January Visitors

Over the last 2 weeks I have hosted visits to our school from a couple of ICT coordinators from primary schools in the region. 

In the first visit of the year we spent time discussing the process of the ICT Mark, a national accreditation for technology in schools, and how it can help become a diagnostic tool for curriculum development. My school completed the ICT Mark back in 2006. Alongside discussing how to get the most out of the process for technology in the school, I explained how we have used the whole diagnostic process to help plan and implement subject development across the other curriculum areas. It has proven extremely valuable in our school and is now part of the whole school development plan.
Ready for another session
The second visit took place yesterday, in which I welcomed an ICT coordinator exploring the concept of mobile technology. They are to be moving to a large scale new build in a few years and so will implementing laptops in the classroom. It sounded like they have already had some success with them in their current setting but was looking for more inspiration on the practical uses of the technology in primary.

I spoke about how the vision of “choice” that we have is at the heart of decisions we make in terms of technology and how the resource must be owned by the children. They saw the children working on their morning activities, in which they have a specific group, table and independt activity to work at first thing in the morning. This allows them to get straight on when they walk in the classroom – engaging them in class immediately. We do this for half an hour most days and it has proven very successful to making a good start to the day. The children access a range of activities on the laptops as well as away from them too.

I taught a maths lesson in which we were developing our understanding of nets of cubes and exploring the various ways we could make them. I decided not to use the laptops as the children needed hands on experience of using Clixi to make them. I stressed that the sense of a blended learning environment was important to me and so the decisions to put them away were just as important.

On both visits I ended up speaking about Twitter! Both ICT coordinators were not members of any sort of community of fellow practitioners that could help and support them in their work. I could not help but recommend the education technology Twitter network as a great source of support, friendship, inspiration and connections. I took some time to demonstrate Twitter by giving a shoutout (as some of you may recall) and was grateful as ever of the wonderful response received from people.

Face to face meetings with colleagues are always great and I feel privileged to be in a position to offer some support, help and encouragement to visitors to my classroom. I hope in their short time with us I did just that.