Week 4 : Reflecting on our day at Shirley Warren School

I felt that my time spent in school was a learning experience for both myself and the children. I was surprised by how proficient the children were at both using an iPad and specific apps, to achieve a desired outcome. Within a teaching role, it was a challenge to hold back from making suggestions, to allow the children to evaluate and improve their work. Using the iPads really gave children autonomy over their work, as the technological basis of activities supported children in ‘learning by doing as the dominant form of learning’ (Willett, 2009). This was evidenced by the fact that the children required little further instruction from teachers once the creative context had been set. For example, when children had recorded a voiceover in ExplainEverything, they realised that the sound recording was unclear due to a high level of background noise. As teachers our role was then to scaffold learning by asking ‘what do you think we could do to improve the quality of the sound recording?’ Children were then engaging in collaborative discussion about how best to address this problem, and generating solutions to move their learning forward. This observation has been supported by research by Merchant, 2003, who found that children’s on-screen writing provided evidence of children’s ‘expertise, willingness to learn from each other, and to solve problems through creative play’ (Merchant, 2003 in Burnett et al, 2006).

As the children had planned the content of their book page prior to the activity, I observed that the children were able to successfully negotiate tasks by assigning different roles within the group. In practice this meant that all the children were exploring different apps, and could then collaborate their ideas through the use of the iPad software sharing system ‘AirDrop’. This had several benefits for children’s learning. There was a high level of engagement for all children, and then joining their ideas together facilitated critical reflection on how aspects of their book could be improved. This created a cohesive classroom atmosphere in which achieving what the children wanted to do required perseverance, and the consistent application of ‘trial and error’. In combining their ideas children were enabled to review what had been successful and what had not. Using iPad software encouraged the children to take risks and afforded opportunities for self reflection (Gee, 2003 in Willett, 2009). The fact that children were evaluating their work demonstrated how creating multimodal texts can support children in developing editing experience to combine and improve the integration of ‘sound, stance, gesture, movement, print and image’ (Bearne, 2003 in Wyse and Jones, 2008; p289) for literacy learning.

Bibliography

Burnett, C. ,  Dickinson,P. Myers, J. and Merchant, G. (2006) Digital

connections: transforming literacy in the primary school, Cambridge Journal of Education, 36:1,

11-29

Willett, R. (2009) ‘Young People’s Video Productions as New Sites of Learning’ in Carrington, V & Robinson, M. (Eds) Digital Literacies: Social Learning and Classroom Practices London: Sage

Wyse, D. & Jones, R. (2008) Chapter 25 ‘Information and communication technologies and multimedia’ in Teaching English, Language and Literacy Second Edition.  Abingdon:Routledge