Duration: 3:51
Students developing technological capabilities has changed learning and teaching at Leamington School.
Tonia Fenemor: The six C’s have really changed the way that I teach. The device offers them tools that they wouldn’t be able to access, and that has changed the way that I design the tasks that I now put in front of them to do. I had different expectations of what they can do, so they’re writing poems and then putting them into iMovie, and the iPads mean that you don’t have to learn how to use the apps, they just do it intuitively.
Student 1: First we went outside, we videoed ourselves, and we had to say adjectives, and then we went and we wrote our poem. We went into iMovie and we put our pictures in. We read the poems to record.
Student 2: When we finished, we put them on the interactive whiteboard.
Tonia Fenemor: You can ask them to do so many more things. Using the internet as a browser, iPads allow them to use the speak accessibility and it speaks back to them what is said. They can access much more than they could’ve before.
Student 3: We found these words, these are pests that eat monarch butterflies.
Student 4: I’m going to put all these words onto popplet so that we know what are going to eat monarch butterflies.
Leesa Mangino: In terms of the quality of their writing, yeah that’s improved hugely. They are using words that they wouldn’t normally use because they felt, “Oh I can’t write that word, I don’t know how to spell that word”, or, “I’m not even going to give it a try”.
Student 5: At the beginning of the year I used dragon dictation. I wasn’t confident in my writing so I used dragon dictation because it would help me type it. I write three to four paragraphs and I used to just write two.
Student 6: I wrote a story about a perspective of a horse going to WW1. I do my writing in a Google doc. When I’m finished, I share my writing with my friends and teacher, they edit it and give me feedback on my ideas and spelling, as well as punctuation. I like that I can go back and reflect quickly.
Leesa Mangino: So for our creative students, the technology has had a really big impact, there’s not one for them to do something. They can go, well I can make a PicCollage, I can make a movie, I can make a song, and they’re able to do those things really quickly, they’re not limited.
Tonia Fenemor: My teaching practice has changed in the way that I move around the classroom. The way that I group the students. It’s changed my role in the classroom so there’s a lot more time for the children to work collaboratively and I can just move around and see that they are still on task and answer questions and be that person that they can come to if they need an extra.
Leesa Mangino: I’m really aware that I’m not the expert, that the children, as much as me, are the teachers and the learners, so we’re teaching and learning together.
Tonia Fenemor: I’ve learnt so much on this journey. I think one of the key things that I’ve learnt is that I shouldn’t underestimate what children can do, and where they can find their learning, and how much they get from teaching each other, and how much they learn from each other. There’s so much that the iPad has allowed them to do independently, and that’s probably been a big lesson for me, that I don’t have to teach them how to use the technology, that’s just going to happen and I’ve got a lot to learn from six year olds.