Duration: 1:53
Michelle Macintyre from Hillcrest Normal School shares how using technologies had changed the way she plans and teaches. Based on the needs of her students, iPads are the main tool used and learning using with technology is blended throughout the classroom learning programme. The results have a included deeper knowledge of all students' learning in the classroom.
We’ve been using the iPads in our classroom a couple of terms now maybe three. We’ve been using them to look at different student needs. As teachers it gives us an opportunity to reflect on their learning things that you don’t always notice and in a very busy classroom.
We have nearly 40 five year olds and whilst we see a lot we don’t see everything and the iPads have really helped us capture learning moments and then given us an opportunity to go and have a look at them later and say ooh that child didn’t understand I need to go back and re-visit that or there’s been some exceptional learning that’s happened that another child has captured, or another person in the room has captured.
It has changed the way we plan and teach together because we try to integrate the technology into our planning and teaching rather than just going to the ICT suite to use the computers and logging in and maybe learning a programme. It’s blended throughout our learning so as teachers we need to find the best way to do that and we have to make choices about which technology works the best for us and we have found the ipads and their ease of use really, really crucial because the children can pick them up, they can take pictures, they can take videos it’s all in one place. They can very easily use their fingers to drag and drop and to create things. We go the further step at the moment to upload it onto our blog but we are in the process of teaching them to do that as well.
So looking ahead the next steps for us are to try and reduce teacher direction and help them manage the process so that our students are responsible for their learning.