Harnessing New Technologies - Implications
of this session on my future practice.
‘As teachers, we can no longer ignore technology’ (Halsey,
2007: 99), this session on harnessing new technologies has exposed many
possible resources that could support my own teaching, ‘whilst as the same time
helping students to further their subject knowledge’ (FutureLab, 2010:21).
Fostering digital literacy means going beyond the functional
and the presentational and giving students the opportunity to use a wide range
of technologies collaboratively, creatively and critically (FutureLab, 2010:
22). I found story makers such as Photo peach and TES IBoard useful resources
to model to children the structure of stories, allowing critical thinking about
pictures. Photo peach also allows for pictures to be used to create a quiz,
this could be used by teachers to model questions which support children in
thinking critically.
Another useful resource which at first I had reservations
about using was Tagxedo, from reading further literature I can now see how it
could be used to create an engaging word bank which children can refer to in
their writing, Halsey (2007: 102) supports this idea expressing she used a ‘word
power’ section in her school website ‘to provide the children with a stimulus to search
out interesting words as they engaged with books, and then share those words
with others’.
There are also many ways of supporting speaking and
listening aspects of literacy through podcasting, Halsey (2007: 101) reflected that
this enabled her class ‘to move past simply recounting events and surface
features and into deeper Metacognition’. Previously ‘the separation of literacy
and ICT has tended to stand in the way of progress in the classroom’ (Merchant,
2009:39), Internet technologies provide the opportunity for a real audience and
helps to create an authentic purpose (Halsey, 2007) creating work which can be
viewed on blogs and school websites can encourage more thoughtful content. Photo
Peach allows work to be shared on blogs and websites to enable this concept of
providing material for an audience.
However although harnessing new technologies is demonstrated
to be easily accessible Merchant (2009) states that although the DCSF (2006)
provides plenty of opportunity to incorporate digital literacy in the classroom
the framework itself sets out what is tested and measureable is the print
literacy, therefore when faced with this challenge many teachers still teach
through what is measurable and tested.
FutureLab (2010) Digital Literacy Across the
Curriculum (Sections 3.1 -3.4 Digital Literacy in Practice) http://www2.futurelab.org.uk/resources/documents/handbooks/digital_literacy.pdf
Halsey, S. (2007) ‘Embracing emergent
technologies and envisioning new ways of using them for literacy learning in
the primary classroom’ English Teaching; Practice and Critique 6 (2) pp 99-107
Merchant, G. (2009) Literacy in Virtual Worlds Journal of Research in Reading, Volume
32, Issue 1, 2009, pp 38–56
Photo Peach: http://photopeach.com/
(accessed 12/02/13)
Tagxedo http://www.tagxedo.com/
(accessed 12/02/13)
TES IBoard http://www.iboard.co.uk/
(accessed 12/02/13)
It is useful to read the debate using these technologies and the impact they can have on our future practice as teachers. As I did not attend this session, reading your blog has made useful programmes apparent to me like Tagxedo, and what I could use within my own teaching.
ReplyDeleteI thought Tagxedo was a useful resource for vocabulary too. Have you thought about using it for displays in the classroom? I would use Tagxedo to display a range of vocabulary which could be used as a resource to encourage and support the children in their writing.
ReplyDeleteThis is a nice idea using Tagxedo in displays would give children an easily accessible visual aid to include descriptive or 'wow' words in their writing.
ReplyDelete