Category: Prep Work

Session 6: Prep Reading – Buckingham (2007) Blog 9

In this blog I will be reflecting on the Buckingham (2007) reading before visiting BETT next week. From reading Chapter 1 it is clear there are two sides to BETT: the great opportunity to support and progress learning on for the benefit of the children using technology and the darker side that unless you pay big money for the latest educational tool, your children are going to suffer.

Advantages (The Light Side of BETT):

After this reading it is so inspiring to hear how far technology has come and the standard of teaching may be hugely improved from spending money. This might not be the full truth but take a child with EAL needs; being able to use technology to support and communicate with them is such a huge advantage.

Government spending to support schools get more tech-friendly is another good thing. Over the last decade the government is betting extra technology will have a positive impact on children’s test results. True figures and studies will need to be done before this claim can be proven fully.

Companies are investing a lot of money to fund educational tools and certain hardware and software is being created that we could not even dreamed of in the past is now becoming a reality.

Disadvantages (The Dark Side of BETT):

The main disadvantage I can see already is the sales pitch of how if I do not spend all the ICT budget on the right piece of equipment, the children’s learning in my school will suffer or stagnate. This is a lot of responsibility for ICT Coordinators or whomever is at BETT looking to spend money. It highlights how much pressure there is to impact our pupils in the right way and how important a career in teaching really is. Tell that to the office workers who believe we work so little from 9am until 3pm!

Education was solidly in the public sector, times are changing and the amount of money going round and through profitable companies needs to be focused on. Unfortunately, call it human nature or whatever you like, if money can be made from something like education, or the NHS at the moment, then there are always going to be profit made from these kinds of companies. Some people call it paranoia when others say Google is spying on us and collecting our information. But one look on a shopping website, next thing you see when you open facebook is that same product being advertised and you realise how much of a footprint your internet history leaves.

The loud hustle of bustle of BETT is not something I believe I will not enjoy, but an open mind is what I am focusing on and at least I want to look to see what type of technologies could be inside the classroom when I am teaching myself in the near future.

I have a feeling as I am a student walking into BETT the sales teams will look at me and ask how much money I have to spend. The raw fact I am not there to spend money is likely to result in an abrupt end to our conversation. Time will tell…

Session 4: Prep Work – Well Designed and Poorly Designed Websites (Blog 6)

Well Designed –

This is the school I went to as a child and then the school I worked as teaching assistant before university. The old website was dreadful so I was pleasantly surprised how much it had changed, including having a look which staff have left! The simplicity is what made me think how well designed it is. It was photos with text to find the most popular links and the navigation bar can be used to find other parts of the website. Like any good website the layout stays uniform throughout so finding the navigation bar when moving onto another page, it is easy to find and get back to where the homepage is.

Purpose – I believe the website works well for its purpose to be read by children and adults. The ease of navigation is a great advantage. I particularly like the integration of class blogs as many schools are still playing catch up and have not recognised the importance of blogging for the children and parents/carers to see what their children are doing.

Communication – The quick links to newsletters and the preview feature for the newsletter pages allows you to read it quickly or click to download it to then read which I really like.

General Layout and Text/Colour – The grid format makes the information easy to look at and to scan the website to find the link you want. The text is an easy font to read and the colours are based on the school badge (which I still can picture in my mind) and is used well throughout. The colour contrast nicely so it is nice to look at.

 

Poorly Designed –

This is the school website of the placement school I was in first year. I chose this website because it is too busy and hard to read colour scheme wise in my opinion. Being totally honest I found it difficult to find a badly designed website and I would say mostly I can navigate it fine, however the busy look and hard to read colour scheme is a pet peeve of mine.

Purpose – It is quite fit for purpose however for children to be navigating the website I think they would struggle. Other users like parents/carers, especially those are not used to navigating websites, could have difficulties of finding the information they want.

Communication – I believe the busy look does not give a great impression of the school. There’s too much information: the twitter feed, news, images, videos, text everywhere across the page, the scrolling text, calendar dates. That much information is FAR too much to process, especially on the homepage!

General Layout and Text/Colour – With text everywhere, scrolling and static with images, it is not great. There is a navigation bar which does appear on each page and quick links of “Admissions” and “Ofsted” are useful too. The text/colour is not optimal because the background is blue, so is the text. The two main colours are yellow and blue, which would fine with it did not clash with each other due to the mass of information. A more simplistic view would be more beneficial to children wanting to use the website, as well as those less-experienced with navigating websites.

Conclusion – 

From looking at various school websites before choosing these two, I could see how children may be wanting to use the websites as well as parents/carers. Because of this simplicity is key, even as an adult and very experienced with navigating websites, finding the information you want needs to be easy and not scanning across huge amounts of information, especially on the homepage. The homepage is the first thing you see and it gives the vital first impression of the whole website. If something is cluttered then I would think the school is the same, throwing vast information at you and it is hard to take it all in. First impressions are key because as most schools have a website, potential parents with children could be looking at the school’s website before sending their child there.

Session 3: Prep Reading – Educational blogs and their effects of pupil’s writing

This week’s preparation reading is written by Barrs and Horrocks and can be found here https://www.educationdevelopmenttrust.com/~/media/EDT/files/research/2014/r-blogging-2014.pdf

From reading how one teacher is using blogs how he believes is the correct way so it inspires children to want to respond, it has given me a great idea for my future practice. For a more creative way to setting homework, I could record myself giving the instructions whilst acting out a certain situation or pretending to be a character so that the children can fully understand what my expectations are for the task. This method of setting homework I believe is better because it assists children with EAL or poorer readers who may not understand the homework/classwork by reading a paragraph of instructional text. In this article it mentions the similarities when comparing children writing blogs and children writing in Literacy lesson, however in some tasks, using blogs can allow children to engage in the task in more unique manner. Children blogging from home can allow more independent thinking and also support from parents/carers to further understanding from a different point of view. The interactivity of blogs allows social interaction between a child and their peers and the teacher through commenting. I think compared to writing and commenting in children’s workbooks, blog commenting is more effective as it orders the comments and replies under one another.

The article argues how children enjoy writing stories the most, possibly from the openness and creative thinking it involves. Through blogging children can write and reflect on anything with a more unique method than in their workbooks. A teacher once told me “classroom workbooks are for Ofsted and learning is for children”. Even though this could be argued as a more extreme outlook on Ofsted’s involvement, I agree on some levels with children do not necessarily only learn through writing everything down however how can you prove or confirm children are learning without any evidence? When teachers were asked for this article what makes for good writing they responded with: “good content and ideas, real meaning and purpose, imagination, originality and creativity, fluency and momentum and a strong sense of a reader/audience”. Some teachers regarded the children’s blogs as something that does not need to be as critically assessed like literacy books for example, the teachers preferred to look at the content in the blog contained instead. The interesting finding in this article was that teachers believed they saw an improvement in the quality of writing as the school year progressed and more blogs were being written. But, ‘a London deputy headteacher wrote: ‘It didn’t quite have the benefit I was looking for in that way. I would like to say it has improved the quality of their writing but I can’t at present.’’

Session 2: Prep Reading – Supporting community cohesion through ICT: The epartners programme in Northern Ireland (Blog 2)

Reading Source:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074756321500148X

The preparation reading this week was a journal article published by Austin, Hunter et al based on the research completed to ‘promote community cohesion and assesses the role that information and communications technology (ICT) can play to encourage collaboration within a social psychology framework.’

The article first informs you about past efforts used to try encourage community cohesion. The various methods initially stated were ‘Integrated education’, ‘Common curriculum’ and ‘Shared education’. All three of these efforts I believe made positive strides towards the goal of community cohesion as Niens et al (2013) states ‘while the curriculum has had the effect of making a difference to pupils’ attitudes, there was considerable added value for both the pupils and teachers when contact was part of joint study of the curriculum.’ After exploring other means to aid community cohesion, the use of technology was considered more recently. This effort seemed to be very positive as ‘the most recent research indicated that even a year after the contact came to an end, pupils were reported as displaying more tolerance than matched pupils who had not been involved (Austin, Rickard, Austin, Smyth, & Grace, 2014).’

The rest of the article discusses the epartners program that used past efforts to build upon the progress linking schools through technology made. The program ‘was set up by the Ulster University in 2013–2014 as a partnership between the School of Education and the Department for Widening Access.’ The main program used throughout this study was Fronter which is a Virtual Learning Environment. From my own research into Fronter I learnt ‘East Barnet School were the first secondary school in the UK to actually adopt a VLE and have been using Fronter as the chosen Virtual Learning Environment platform since Autumn 2006. Fronter has been acknowledged as a leader in its market, and one of only 10 Learning Platform Service Suppliers to be certified by the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) in the UK.’ http://www.eastbarnetschool.com/parents/fronter-vle/

The outcome of this study found that many of the children did not find issues with working collaboratively with their peers of different backgrounds or religious beliefs. As Barber & Cooper (2012) states, children do not come to school with one set of experiences, differences in social and cultural background influence the amount of exposure a child has to computers and the internet. The sectarianism in Northern Ireland was not apparent as some people associated with the study may have believed. Overall, the four broad conclusions drawn from this study are as follows:

‘First, the use of technology, while not without some technical problems, can be used effectively as a link between schools.

Second, a strong focus on non-contentious areas of the curriculum has been shown to engage both teachers and pupils at a level that is not threatening and can provide a valuable platform for genuinely collaborative work which has clear academic value.

Third, the support of the churches and a range of other stakeholders in the epartners program has provided a valuable building block for further work.

Finally, the use of ICT with university student support offers a highly cost-effective means of harnessing existing resources, both human and technological, to address a problem which is a drain on the public purse and a barrier to community cohesion. At a theoretical level, it adds a further element to our understanding of the types of contact that are likely to be productive within the framework of the contact hypothesis. In that sense, although the focus for this piece of research is in Northern Ireland, we hope that it has resonance wherever the negative effects of separate and parallel lives can be mitigated by purposeful contact.’ In support of this, Selwyn argues “many psychologists would now share the view that learning is a profoundly social process” (2011:76).

Through further research and reading I found this YouTube video from Bill Hunter (one of the authors of the source article) which is very informational about online learning and community cohesion.

References:

Austin, R., Hunter, B. & Hollywood, L. (2015) Computers in Human Behaviour, Supporting community cohesion through ICT: The epartners programme in Northern Ireland, Londonderry: Elsevier Ltd, accessible here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074756321500148X

Barber, D. & Cooper, L. (2012) Using New Web Tools in the Primary Classroom, London: Routledge

East Barnet School (2017) accessible here: http://www.eastbarnetschool.com/parents/fronter-vle/

Hunter, B. (2014) Bill Hunter – Online learning and community cohesion, YouTube video, accessible here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJpqS6Py4uc

Selwyn, N. (2011) Education and Technology, London: Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd