ICT in a Mainstream School

Working in a traditional primary school with limited Technology resources means trying to make the most of the small amount of time our class has each week to use and explore computers and the internet. With one block allocated at the ICT suite I have been looking for ways to maximize this learning time and make it relevant, age appropriate and build skills across multiple curriculum areas at once.

During terms 1 and 2 this led to some ambitious projects using the Microsoft Office set of programmes. I was pleased with the initial fluency of my students on the computers but these projects were aimed just a little bit too high and were a little bit too big for the amount of time we were designated. While some students achieved success and finished these were the minority and a lot more managed to do some of the work but never complete it.

My Model Poster

Students work - Close but not quite! (after 2 sessions in the ICT)

I have since moved word publishing into our writing period by utilising a set of laptops that travels around the school. In this way I can more efficiently manage and choose the students who can complete the publishing task and alternate these on a weekly basis. Therefore giving students a chance to complete both traditional pen and paper publishing and also digital publishing skills as well.

The time now freed up in the ICT room has allowed me to experiment more with online based classroom management tools. The standard being set very high by Google Classroom. While there are a lot of paid subscription services (Mathletics, Math Whizz) we are not enrolled with these and so I have opted to try out a free service (Studyladder) for the term. I think a simple pros and cons chart will detail my experience with this service over the first 5 weeks.

Pros:

• I can sign my students up without an email.
• Tasks, while simply designed, show some progression and are mostly child centered.
• A very strong rewards system.
• Ability to differentiate tasks (although convoluted)

Cons:

• No way to have groupings inside of a class. This means i cannot organise my students in my class into their reading or maths groups to direct tasks specifically at them. (I managed to solve this by creating whole new classes that represent each group.) This is such a standard way to run and teach maths surely education services like this can keep up.
• Home page is very deceptive in it's apparent ease of navigation. When students click through to their tasks there is no quick way to see what has been completed and what hasn't.
• The rewards system, while great for generating and maintaining motivation has clearly been thought out a lot more than the education tasks. The more important thing (educational tasks) I would argue therefore has clearly lost out to the rewards.

I am yet to try use Google Classroom, due to the full school approach for sign up and ultimately it seems futile when not all my students have access to computers all the time. I think this is just another obstacle I have come to face and will have to come to terms with. That the majority of education still lags largely behind the advances technology has enabled us. This is quite a frustrating and ultimately disappointing conclusion to come to especially for the large numbers of current teachers coming through the system and into schools that may relish in the opportunity to push education forward a little and try a different classroom routine to the process we went through and learnt under over 15 years ago.

For me it seems antiquated and inefficient and ineffective to be teaching today's kids using the same models/structures/processes that were in place when I was at primary. Lets get innovative.

Portraits inspired by ASKEW

In term 2 room 11 studied the Auckland based artist ASKEW and looked at the ways in which he created portraits using a variety of different painting techniques.

After looking at the use of colour and how the peoples faces still looked like people underneath, Room 11 had a go at making their own paintings using ASKEW's as a reference. The paintings came out very well and because ASKEW still works as a street artist, we decided to present the paintings in a street scene that we created in the classroom. 

My motivation and justification behind choosing ASKEW as an artist model is based upon using the students own experience to guide learning. It is naive to ignore the presence of street art in Auckland and around the world at the moment. It is a growing movement that is currently bordering two worlds; on the one hand it is still viewed as vandalism of public and more often private property while on the other hand Street Artists are increasingly finding themselves in high art galleries and in auction houses around the world. There is a tension between how they should be viewed and interpreted. Choosing a street artist is something that is relevant to my students lives, the next day after introducing ASKEW students came back telling me they had spotted some on dairies and on walls in the streets. Would this have been possible with an European Artist or even a Classical Painter? Choosing an Artist that grew up in Auckland was also another explicit teaching decision I made to help engage and guide my students learning through the term. Ultimately using these explicit decisions through my planning and implementation of the art topic ensured that my students were actively engaged and excited to learn and produce their own individual pieces of artwork.