Brilliant Ideas for Using ICT in the Inclusive Classroom

Sally McKeown, Angela McGlashon

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317611592
• Edizione: 2
• Argomento: Éducation
• Categoria: Éducation générale

Runner up in Teach Secondary's Technology and Innovation Awards 2014 sponsored by Lego, Brilliant Ideas for using ICT in the Inclusive Classroom provides lots of simple practical ideas showing teachers and support staff how they can use ICT to boost the achievement of all pupils.

How can you use ICT to boost the achievement of all your pupils?

This practical teachers' guide will help you to unlock the enormous potential of new technology in order to enhance pupils' learning, particularly for young people with additional needs. Written by two of the UK's leading technology experts, this invaluable and newly updated resource will enable you to use ICT effectively to make lessons more accessible, motivating and fun.

With fifty illustrated case studies and twenty starter activities, this practical resource will help you to introduce new technology into the inclusive classroom. It has been specifically designed to help develop your pupils' key skills, such as problem solving, developing concepts and communicating to different audiences. In each activity, the authors show why and how a particular resource was used and show how similar techniques can be implemented to open up the curriculum to your learners.

The authors include timely and realistic advice on how to use a range of technologies from the cheap and cheerful – and even free – to more sophisticated and specialist packages. Find out about:

• 
  
  

• Apps
• Blogging
• Digital animation
• Podcasting
• Digital storytelling
• Wikis
• Geocaching
• Coding
• Games and gaming
• Sat nav
• Art packages
• Twitter

Whether you're already techno-savvy or looking to get started with ICT, this book is full of brilliant ideas on how to engage learners of all abilities using technology. If you're looking for inspiration on how to integrate creative uses of ICT with the curriculum, this book will prove invaluable.

Part 1

Brilliant Ideas

Brilliant Idea 1

A tale of Tigtag, iPads and invertebrates

HOW DO YOU get pupils to revise for science without relying on written notes? Rob Havercroft, subject leader for science for juniors and e-learning coordinator at St Gabriel’s School in Newbury, found that a judicious use of iPads, apps and an online multimedia resource meant that pupils got better results than ever before.

Classification is very important and helps children to think like scientists. They begin to look beyond surface differences to understand the relationship between living things. It can be a dry topic but with a good blend of videos and practical activities it is possible to make classification a creative, as well as an analytical task.

In the past schools might have used a textbook or photocopied worksheets, supplemented with a selection of websites and film clips from the BBC. Rob decided to use Tigtag, a primary science resource from a company called Twig World. Tigtag has 600 short films called ‘tidbits’ which last about one minute and core films of about three minutes, long enough to sustain interest but not so long that they dominate the lesson. Tigtag seems to have all the elements a teacher might want to use: lesson plans, interactive whiteboard visuals and classroom activities, and everything is matched to the primary science curriculum. All the materials are produced to a high standard by researchers and subject experts, professional film makers and designers.

There are many good additional features. Key points appear on screen in a freeze frame at different stages and Rob has found that many girls like to take a photo on their iPads. This distils the crucial messages and the visuals give them a context and help them remember the content more dearly. Teachers can switch on captions. This not only helps pupils with a hearing loss but also those who are learning English and they do better if they can see and hear the language.

Armed with some knowledge of invertebrates, the girls went out into the school grounds and took pictures on their iPads. This meant that they left the animals in situ but their pictures gave a close up view of the creatures and let the viewer see something of their habitat too.

‘One of the most powerful functions of the iPads is to be able to take pictures,’ said Rob. ‘One girl has filled her iPad already. She’s done very well as it is the 32gb version and we only got them a couple of months ago.’

Once the girls had their photos, he asked them to choose six pictures of different creatures. They were introduced to the idea of a branching key to develop their own classification system using an app called Popplet on the iPads. They practised this as a group working with information about penguins but once they had got the idea they developed their own system of classification with questions such as: Does it have a shell? Does it have six legs?

Finally the girls made their own e-books with an app called Book Creator. Just as they might gather together all their handwritten notes in one folder, so with an e-book they can bring together all their electronic resources in one place. They collected photographs, stills from lessons, recordings of Rob’s explanations, instructions, group discussions, video clips and links to websites. This means they have a very rich resource, which they remember because they have created it for themselves.

Not only are the final results impressive but they also have had a good effect on pupils’ performance. Recently they had an examination. ‘One of the girls was nervous and thought she could not answer the questions,’ said Rob. ‘Then she remembered that she had made a film about the lung. As she thought about her video, it all came back and she was able to get full marks.’

A longer version of this article was originally published as ‘Tag the invertebrates’ in Primary Teacher Update, Vol. 01, Iss. 24, September 2013, pp. 52–53: www.primaryteacherupdate.co.uk. This extract is reproduced by kind permission of the publishers MA Education.

Contacts and information

Tigtag from Twig World: www.twig-world.co.uk/tigtag/

Popplet: http://popplet.com/

Book Creator: https://itunes.apple.com/

Brilliant Idea 2

Disney and Spielberg need to look to their laurels

NEWMAN SCHOOL IN Rotherham is a Specialist School for Cognition and Learning. A few years ago Jack Todhunter, former teacher of English at the school, started to use Apple technology with the program I Can Animate. Since then, the school has won a number of awards for its work with claymation and digital animation.

‘Theseus and the Minor Detour was one of our first attempts,’ said Jack, ‘and although we have moved on, we are still very fond of it. We were amused when someone at Cambridge University cited it as a good example of getting children to engage with the classics! So far as they were concerned it was just a good story and fun to animate.’

‘I always feel we should encourage “stealth reading” where pupils engage with a variety of texts but don’t realise how hard they are working,’ said Jack. ‘At the moment we are animating the witches’ scene in Macbeth and in the past we have worked on King Lear, Othello, Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations – not many mainstream schools could claim as much.’

Newman School had two entries in the National Schools Film and Animation Awards run by TAG Learning Limited. Homage to Hitch features a strange bird which ‘haunts’ a couple of villagers and was the culmination of work on Daphne Du Maurier and Alfred Hitchcock. The storyboard itself emanated from a genuine article in the Daily Mail which, by happy coincidence, was published in the middle of the project. As preparation for the piece, the students had to ground themselves in a number of genres including short story, film and journalism before turning their hand to animation. The result is a story full of suspense and humour. Their second competition entry was Safety on the Internet, which combines drawings, computer graphics, avatars and synthetic speech to create a short piece with a very futuristic feel.

The whole process is very engaging. Creating the models in clay is quite therapeutic for those children who can be hyperactive and they all really enjoy the ‘making’ part of the process. ‘When we made Homage to Hitch, we had several versions of the clay figures which were farmed out around the class. We storyboarded the action and people could choose which parts they wanted to animate and edit. It was a very collaborative approach. After all, at Aardman Animations, the company that produced Wallace and Gromit, they have a team of 60 or so animators so we should aim to work in the same way. We also had a parents’ evening and let them animate a couple of frames so they got a feeling for the skills involved. Some parents were so taken with the project that they have bought computers and animation software to use at home.’

Contacts and information

Newman School has used a range of software for their work:

Crazy Talk 6 – www.taglearning.com

I Can Animate – www.kudlian.net/

Noodle Flix – http://noodle-flix.en.softonic.com/mac

Xtranormal – www.xtranormal.com/

Claymation – www.ikitmovie.com/59/claymation.htm

See the videos online at:

Theseus and the Minor Detour

www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMPDOcohcLY

Homage to Hitch

http://schoolstube.com/asset/view/id/937/code/1eec34

Brilliant Idea 3

Visit museums online and become a Caboodle curator!

SO MANY ARTEFACTS which represent the nation’s heritage are to be found in museums. They give us a unique insight into our past, from the agricultural traditions in Britain to the conditions for slaves coming into Liverpool before heading out to the New World. These days it can be really hard to organise school trips on a regular basis. A project called Caboodle, run by Culture24, opens up some of the best museums to children and gives them the chance to develop some curator skills with collections of their own.

Mark Slawinski, Staff Writer and Outreach Co-ordinator at Culture24 explains what Caboodle can offer: ‘Cabo...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword by Caroline Wright
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1: Brilliant Ideas
• Part 2: Now it’s your turn
• Afterword: making it happen – Lorraine Petersen
• About the authors
• Index