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Carol Rainbow, Primary Consultant reports on the recently completed Transfer project.
The ICT Transfer Project is an exciting series of activities, which a number of schools have used for the last few years. It is designed to continue developing good practice in using ICT as a cross curricular tool and to revise primary pupil skills. It helps with the transfer between primary and secondary schools enabling secondary teachers to see what pupils can do and hopefully giving them a useful opportunity to meet the pupils and vice versa. Kidlington partnership agreed to try out a shortened version of the chocolate bar project across all schools to see how it works and in particular, to use Digitalbrain to facilitate the transfer of materials.
An initial meeting was held where the scope of the project was discussed. A problem for two of the schools involved was that they had mixed year 5 and 6 classes so needed two different projects for alternate years. It was agreed that the chocolate bar project would be done in year one and a CD cover would be done in year two, the same outcomes would be achieved but in slightly different contexts. Ideally this should cover literacy, maths and ICT with the possibility of making it a multi-disciplinary project.
This year pupils designed a chocolate/ health bar wrapper, jingle and logo and put these together in an advertising presentation suitable for their peers.
This was further developed during the first term at secondary school, where the presentation was altered to suit an adult audience following which the project was evaluated. During the initial meeting a discussion of which activities should be included took place and the following list was agreed:
Activity 1 – Chocolate / Health bar Analysis Initially pupils analysed chocolate/ health bar wrappers focusing on what was needed on the wrapper, what design features were important, etc. They completed a design brief sheet as an aide memoir before designing their own wrapper.
Activity 2 – Pupils design their own wrapper. In response to the ideas noted on their chocolate design brief pupils designed a wrapper for their own chocolate or health bar. This was saved in their personal web space on the Learning Platform, Digitalbrain, for later use.
Activity 3 – Design a jingle and logo Pupils used a music program (Compose World Junior) to make a jingle to accompany their presentation and Word drawing tools to make their company/ personal logo.
Activity 4 – Advertise your chocolate / health bar Using PowerPoint pupils made an advert for their chocolate/ health bar using a maximum of six presentation slides. This was suitable for pupils aged 10-11 but could have been aimed specifically at boys or girls if they preferred. This was all saved in the Digitalbrain transfer project community for later use.
Assessment / moderation meeting: Use the Presentations to level work. Teachers agreed that at the end of June they would upload a selection of presentations chosen by the children into the Transfer Project Community shared folder. These were given a filename, including the name of the school for ease of identification, for the cross partnership and phase moderation session.
Activity 5 – Re arrange the presentation to be suitable for adults. At Gosford Hill pupils retrieved their work from Digitalbrain and saved it to their new school Digitalbrain portal. Pupils worked again on their presentation making it a suitable advertisement for adults. This addressed the opportunity to write for different audiences.
Activity 6 – Pupils evaluate their work. Pupils evaluated their two presentations, logo and jingle and noted changes / improvements they could make should they do a similar project on another occasion.
The Evaluation Meeting
Despite the popular misconception among several of the teachers present that the children were working at level 5, all pupils were either level 3 or low level 4. Teachers felt that because of the skill level involved in making the presentation, arranging to play automatically and adding music, etc. it should be a higher level. They were confusing skills with capability. The National Curriculum level descriptors are for assessing the capability of pupils to use ICT in a curricular context and do not measure the amount of skill needed to carry out a task or the technical requirements of the task being assessed. Also it is worth noting that this was only levelling pupils in one aspect of ICT, not across the aspects.
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What we learned: · Pupils are excited by the use of the learning platform to access their work at home · Time is an issue, about 5 sessions (e.g. mornings) are required · Where the project has been most successful it was done immediately after SATs giving pupils something completely different to focus on for a few days · Teachers need more help creating and embedding the sound files, getting the presentation to run automatically and to solve some imaging problems · Teachers need examples to show pupils so that everyone understands the brief and can see what is expected · Pupils need reminding to reference images used from the internet · Clear file naming conventions are needed; we have had a problem distinguishing between several “chocolate bar.ppt” presentations! As pupils started working in their own folders this was not perceived as an issue until we came to review the work from a central folder.
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A further observation: The project would have been more effective if the order of the activities were changed to:
Create the wrapper and the logo followed by the advert presentation. This establishes the mood of the presentation and the length of time needed. Once that is done then create the music the right length so that it can be slotted straight into PowerPoint without trying to get it running several times on different slides. It should then reflect the mood of the chocolate bar / presentation better.
Conclusion
The shortened transfer project was fun and was enjoyed by the pupils. Storing material on Digitalbrain also allows new pupils to start at the same point as those that completed the project in primary school. Help for teachers will be provided on the website for next year, particularly regarding making the logo and embedding music into PowerPoint as well as running the presentation automatically. Also there will be more help in the website examples of real pupils work at both primary and secondary levels from this year please visit http://www.ict.oxon-lea.gov.uk/transfer/.
