Introduction 0.2 - Effective use of ICT
The OER4Schools Professional Learning Resource
Learning intentions and objectives.
Group work with ICT
Success criteria.
ICT components.
Review of follow-up activities from last session
If you are running a professional learning programme which follows these sessions in sequence, then you should do the review of follow-up activities relating to the (Category:OER4S CPD). The 'review of follow-up activities' for that session is available, and also shown below in the session text. However, if you are following selected sessions in a different order, then you should use the reflection appropriate to the previous session you did.
The review of the follow-up activities for this session (to be done at the start of the next session) is available here.
There is no review of follow-up activities from last session available. You can go to the previous session () and.
How do you use ICT effectively?
Review of found resources.
Whole group discussion (11 min). Last time you were asked to come to the lab to find resources. Did you manage to find resources for an ICT-based lesson? How did you find them? What did you find? Was it easy? What do you think can be done with them?
Small group activity (11 min). Last time you were asked to prepare a simple activity using ICT, and to develop a lesson plan around this. Share your lesson plans in your group.
Discuss the use of ICT. Does it support interactive teaching? How?
If you need additional ideas for creating ICT-based lessons, here are some examples, all to do with photos.
Digital technology allows you to create (as well as re-use) images. A Digital Photo Story combines different media. It is a story made up of images, accompanied with written text, voice, motions, transitions and music, resulting in a rich product that can be used to express, share, describe, present, … to tell a story. Photo Story Telling can be used to:
- Present: Learners can use a Photo Story to report on a trip, a visit or a meeting, to describe a phenomenon, a person or an event. Students can describe for example a normal day in their life, or the place where they live with a story of pictures and narrated with voice.
- Introduce: Teachers and learners can make an overall introduction of an object or a word by using images.
- Explain: Teachers and learners can use a sequence of pictures to explain a phenomenon or a certain process.
- Tell a story: Teachers and learners can tell the story of a character or an event by pictures.
- Create a learning situation: Teachers can engage learners in a visual story and encourage learners to solve presented problems.
Teachers can use Photo Story Telling at different stages of a lesson:
- To introduce new concepts, ideas and background information, as a warm-up to engage learners in the learning process, to illustrate a problem.
- For learners to attain new knowledge: Learners can be asked to develop a Digital Photo Story to describe what they have learnt, synthesising their knowledge, etc...
- To review and evaluate learning outcomes: The teacher can produce a Digital Photo Story as a visual summary of main concepts of the lesson, to revise and conclude a lesson.
Digital Photo Story Telling can be used in different subjects, for example:
- History: To tell the story of a people in history, achievements or events.
- Geography: To describe local environmental problems, to report on a fieldtrip, to illustrate a study on natural and social phenomena.
- Literature: To describe and summarise a story (characters, context, climax, actions...).
- Civil education: To tell stories of contemporary people in the society.
- Science: To record an experiment; to present the growth process of a tree, report a fieldtrip, create stories about animals under water and on land.
Another way to use photos is to prepare a set of digital photos for classroom use by students on computers, such as for classification tasks, as in the Eness lesson on vertebrates that we watched earlier. You can remind yourself of the video here.
The above material derives from the VVOB ICT for Active Teaching and Learning toolkit which is available on the server for reading in your own time if you are interested. See pages 57-63 for information on how to create a Photo Story and more detailed examples of use. The VVOB toolkit is also available online:
- PDF file: http://www.vvob.be/vietnam/?q=toolkit-ict-atl
- Website: http://www.ict4atl.org
Background text: Principles of interactive teaching
This section summarises some principles of interactive teaching. They are here for information and reference for the workshop participants. Ask them to look through the list now and see if they have any comments? Print the list and ask them to file it in their folders.
What is interactive teaching?
The principles of interactive teaching include
- recognising children as individuals actively engaged in interacting with the world, rather than passive recipients of knowledge,
- assessing learning needs and tailoring teaching to the child’s current level of knowledge and understanding (“scaffolding” or “child-centred” approach,
- “multimodal” interaction and expression – using different modes of presenting material and expressing ideas (drawing, video, audio as well as conventional texts) to engage learners,
- higher-order thinking – encouraging skills like analysis, synthesis, evaluation, sorting and categorising,
- improvable ideas – providing an environment where ideas can be critiqued and refined,
- diversity of ideas – exploring ideas and related/contrasting ideas, encouraging different ideas,
- building directly on others’ ideas to create joint knowledge products,
- democracy in knowledge building – everybody participates and is a legitimate contributor to knowledge, and
- learner agency and peer support – encouraging students to take responsibility for their own and one another’s learning.
You can print this content on a separate sheet here: OER4Schools/Principles of interactive teaching.
Where are we going? Overview of the resource topics
The present resource intends to cover a number of units. You have now come to the end of Unit 1.
The OER4Schools Professional Learning Resource
In this chapter, we provide a brief overview of each unit in the programme. Each unit is preceded by an introductory page, which gives lesson objectives and success criteria for each session in that unit. A full table, giving lesson objectives and success criteria across all sessions for all units is available here.
Unit 1: Introduction to interactive teaching and the use of ICT. The unit offers an introduction to interactive teaching with and without ICT. It introduces the idea of “plan-teach-reflect”, as well as lesson planning to include interactive activity. The unit covers the following aspects:
- What is interactive teaching?
- ICTs in interactive teaching.
- Effective use of ICTs, including basic use of netbooks, browser, and images / slideshows (also in OpenOffice Impress).
The aims of Unit 1 are to
- understand principles of interactive teaching - with and without ICT,
- see illustrations and discuss issues involved in implementing it,
- think about changing one’s own practice, and
- develop ways of working with colleagues to reflect on practice, share ideas and trial new strategies.
The unit also introduces the most significant change technique, and at the end of this unit, we look at the Leadership for Learning principles.
Unit 2: Whole class dialogue & effective questioning. The unit’s focus is whole class dialogue and effective questioning. It covers:
- creating a supportive environment for dialogue;
- introducing cumulative talk – creating a story together;
- promoting and managing whole class discussion;
- types and examples of effective questions to ask in class, and
- how to engage students in activity at the blackboard.
At the end of this unit, we consider how to communicate with other teachers at the school, with parents, head teachers, as well as officials who might seek to assess your new teaching practices. It also includes some material to support school leaders in providing a conducive learning environment for their staff.
In terms of ICTs, this unit introduces GeoGebra and collaborative writing. You should continue practising your other ICT skills, including typing, and making use of images.
Unit 3: Group work. This unit introduces group work, how to agree on ground rules, and what sort of resources support group work (such as “talking points” and digital resources). In detail, the unit covers
- exploratory talk,
- same task group work,
- different tasks group work,
- group composition and formation,
- ground rules for group work,
- carousel of activities for group work,
- mixed pace group work and differentiation, and
- talking points activity for promoting group interaction.
Unit 4: Assessment for learning and lesson pacing. The unit introduces how to find out what your pupils have learnt, and where they need more help, allowing you to use lesson time effectively whilst making sure that your pupils are making continued progress.
In detail the unit covers
- using an assessment inventory as a self-assessment measure,
- sharing learning objectives and success criteria,
- summative feedback,
- formative feedback, and
- peer assessment.
Unit 5: Enquiry-based learning and project work. The unit introduces how to work in an “enquiry-based” way, for instance learning through project work and in-depth, open-ended investigations. We explore a way of teaching and learning that encourages students to take the initiative to pose questions and explore their curiosity about the world around them, through a process of enquiry.
Unit 6: Into the future. This unit reviews the programme, and continues to make connections between the various interactive practices introduced throughout the programme. It also offers an introduction to action research and communities of practice, through which teachers can continually evolve their teaching practice.
You can print this content on a separate sheet here: OER4Schools/Detailed outline.
Go through the above text (not spending too much time), making sure that everybody understands.
What is the most significant change?
In this section, we introduce participants to the “Most Significant Change technique”. We would like participants to formulate their own goals, and to identify what change(s) they might like to make.
The most significant change (MSC) technique
MSC is a form of participatory monitoring and evaluation. It is participatory because many project stakeholders are involved both in deciding the sorts of change to be recorded and in analysing the data. It is a form of monitoring because it occurs throughout the program cycle and provides information to help people manage the program. It contributes to evaluation because it provides data on impact and outcomes that can be used to help assess the performance of the program as a whole.
Essentially, the process involves ‘searching’ for project impact through:
- collection of significant change (SC) stories emanating from the field level
- systematic selection of the most significant of these stories by panels of designated stakeholders or staff
- collective reading of the stories aloud and regular and often in-depth discussions about the value of reported changes
When the technique is implemented successfully, whole teams of people begin to focus their attention on programme impact. You can find out more about the MSC technique here: http://www.mande.co.uk/docs/MSCGuide.pdf
We now consider what the biggest changes might be as a consequence of being involved in this programme - for yourselves, for your teaching, for your students, for the school, or in whatever other area!
Brainstorm (11 min). Think about how a newspaper works. A newspaper presents news stories about interesting events. Newspapers are structured into different sections (subject areas, such as foreign news, domestic news, financial news, sport, leisure). The most important stories go on the front page and the most important of these is usually at the top of the front page.
Whole group discussion (11 min). Now imagine that later on you will be putting together a whole newspaper issue about how this whole programme affects your thinking and classroom practice: What kinds of stories will be the most important? Who and what will the stories be about? Who will be affected by those stories, who would listen, and who will be they of interest to? What different sections would the newspaper have? What kind of change would you like to make?
Do the participants agree on how things might be different as a result of the programme? How will we know when these significant changes have happened? What kinds of evidence do our stories need to refer to? They can also be revised as time goes on. If participants mention ICT use and skills, ask them to focus on changes in pedagogy too.
Record what participants say in a permanent form - in writing or electronically so we can refer to them later on. Make sure it is recorded on video / audio.
Follow up activity
Agreeing follow-up activities (5 min).
Part A: Teacher lab activity
- Come to the teacher lab at least once this week to learn more ICT skills. This week you should
- Send an email to the oer4schools list
- Do some typing practice to improve your typing skills.
- Go to Etherpad and explore options for making text bold and underlined.
Also, in preparation for developing some image-based lesson activities, you should search suitable images.
- If there is internet, you can use the "search images on flickr" link from your school homepage (http://192.168.128.1)
- Alternatively, if connectivity is poor, you can do this by browsing the schools edition of wikipedia, also linked from the school homepage.
Part B: Classroom activity. Do the collaborative writing activity - the classroom activity sheet is available here. Please print it, and use it during the lesson
Part C: Read the principles of interactive teaching - do you have any questions or comments?
In the next session, these follow-up activities will be reviewed. If you are using this session on its own, you can have a look at the review of follow-up activities here.
Learning about spreadsheets
This activity will orientate you to make use of OpenOffice for creating
spreadsheets and databases which can be useful for investigating maths
and science problems. You will need to access a
computer/laptop/netbook and internet. Access a web browser and
navigate to this page: http://inpics.net/calc.html
We suggest that you go through some of the exercises on the page in this order:
1. Basic Calculations
2. Formatting Worksheets
3. Manipulating Data
- Move, copy, and paste
- Add / delete columns
- Add / delete rows
- Employ multiple worksheets
- Employ AutoFill
- Insert / delete worksheets
4. Advanced Calculations
5. Making Data Visible
You can print this content on a separate sheet here: OER4Schools/Spreadsheet exercises.
At the end of each session, we provide an overview of the activities in this session, together with their suggested timings. Although this appears at the end of the session (for technical reasons), you should keep an eye on this throughout the session, to make sure that you are pacing the workshop session appropriately!
Total time: 27 (min)
Activities in this session:
- Whole group discussion(11 min).
- Small group activity(11 min).
- Brainstorm(11 min).
- Whole group discussion(11 min).
- Agreeing follow-up activities(5 min).
If you have printed this session for offline use, you may also need to download the following assets:
Next session:
