Week 9 – Multimedia and multi literacies in the primary school: Linking Theory and Practice (Part 1)

This week we had the great opportunity of visiting Shirley Warren Primary School in Southampton.  The main aim of the visit was to see how technology is implemented throughout the school and to then in the coming weeks create a ‘Talking Book’ with a group of Year 1 children.  From my experiences and research into creating my blog posts for this module I have found that digital technology has had a positive impact on children’s learning (Byron, 2007; Ofsted, 2011; Palfrey and Gasser, 2008).  It will be interesting to see if the school uses ICT to develop the children within three purposes of education; individual, formal learning and society (Beauchamp, 2012: 30).

I was excited to see how technology in the school is used to create an engaging curriculum.  As digital media is an important part of children’s lives (Buckingham, 2007); I was interested to see if the school had created a good balance of appealing lessons with the use of technology to engage and motivate the children.  The use of Apple TV, connected to every IWB via AirPlay, is a very useful tool that allows the sharing of data and information between children and allows the teaching on iPads to be a more social and engaging concept.  I enjoyed seeing this technology in action and feel this would get the children to be using the technology purposefully to collaborate and organise digital content (DfE, 2013).

The radio station at Shirley Warren was something I was not expecting.  To build a fully functional and working radio station in the school was a joy to see.  I was interested to see how this was used to get children, who had not necessarily had the best relationship in school, to participate and contribute to the wider school community.  I feel the radio station is a unique feature to the school and would be hard to replicate in other schools due to cost and space limitations.  However, it has brought to my attention how the school is trying different and unique strategies to maximise the children’s potential with literacy.  I was also surprised to see a Nintendo Wii area for the children to participate in games with each other.  The ICT co-ordinator made it clear that this area was used as a reward to children with good behaviour or good work.  This would clearly be a huge motivator for some children to do well in school whilst also promoting healthy gaming due to the Wii’s mostly body active games collection.

Overall I was impressed with the commitment by Shirley Warren to promote and develop children’s digital literacies throughout the curriculum.  This was in part due to the enthusiastic ICT co-ordinator at the school who acknowledged he had fought for funding to make the school realise its potential to help develop children’s digital literacy.  The visit to the school has certainly given me confidence to embrace technology in the classroom even further with the aim of developing children’s digital literacy. To ideally help them to use, develop ideas and express themselves with technology to ‘a level suitable for the future workplace and as active participants in a digital world’ (DfE, 2013: 178).

References

Beauchamp, G. (2012) ICT in the Primary Classroom: from pedagogy to practice. Harlow: Pearson.

Buckingham, D. (2007) Beyond technology: children's learning in the age of digital culture. Cambridge: Polity.

Byron, T. (2008) Safer Children in a Digital World: The Report of the Byron Review [online] http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/7332/1/Final%20Report%20Bookmarked.pdf (accessed 27/03/2014)

DfE. (2013) The National Curriculum in England: Key stages 1 and 2 framework document. London: DfE

Palfrey, J. and Gasser, U. (2008). Born digital: understanding the first generation of digital natives. New York: Basic Books.