The Significance of Monitoring Children’s ICT work

The establishment of a starting point for a child’s learning in ICT capability must begin by the monitoring and observation of their current capabilities in ICT. Both of these teaching techniques are closely linked to the effective assessment of ICT capability, so it is easy to discuss them in this context. However, monitoring is also instrumental in the development of child ICT capability as it allows you to stimulate learning at the important moments. Research has found that if you monitor their capabilities you will be able to determine the best moments to intervene and this has been proven to have had beneficial effects on their ICT techniques and routines. In particularly, if you do use this practice in the learning environment then it would be most likely that you will have helped developed their higher order skills.

In the early childhood learning setting, Price (2009) outlines four reasons for this to occur:

1. To bridge the gap between those who have most and the least skills; 2. To recognise what children already know about ICT and how to provide support and encouragement to them; 3. To ensure that you are engaging girls as well as boys in all cultures and; 4. To consider dialogue with parents and professionals in terms of a child’s ICT capability.

Later in the primary years, Kennewell et al. (2000) adds to this and states that monitoring is necessary for two main reasons – firstly, that it is common for children to appear to be usually occupied with a task when in fact they are working very inefficiently and failing to exploit the potential of ICT; secondly, the richness of ICT resources allows children to very easily be distracted and to divert their attention away from the intended task without it being too obvious from their behaviour.

It is for this reason that you make observations of your children continuously. You need to:

• Monitor the way they respond to explanations; • How they answer your questions; • Whether they are applying themselves to the task; • Whether you have pitched the level of demand appropriately and; • Monitor the changing mood and relationships between different children or groups of children. (Bennett, Hamill, & Pickford, Assessment, 2007)

With the above information, you can “adjust your teaching to cater for the changing needs of the children, unanticipated responses or opportunities to intervene with apposite instructions” (Bennett, Hamill, & Pickford, Assessment, 2007, p. 73). You could even increase the level of challenge provided by the task. This type of observation is informal and be used to monitor the ways children respond to an activity.

A good rule of thumb to remember is that at the end of lesson when ICT is used, depending on whether you had set clear objectives you could think about these responses to tasks. Using this information you can then quickly decide who was able to complete the activities with the minimum amount of support, those who needed a lot of support and those who sat somewhere in between.

What do you monitor in the Early Childhood Education setting?

– routines, ICT techniques, processes, concepts and higher order skills. In order for you to develop this 21st century skill, it must be these components that you monitor.

In the early childhood education setting there are three main aspects of children’s learning to monitor according to Price (2009) that include a child’s growing awareness of the technological world, their ICT skills, understanding and progress and their ability to access and use ICT. Kennewell et al. (2000) expands on this further and provides further guidance in what you need to monitor and when to intervene.

Component

Routines - Recognised by the ease and speed by which familiar ICT techniques are carried out; - Have a brief list of checklists for each age-group; - For children who struggle with routines characteristic to their age-group, extra practice is required; - Practice in specially designed areas should be supplemented by opportunities to apply the ICT techniques concerned to worthwhile tasks; - Checklists needs to be kept up-to-date in relation to hardware and software available. Example: The ICT technique of drag-and-drop becomes more routine than cut-npaste in this age group. ICT Techniques - Have a checklist of ICT techniques for each class to keep track of children’s progress; - Give the children requiring help the minimum amount of support; - Withdraw the support as soon as possible.

Processes - More general and made up of many ICT techniques; - An understanding of relevant concepts is needed in order to analyse a particular situation and identify particular ICT techniques required to achieve a goal; - Children need to work on a task that is not set out step-by-step so that they can try out new ideas and you can intervene when you have observed them struggling to reach their desired goal; - Provide the minimum amount of support; - Provide scaffolding in the form of structuring their activities by questioning, prompting and showing if necessary.

Higher Order Skills - Enable children to carry out complete processes themselves when the scaffolding and support has been withdrawn;

Challenge the naïve idea of handling particular ICT techniques both in whole-class questioning and when monitoring. For example: - When children uses spaces to spread out text on a line or page, you can show the effect of adding extra text so that the spaces move to a different position; - If children use backspace to delete back to an earlier mistake and re-type, you can set a task requiring the editing of previously composed text to achieve a different goal; - When they type calculations into a spreadsheet using values directly rather than formulae containing cell references, you can change the values in the cells and point out result from the calculation based on the previous values; - When displaying the results of a database search, if the child only selects the search field for display, you can remind them of the manual process with a card file to focus on the distraction between search criterion and information display.

Demonstrated when children: (Morgan & Siraj-Blatchford, 2009, p. 16) - Decide when it is appropriate to use a particular ICT resource for a specific purpose; - Plan what ICT techniques, routines and processes are to be used; - Work independently to solve problems; - Evaluate their use of ICT and the outcome of an activity; - Explain and justify their choices and approaches; - Reflect on their learning and how things could be approached differently next time. Adopted from Kennewell et al. (2000)

When monitoring individuals and groups, it is best that you:

• Keep within the ways that you are already evaluating; • Try to resist tick lists of discrete skills. If a child can paint and print a copy of their work on the computer, they can adequately use a mouse, know what icons are and can find a button to send to print; • Plan to quickly observe all the children two or three times a year to see if and how they are accessing equipment and what their next steps might be; • Plan to quickly monitor access by groups of children. For example, are girls accessing equipment as much as boys? For different programs? • Use a folder for each child, or a group of children, on the computer. You can add their achievements over the year. For example, an electronic painting, digital photographs etc.