Rachel Yates, Cotham Grammar School
Rachel was in her second year of secondary English teaching when she joined the InterActive Education team. She was tenacious in developing her own ICT expertise often in the face of technical and institutional challenges. She worked on subject designs using digital cameras and PowerPoint to explore the grammar of still and moving images as well as experimenting with visual representation of poetry.
In the process of reworking her designs she incorporated ICT to allow an increased attentiveness to pupil choice and control at the same time as valuing the affordances of data projection for whole class instruction and reflection. Trained within the Literacy Strategy model, working in the Interactive Project has entailed significant modification and strategic professional questioning of her initial commitment to a highly structured objective led approach.
"When I was teaching, whole class teaching, I was very much at the front and that was my responsibility. But when they were doing collaborative learning I took a step back and that was very positive in the second project because in the computer room I felt much more relaxed and more in control and more let's just let it happen. So I think my mindset changed."
Pam Kelly, Colston's Primary School
Pam is a highly experienced, confident and expert primary teacher who was unconfident and sceptical in her approach to ICT. Her subject design involved pupils working in pairs on a creative writing task. The innovation for Pam was that they would compose direct to screen and write collaboratively. This apparently straightforward and traditional task raised powerful questions about the nature of the writing process, the way pupils negotiate collaborative writing and the culture of multimodality that pupils are now bringing into the classroom. The pupils' control of the technology disrupted the teacher's defined stages of composition and changed the nature of the task itself. Pupils worked creatively and sensitively in relation to font and image from the outset. Some pupils produced highly graphical pieces which disrupted the language bias of the task.
For video extracts and commentary from Pam's lessons see one of our Tools for Transforming Learning
Dan Sutch, St Michael's CE VC School, South Gloucestershire
Dan wanted to use ICT to drive up the standards of spelling in his Year 6 students, in preparation for Key Stage 2 tests. As the work progressed, he moved away from teaching spellings to teaching the structure of vocabulary within the context of promoting knowledge and awareness of language. Dan was an ICT enthusiast and an energetic recently qualified teacher working in a well-equipped and successful beacon school with a national reputation for its Key Stage 1 Phonics teaching. The Wordroot software enabled students to see, test and manipulate the 'Lego-like' patterns in the structure of 'hard words'. Such words have spellings based on morphemes borrowed from other languages. These constitute a major proportion of the longer words used in more sophisticated contexts. Pupils achieved record results in their English Key stage SATs.
Dan said:
"My involvement in the project had many benefits. Reviewing the video data enabled me to analyse and reflect on my teaching style and on the learning styles, attentin and reaction of the students. Working closely with one university-based researcher and in a team with other primary and secondary teachers and university researchers was without doubt the biggest influence on my learning."
Dan tells his story in a videopaper.
Chris Davies and Adrian Blight, John Cabot City Technology College
These teachers working in a city technology college were keen to experiment with highly innovative ways of using ICT. Two designs involved the pupils in collaboratively writing hypertexts: Year 11 pupils produced a revision website for Of Mice and Men and Year 13 pupils produced a literary connections website around World War I texts. For some learners this was a strong motivator, resulting in engaged, collaborative and intensively researched work. Year 11 pupils all evaluated the project positively and the target group reported a deeper and altered valuation of their assigned character. Note for example this pupil's comment on 'Slim' as an authority figure within the text:
"It was fairly obvious from reading the book but it became more and more visible from actually doing the website."
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