Staff & school development
❚ Whole-school planning and integration of new tools for learning Case study
Doing ICT for themselves Sweyne Park School in Essex, UK is passionate about using ICT to share work and resources in classrooms. For the last three years it has brought work to the front of the classroom by connecting classroom computers to large television monitors. After a successful pilot scheme, some departments have now received data projectors in their classrooms to take this work further. Regular demonstration sessions where staff show others what they are doing have ensured that good ideas spread quickly. Once a year they run a staff training session for each other. The day is slightly unusual because it’s run by staff for staff. One year, in one room, the head of humanities ran a course on web page making, while in another, the head of ICT was running a seminar on digital video editing. In yet another session, staff were shown how to take pictures, annotate them and store them on the school server for students to access. The day had begun with five members of staff from different departments giving a short presentation on how they were using ICT and the school network to publish work and share ideas. Each member of staff attended three of the activities and their finished work was published on the school intranet and taken back to school to provide exemplar material for further work.
For schools integrating ICT to help accelerate learning, the challenge is not to let a thousand uses bloom but to develop the learning environment so that different learning styles are catered for and students can demonstrate their understanding using tools suited to a range of particular capabilities. Some teachers will use staff room printouts and OHP slides in class – some will use the internet live, projected onto an interactive whiteboard. Ultimately, the development and application of new tools in the classroom will be a local event and the confidence which allows teachers to make the most of the opportunities requires ongoing personal and professional development. Art of the state At times, it might seem as though many other schools are racing ahead with innovative uses of ICT because it is always the high profile and leading edge examples that get the publicity. Other schools might have wall-to-wall interactive whiteboards and ICT learning centres while your school may still be trying to get aspects of basic provision right. The advice here is to hold your nerve, for each individual school’s chosen path doesn’t have to be state of the art – for this really means little in an education context. What we really want is to be art of the state. That is, to use a variety of teaching approaches and ICT props to manage the state of optimum learning for students with a variety of learning styles and needs. Large screen projection, independent access and local stores of mediated knowledge in shared folders will undoubtedly be important in developing this provision. Each iteration towards the local sharing and celebrating of knowledge will be unique at school level.
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New Tools for Learning – Accelerated learning meets ICT