Added: July 24th, 2008 Categories: Assessment and Learning, Classroom Ideas, Creativity in the classroom, Early Years and Primary, Expression, Inspirational ideas and people, Margaret Allen, Pedagogy, Personalised Learning, Promethean Products, Theory Into Practice, Uncategorized |
How does a child approach technology?
How do most adults engage with it?
As a general rule Young people (3-18) will “go for it”. They will push most buttons to explore and establish, whereas adults tend to check before they push!!
This has been particularly pertinent for the recent introduction of Expression into the market. This addition to the Learner Response Family within Promethean has offered teachers an alternative approach to engaging students in the classroom…..

BUT is it too sophisticated for infants? Are there too many buttons? Will they get confused?
Alison Reese who teaches 6/7 years olds has been sharing her experience in the forum
http://www.prometheanplanet.com/forum/showthread.php?t=6116 - Below is her overall final post, but it might be of interest to read the whole thread!
“We live in the technological age and our children are lifelong inhabitors. They’re not playing catch up, they accept it as the norm. To them a new piece of technology is something to explore, play with and learn how to use. I was surprised just how few of mine knew what texting was and had had a go on a phone before. I thought a lot more than 3 or 4 would have done it. So how have I used them? Well, I could go on forever!!
My children knew that we were getting them and were just as impatient as me for them to arrive. When we did get them we got to look at them and all their features. I introduced the text feature first. I had a big picture of an expression on the board and we looked at all the features and what they could do. I explained that having one button for each letter was silly and we discussed how you tap a key once for the first letter, twice for the next etc. Then we got to try and text in our names. We used shift to make our first letters capital and then I realised I had to go in to more detail as two of my children have two first names! For Sin Kue we had to look at spaces and then making her ‘K’ capital, so scrolling through the options under shift. For Jo-Yee, we had to look at the hyphen as well! Luckily they’re both confident ICT users and had no problems. Then we got to text in someone else’s name. Yup, you guessed it, practically everyone chose to text in Sin Kue or Jo-Yee so that they could use the hyphen, space or extra capital letter! Gotta love kids! Then we text in our number. (All the children have a number for our work buddy wheel and we use this number for the votes/expressions, as they’re all numbered. Means the system is easy to manage in every class.)
After that we used selecting an answer from multiple choice (our favourite colour) this was easy, as we use activote a lot, but of course, the buttons look different. Then we got to choose our 2 favourite colours, then 3. We did some with letters and some with numbers, just to be different. Then we did yes/no/true/false etc. The children accepted this as a matter of course. Lastly we looked at ordering. We did instructions and discussed the correct way first, as I wanted to see if they knew how to order, instead of why they had ordered in a certain way. To finish off, we looked at punctuation and then they had to text in ‘I am …’ with their name at the end and a full stop to finish. This was all in the last 50 mins or so of the day. Over half text in their sentence correctly, complete with full punctutation.
We use them a lot now, in all subject areas, although we do focus on Literacy, as that’s what I said we’d focus on when I applied for the grant to buy them! I often use them to check if the main teaching point has been understood. I used to do this with activote, so that children who have understood can go and start working and those that haven’t could stay for more support. The problem was that some children sometimes got the right answer by chance. Less chance of that happening when they don’t have a multiple choice option. So ask the children to text in any even number. Then any odd number. Do it a few times. Tell them to think creatively! That way you get the children who’ll text in 6/7 digit numbers and those that stick to 1-10. Tell them it must be above 50 or 100 or 1000! This is a really quick way of knowing who does and does not understand odd/even numbers.
One of the other things I used expression for was in that same lesson that I wrote about before. Not sure if everyone knows, but for the past two years the short writing task in KS1 SATs (Key Stage 1 (K-3) (SATs Standard Attainment Targets - tests) has been to write a riddle. I had a riddle I’d typed up on the board and we had previously discussed various story characters. We then looked at a riddle where the clues were in the wrong answer, as the third clue gave away the answer. We thought about what order they should go in and then sent our opinions in. Then children justified their response by saying why they had chosen that order.
Then we looked at another riddle and I revealed each clue one at a time. After each one the children had to text in which story character the riddle might be about. To support the EAL (English as an additional language) with very limited english I had printed out a card with only about 8 characters on, complete with names, so that they could join in. I had no EAL support for this lesson, but I did have a teaching assistant.
After everyone had text in who they thought it was, we brought the results up and discussed why some were/were not good suggestions. For example, if I had said ‘he’ and someone had text in Goldilocks, other children pointed out why it couldn’t be the right answer. Because on Expression you don’t have to have a new page for a new vote it made it much easier and I was able afterwards to track children’s changes to see if they understood and at which point they were giving plausible answers. It was interesting as some higher ability children did not always give plausible answers at the beginning, whereas some lower ability pupils did! After the first two clues I could then see immediately which children were having difficulty (they had only been introduced to riddles the day before!) and support them. I’m pleased to say that by the end of the riddle everyone was giving plausible answers!
Although I was very mean and deliberately mislead everyone in to thinking it was one character, when in fact it was another! Everyone got it right after the final clue, but my teaching assistant and the Deputy Head kept trying to argue it and wouldn’t let it go! All in good humour but my children thought it was hilarious that the adults had also not guessed it until the very end.”
Utilising technology in the classroom is clearly being adopted all over the world and the impact is sure to influence “the adults of tomorrow”, but lets also applaud teachers who are prepared to take risks, but who also recognise the potential of every child no matter what the age.
Engagement and understanding are key…..
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