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Julie Leigh, Co-ordinating Adviser for ICT, presents findings on the recent DfES visits to primary and foundation schools.
Between January and March 2005 the DfES made a number of visits to Local Authorities, nursery and primary schools nationwide, including Oxfordshire.
The purpose of the visits was to explore the schools’ and LAs’ successes in using ICT effectively across the primary and Foundation Stage curriculum and, in particular, the awareness and impact of the recent programme of work including the example materials to embed ICT effectively in the curriculum and the Leadership Team Toolkit.
I include below some of their key findings together with a few of their recommendations which, for ease, I have bulleted:
Resources
The impact of the Example materials (the DfES CD ROMs) and Leadership Team Toolkit was greatest in schools where staff were not simply required to look at the resource, but also undertake a task in response to it and provide feedback to colleagues. The impact was minimal where there was a perception that staff were already engaging in the practice promoted by the resources.
Many head teachers or ICT co-ordinators had given each teacher the CD-ROM of example materials relevant to their year group and perhaps also a set of CD-ROMs to subject co-ordinators; some had demonstrated, or were planning to demonstrate, the example materials in staff meetings, but there was little evidence of an expectation beyond hoping that teachers would have looked at them.
Foundation Stage teachers recognised the appeal of interactive whiteboards to kinaesthetic learners, because they are able to touch the screen and move objects around for themselves.
PCs in the classroom were considered of greater use across the curriculum, but only where there were at least three, thus easily lending themselves to small group work.
· Schools should amalgamate single or pairs of computers, so that they have three or four computers in some classrooms, or at least a cluster shared by classrooms, which can be more successfully integrated into the curriculum.
Video cameras were often spoken about, but use was rarely in the context of teaching and learning.
Schools clearly recognise the contribution digital images can make to learning and teaching, but there needs to be further emphasis placed on the effective use of digital cameras by children themselves.
· The effective use of digital cameras can be heightened by encouraging an increased sense of ownership, that is a digital camera being “owned” by a single class, or at least a year group, rather than shared across the school.
Success was very much dependent on the:
· Teacher absolutely perceiving the ICT to be theirs and not shared (such as a teacher’s own laptop, or an interactive whiteboard in their classroom)
· Expectation from the SMT being very firm, for example, a requirement to plan electronically, or to create and share computer resources within directed time.
Few teachers, even those involved in interactive whiteboard pilots, could identify specific benefits, for example where ICT contributed to the learning of specific concepts and hence how it may be used to raise standards.
Many teachers were much more able to speak about the contribution of interactive whiteboards to teaching than to learning.
When questioned about efficiency, teachers talked of ‘increased pace’ or’ ‘quick retrieval’, with just a few defining it in terms of impact on learning or standards; and many defined ‘embedding’ solely in terms of ICT’s use across the curriculum.
· Embedding ICT across the curriculum should not deprive children of opportunities to improve their ICT capability
· Move away from the term ‘embedding’, and refer only to ‘effective’, where effective teaching using ICT may be defined as teaching where the use of the ICT offers opportunities for deeper or broader understanding (i.e. creating opportunities for more children to understand a concept).
Only a minority of interviewees were able to identify where and exactly how ICT had made a contribution to the learning of a concept. For example, where children were required to relate two or more simultaneous phenomena such as the way the Earth moves in relation to the Sun to cause day and night. In this case, it seemed that ICT was able to make the understanding of the concept easier, because it was able to show the two phenomena at once. Children could actually see the effect of one phenomena on the other - what happens as an animation of the Earth shows a country moving into the Sun's shadow, children could see a simultaneous animation of the sun appearing to set in the sky and night falling.
ICT co-ordinators that were interviewed felt overstretched and overwhelmed by their workload. Only a few schools had recognised this and sought to overcome the problem by distributing the role among more than one teacher and / or teaching assistants, thus creating shared responsibility for ICT across staff, ensuring the ICT co-ordinator’s role remained manageable.
· The DfES would like to encourage this distributed role in all schools and hope to share models with schools in the near future
· Recognise that there are two different technical support roles: support for setting up a lesson where ICT is going to be used and support for troubleshooting problems
· Consider training programmes for support staff to address both roles.
In interviews teachers often failed to distinguish between confidence in personal ICT skills and confidence with using ICT effectively for teaching and learning, and so they did not always recognise their lack of confidence with using ICT in the classroom.
· Guidance is needed for leadership teams to help them identify those teachers that may appear to be confident users of ICT, but who require CPD because, although they display good personal ICT skills, they need to work at good use of ICT in their classroom practice.
NQTs were largely competent and confident users of ICT, but they had little or no understanding of how ICT could contribute to teaching and learning, especially how ICT can be used across the curriculum. Worryingly, this perception did not appear to be shared by the NQTs though, who, in interviews, often failed to distinguish between confidence in personal ICT skills and confidence with using ICT effectively for teaching and learning.
CPD in ICT for teaching assistants often seemed to have lower priority in schools than teachers.
CPD in ICT for Foundation Stage practitioners also seemed to have lower priority
· CPD needs to explicitly focus on helping teachers move from adopting to adapting examples of good practice in the use of ICT.
[1] Extracts from “School & LEA Visits Report”, January - March 2005
by Dr Norman & L Bayford
