Week 4: Visit to school

School observations/reflections

Working with a group of children in school to create pages for a class book has shown me several different things.  Firstly, I was surprised at how much knowledge the children had of the technology being used and secondly, how effectively they used it.  Evans (2004) suggests that literacy is changing and being influenced by the choices of activities that children in the twenty-first century are making.  She also says that ‘schools are not meeting the demands of today young people’ (Evans 2004:8) in relation to the changing literacy trend towards the digital age.  In some ways I agree with this as I did not expect to see the level of competence that I observed in school nor did I expect to see the children being able to do things with the iPads that I did not know were possible.  The enthusiasm and skill with which the children applied themselves to the task was admirable and the end result was an excellent achievement and display of cooperation.

There were a couple of areas that I found to be challenging, the most striking of which was the fact that the children had more knowledge of the technology that I did.  This, however, is a challenge that I feel should easily be overcome through training myself on the capabilities of the technologies that are used in the classroom.  Bearne (2004) suggests that there are implications, pedagogically, of ‘working with children whose text experience is mainly multimodal’ (Bearne, 2004:18) and this is something which raises the question ‘Do I need to up skill myself on the use and application of different technology in order to better provide help and guidance for children?’  Even though I consider myself to be reasonably adept at using technology, the answer to this question is a definite ‘yes’.  Also, the technology and the applications that are incorporated within are constantly being improved, leading to yet further requirements for training.  Therefore, due to these constant improvements, the answer will never be ‘No’.     

Another area I found to be a challenge was that the children showed a definite hierarchy when it came to who was doing what in terms of technology use.  This is more of a behavioural issue than a technological issue, although it may be due to the differing levels of confidence that the children have with the technology itself.

Overall, the experience as a whole was extremely beneficial as it allowed me to see, first hand, how todays primary schools incorporate technology into planning.  As a future ICT leader, this will prove to be an invaluable experience and one that has shown me the potential that multimodal technology has in the classroom.

Bibliography

Evans, J. (2004) Literacy moves on London:Fulton

Bearne, E (2004) ‘Multimodal texts: What they are and how children use them’ in Evans, J (2004) Literacy moves on London:Fulton