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On a personal level I believe that it is important to analyse the work that we are doing in the classroom and share your observations. Which is why I've put this section into my website. If you want to download the text please click on this link Thoughts.rtf There does seem to be a very specific set of skills that enable good progress in IT but they are also developed by studying this subject so I don't believe that they are pre-requisite skills. I have identified the following useful abilities.
The Start of the Lesson A big break through for me as an IT teacher came when I got access to a projector. This meant that I could talk to the whole class about the content of the lesson but it also created a few problems. It seems that IT involves a lot instruction where the teacher tells his class how to carry out a specific set of tasks and if you just rely on gathering the whole class around the projector it can take up 15 to 20 minutes at the start of each lesson, which takes up a lot of time and establishes a predictable routine that can undermine the student's level of interest. Also during this 15 to 20 minutes at the start of the lesson you have to explain the need for and insist upon quiet and concentration and yet I am not looking at the class when I'm talking to them, I'm looking at a screen so I can't see those students who have lost their concentration and restless students find it difficult to co-operate in this situation. Talking to a class like this is such a convenient way to introduce a new piece of work that I will frequently work my way through these difficulties but once a project is up and running I will use some alternative methods of communication. As well as the projector I also have a large monitor available and I will usually ask the class to choose a partner that they will work with together on a project. I will then talk to half of the class on the assumption that they will share with their partner what they have learnt. I also use paper based tutorials and these seem to be more effective than online tutorials for the simple reason that the student has to switch from the application that they are using to the online tutorial and then back whereas the piece of paper is always there as a separate resource. The popularity of IT books for adult readers seems to confirm this observation. Having said this though many students sense of focus will be dominated by the computer screen and the paper resource will be ignored. This phenomena can be overcome by making sure that the paper tutorial contains guided tasks that the students have to complete. Students at Work A computer can be a wonderful time wasting toy and this does cause real problems in the classroom. I've found that it is vital that I discuss the issue of time wasting with them and that I make my expectations very clear to the students that I am teaching, particularly when it comes to the amount of time that is available for each specific task. Showing the class examples of an early finished piece of work is a good tactic because they can get an idea of what their end result might look like and it is motivating because most students like to keep up with their peers. Over the last two years at my current school we have moved to a situation where students are getting one IT lesson a week and the general level of computer literacy has gone up and this has definitely picked up the pace of the work that is taking place. Because time wasting is a problem this tends to encourage a highly structured approach to the teaching of this subject and it is worth planning for some loose unstructured lessons so that experimentation and discovery based forms of learning can take place. Just stating that it is okay to do more than the work that has been set is often enough and most able students tend to go down this road anyway. Saving is a big issue and most students given a free reign will choose any name other than the most logical one for their work. In order to mark and assess the work I teach students how to log in and save to their home drive and I also insist that they choose a specific agreed file name for their work like spreads01.xls if we are doing work on spreadsheets, with the next file being called spreads02.xls and so on. Less able students do experience some difficulties with this but at least if most of the class are doing it it can make marking and assessment possible in this subject area. Personally I have tended to set large tasks at the beginning of a project which works on the assumption that students can quickly learn the necessary skills that are required for this task. This does not always happen and I intend to introduce short quick exercises that will cover, in small progressive stages, topics that students normally find quite demanding. IT is obviously about handling information so in order to teach IT you need some stuff, some content to work with. Now if you think of this content as just stuff then that is bound to limit the work that can take place because it's this content that you are working with that drives the IT lesson and arbitrary test data tends to lead to work that has no real sense of purpose. In order to overcome this problem and provide content that has some integrity I use a lot of content from across the curriculum so that for instance a Logo based project exploring computer control may have a strong Art and Design element to it but this in as of itself is not enough, in order for this content to work as a structure that drives the work forward I need to respond to it as a teacher. While I am mainly teaching IT I'm also teaching the subject that provides the content for the IT lesson. When I tell people that I'm an IT teacher I often get the response that at least the students are interested in my subject and by and large this is true, there is a higher degree of interest in IT from young people at the moment but the real situation in the classroom is a little bit more complicated than that. Because IT depends on a very specific skill set some able students actually find the subject demanding. They don't instantly take to it in the same way that they achieve rapidly through conventional academic forms of expression and of course conversely some students find this technology very enabling and they find that IT allows them to write at length in a way that could not do using a pen and a piece of paper. In order to understand this we would have explore how individuals respond to different forms of eye hand co-ordination and different forms of perception. What is the difference between writing by hand and looking at a piece of paper and typing and looking at a screen. The main issue here is that is that here is not a uniform response to this subject. Another factor that effects levels of achievement is attitude. Because IT is very popular with young people it often means that those students who use a computer at home have some pretty entrenched attitudes and habits towards this technology. Many students will see a computer as a kind of toy and will be quite resistant to using computer in order to carry out some difficult demanding tasks that they have not already encountered and this conservatism will lead to some time wasting. It comes as no great surprise to me that I have had some excellent work from students who don't have a computer at home. Achievement in IT seems to have two major components. Basic skills that enable a student to carry out a process and the application of those skills in order to achieve preset goals and objectives. In the current scheme of work for IT in my school we do rather a lot of DTP work and photo editing and I am tempted to leave things as they are, rather than trying to redress balance in some way or another, because it is possible to see what level of achievement students can reach when they have become very familiar with a set applications. Basically their control of the technology becomes transparent and you end up assessing higher order skills like design related issues and you also respond more to how students have applied this technology rather than just responding to whether or not they can actually use it. Another good reason for leaving this slightly unbalanced scheme of work in place is that students become very quick and confident with this type of IT work and it must be good for them to experience this degree of fluency. I saw an example of this when a pop band gave a free performance at the school. Some competent average ability students visited their website, grabbed some images off their site, produced a well designed banner and printed it off and stuck it together all within the duration of a single lesson, so that they could use these banners that afternoon when the band was performing to the school. In my current school IT is taught in mixed ability groups so differentiation is a very significant issue. It really is quite interesting how easy it is to differentiate with this subject. Most of the units of work that are being used in our scheme of work naturally lend themselves to differentiation by outcome. A spreadsheet model of a business's accounts can contain, as a starting point, a small number of addition and subtraction formulas and it can simply be extended from that basic response. More able students will realize more of the potential possibilities that a spreadsheet has to offer. All that is required in order to differentiate for the less able students is the possibility of a simple basic level of success and if the task can only be achieved by working at a level that is beyond them then obviously there is no differentiated level within that piece of work. Preparing differentiated resources is also very straightforward and templates and partially completed pieces of work can be prepared that will allow a student to get moving with their learning rather than struggling to get started while everyone else has almost finished. It is pleasing that once students have been helped over these hurdles they will often achieve at level that is on a par with the rest of the class. Generally speaking IT is not a consistently difficult subject but it is a subject with blockages and sticking points that will stop a student from progressing any further with their work. Getting the time to prepare these resources can be difficult and sometimes I will use the work of quicker students in the class to get round this problem. One strength of IT is that it is so easy to share work, particularly over a network, and it is very easy for a teacher to reformat and disassemble a student's work in in order to turn it into a teaching resource, by the time a piece of work has been through this process it becomes totally anonymous and it does not bear the stamp of its author. It's interesting that some schools have a "no games on the network" rule because games can be a very powerful medium for learning in IT. I am sure that if you looked at these schools you would find edutainment games and what this rule applies to are the computer games that just exist for the purpose of entertainment but some of these games can have a very educational content and even those games that just rely on reflexes can contribute to the extra curricular work of the school, creating experiences that will draw young people together in competitive teams. Real Time Strategy games that require resource management and problem solving skills are complex games to learn and understand. The properties of the game objects have to understood and these objects have to be made to work together to produce a functioning system. In my experience, initially only the high ability students were really interested in these games but then games do motivate students to learn and when I made an RTS game available at lunchtimes during the last week of a school term I quite surprised at what took place. It became hugely popular with the students and the knowledge of how to use the game quickly spread so even students who I might consider to be less able were learning how to play the game at a basic level. Playing games in a room over a local area network is a very social activity with teams of players playing against each other and it was rewarding to see withdrawn students with limited social skills interacting with students that they would not normally associate with. All in all it was such a success I would certainly want to repeat this activity in the months ahead and it interesting to note that very few students were actually trying to play this game during lesson times. This problem can be controlled anyway by managing user rights and permissions on a client server network. Some RTS games have map editing packages and I am very tempted to see if I can find a place for map editing in the mainstream curriculum. This is certainly an area of activity where gaming and IT education can coincide. There are some gender issues here in that this mainly seems to be a boy thing, though some girls did take part. This problem could be overcome by encouraging girls to take part and by expanding the range of games that are available. There is also an issue of content in that only a minority of computer games are suitable for a school environment. R.Finnigan 16th August 01
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