Reflecting on the use of technology and media in a local primary school

This post will reflect upon the use of technology and media in a local primary school, drawing upon things which surprised and challenged me. I will then identify any questions which arise and establish targets for my next visit.

As a result of the learning acquired from previous posts and experience I have an understanding that digital literacy should be incorporated into the curriculum as it is important to the learning of digital natives in current society (Medwell, Moore, Wray and Griffiths, 2012; Dean, 2010; and Pahl and Rowsell, 2005). However, before entering the school this week I believed that most schools did not implement digital literacy into their curriculum plans to its full potential due to a number of reasons, the main being cost (Rossi, 2014). However, this challenged my thinking as I was surprised to find that, in this case, I was wrong as the school had obviously spent a lot of time and money to ensure it provides digital learning environments for all pupils. Digital literacy seemed to play a big part in the school’s curriculum plans and was used across all year groups. From being taking on a tour around the school and listening to a presentation about the schools use of user-generated videos in the classroom, it was clear that the whole school had a passion for digital literacy, which is likely to higher children’s enthusiasm and engagement (Walsh, 2010).

I was also surprised to find out that all of the school staff, even including the receptionists, had been sent on multimedia training courses. I saw this as a challenge because in previous schools I have visited usually only a couple of staff members had training and if I take on the role of an ICT coordinator in the future I will have to make the decision on which staff should be trained (Rossi, 2014).

In week 7’s blog post I mentioned the limitation that multimodal texts are very time consuming to produce, however the visit to the school this week has challenged my thinking. I was surprised to find the vast amount of digital literacy apps the school had on their iPads and through experimenting with some of these apps I found that some can be used to quickly produce multimedia, for example the ‘Tellagami’ app for speaking avatars and the ‘Veescope Live’ app to quickly create a clip using green screen. Before this experience I had not considered using the features from a range of apps to create one multimodal text, this knowledge will now help me when I next visit the school and will aid my dissertation research.

A challenge I will face next week will be filming with younger children, this raises the question of what experience do the year one pupils have and will they be confident with using the technology? My target for my next visit will be to quickly assess how confident my group are with using the technology and then offer support accordingly (Anstey and Bull, 2010; and Dean, 2010).

Bibliography:

Anstey, M. and Bull, G. (2010) Helping teacher to explore multimodal texts. Curriculum Leadership Journal. 8 (16).Available at: http://www.curriculum.edu.au/leader/helping_teachers_to_explore_multimodal_texts,31522.html?issueID=12141 (Accessed: 14/03/2014).

Dean, G., (2010) Rethinking Literacy. In: C. Bazalgette. (Ed.) Teaching Media in Primary School.  Sage: Media Education Association (MEA), pp. 51-60.

Medwell, J. Moore, G. Wray, D. Griffiths, V. (2012) Primary English Knowledge and Understanding. London: Learning Matters.

Pahl, K., and Rowsell, J. (2005) Literacy and Education: Understanding the New Literacy Studies in the Classroom. London: Paul Chapman Publishing.

Rossi, B. (2014) UK schools not investing enough in technology, say parents. Available at: http://www.information-age.com/industry/uk-industry/123457639/uk-schools-not-investing-enough-technology-say-parents . (Accessed: 14/03/2014).  

Walsh, M. (2010) ‘Multimodal literacy: what does it mean for classroom practice?’ Australian Journal of Language and Literacy. 33 (3) pp211 – 239.