Sharing the Addiction

In my role, I get to visit each of the clusters I work with and see what is happening in individual schools. This gives me the chance to see a lot of creative and interesting ideas in action. I have visited six out of the nine clusters I work with so far this year and, as there is too much to write about for one blog post, I thought I’d put together a series of blog posts to reflect on some of the things I have seen.The first in the series focuses on special needs.

Working with special needs

There are two schools within my clusters that are involved in special needs; one focuses on behavioural issues with primary aged students and the other deals with visual impairment across all ages. Personally, I have learned a great deal from my involvement with these schools.

Behavioural issues and ICT

The school that caters for those with behavioural problems has found the use of ICT to be transformational within the school. This is a school where kids come to because they need a break from the mainstream and often have a strong dislike for school. The normal ‘chalk and talk’ does not work for these kids.

Use of interactive whiteboards

They have found that interactive whiteboards have been a valuable tool due to their visual and kinaesthetic nature which suits the learning styles of these kids. I saw these in use in every classroom in the school with both teachers and students using them. There were a range of activities being demonstrated on these boards and you could see that they did hook in many of the students. As someone who is never sure which side of the interactive whiteboard debate I am on, I could see that here was a purposeful use for them.

Websites to hook kids into learning

They have found a number of websites to be really useful for developing kids confidence as they can see proof of their improvement over time:
http://tutpup.com
Kids complete with other kids around the world and in their own classroom on maths and other drill type of questions. They can also see their own progress as they complete levels. (I’ve previously blogged about this site)
http://braingrade.com
Brain development exercises and games where kids can see graphs of their progress. My brain is the size of a grape after playing the first couple of games. Hmmmmm
http://readwritethink.org/student_mat/index.asp
This is another of my favourites and I saw kids using this site to build a scene and then write about it without any encouragement needed from the adult in the room. The link I have included above will talk you to all the digital learning objects available on the site. The teachers said this was a very motivating site for students.

Blogging

The school have set up blogs for each class in the school and have found this may make the difference between a student particpating or not participating in completing work. They often ask if their work will go on the blog and if the answer is yes, they show a far greater enthusiasm for their work and will perserve to get it completed.

Visual impairment and ICT

Making online content accessible for all

I have learned a great deal about accessibility issues for those with low vision when using websites that has changed the way I put content online. I have previously blogged about this with an entire post dedicated to making online content accessbile.

Digital library for assessment

What I have found really interesting is the recognition within the school of the power of capturing information in a digital form. The school are building a library of video footage of children exibiting certain behaviours so as to create an assessment bank that teachers can access to help diagnose children with visual impairments correctly. They have used Voicethread as part of this process with teachers, assessors and parents able to leave comments around the side of the video clip to help deepen the understanding of the context and diagnosis for that child.

Digital evidence of key competencies

All staff across the nationwide school are also being asked to use digital evidence to build a profile of what each key competency ‘looks like’ within their context. Staff collect video clips and photos to show different ways children with visual impairments demonstrate key competencies. The plan from here is to widen this out so that these examples give details on how the skills being demonstrated were developed and then what the next steps are from that point. They plan to turn this into a rich repository showing all stages of development for each key competency in their own context that teachers can use to measure progress of children against. I think this is an idea that could easily be replicated in any school setting.

These are just some great ideas that I came across. I will share some more useful observations in my next post.