Teachers as Innovators
ITechE suite
Jonathan Bishop, Broadclyst Community Primary School
Children live surrounded by media except in many schools. Broadclyst is different in that it saturates, drenches and inundates its pupils with rich media.
Keywords: 21st century skills, pervasive, open system, personalisation, motivation, home-school links
You would not expect to find a school of the future in Broadclyst, a small village just outside Exeter. The school claims to be one of the oldest in the country, established in 1810, and when you visit you can see that the fabric of the building bears out the claim. According to Ofsted the 350 pupils are well served by both the staff and the facilities. The staff have done this in part by constantly examining what ICT can contribute to learning. Deputy Jonathan Bishop and head Peter Hicks realised some years ago that ICT had to be at the heart of their work.
The ITechE suite is their latest innovation. The suite, completely unlike a primary classroom, is large enough to take two groups (60 students). It is more like a lecture theatre with desks in a semi-circle facing a teaching area at the front. Behind the teaching area are three large screens plus plasma screens. Each pupil has a computer with flat-screen monitor and wireless keyboard, a USB stick, a microphone, a webcam, a voting pad, headphones, wireless keyboard and a broadband connection. The children also have access to digital video and still cameras. The teacher at the front also has all those things, as well as a Tablet and pen and the means of working with the three large screens and plasma monitors. The room itself can be used as a cinema with its system of speakers. The Planetarium is in the roof of the suite.
Interestingly, Jonathan decided against interactive whiteboards. “They are very much about a closed curriculum delivering literacy and numeracy, with the teacher at the front with a bright light on the back of their head, casting a shadow. It is a very expensive resource that only one or two children can do something with. We believe real interaction is with groups of children, so you can use the projection systems for children to create their own presentations. We did something recently about the Seven Wonders of the World. We asked the children to create a presentation on what the Wonders of the World are now. The children had all the facilities of their computers to prepare their talks and then were out at the front presenting their findings.”
The suite is a progression, a natural development of work that has been done over the last few years. “We started to look at multimedia and ways of taking kids on journeys in a media-rich way. We worked with the whole staff to plan the different environment. We wanted to look up into space… that was the planetarium. We planned it as an auditorium where we can have 60 children, all with a view of the learning journey. Although we can have what many would consider is a large group, we are actually focused on the individual, personalised learning.”
The children have most of their work in the suite and so a child’s computer is their personal computer which they can configure, customise and personalise. Each child has an e-mail account and they are free to e-mail each other, e-mail the staff and e-mail out of school. There are links being formed with schools in Holland, Brazil and America. There is live communication: children can message each other and collaborate with each other from their desk. The visual is important and each desktop has a webcam. Also they can download images from digital still cameras and from video cameras. Writing becomes different; children can start to present their ideas not only in writing but in photo stories through video. They all have their own websites where they publish their work and their ideas. They all have a voting button. When they are asked for their views, they respond through the voting button. Instant feedback. A two-way interaction. “We are looking for their views, their self-assessment, so that we can feed it in to the direction that we are going.”
In the room there are two teachers and two support assistants. “If we go back in time, we might be going to see an arena through the eyes of a gladiator and experience what it would have been like. They can be enraptured with that. When we are going to work we need to give them work related to what they have experienced but matched to their needs and personalised to them. The very IT-rich environment really enables that to happen.”
Skilled teachers identify the needs of the children and use online assessment. The teacher makes a judgement and the online assessment shows where a child is currently, where they need to go, and will suggest ways of getting there. It does not take away from the teacher. It is a skills-based curriculum.
Much of the content is created and designed by the teachers. Because it is IT-based there are resources across the web that can be tapped into. “The key skills are not about working in isolation. What we want them to do is to interact with others; communicate and collaborate with others. This is a joint experience and the activities that come after will be differentiated so that it meets their needs. There will be support at all levels in order to meet what has been set for them. All the time there is an emphasis on the key skills.
“The link with home is important. The children can go home, log in to see their work, see their e-mails and see the work that has been assigned to them. Microsoft’s Sharepoint, Class server and Learning Gateway are all used. The Microsoft-based VLE system allows us to assign work individually to children. At school they will be getting teaching in a visual, media-rich way which they can carry on at home.”
The infrastructure at Broadclyst might seem a long way from current practice in most schools. At the heart of it is the drive for personalisation and the need to enthuse and motivate pupils. The key principles are to create an environment that will seem relevant to students and to create that by looking at what pupils need rather than what has been practice for the last few decades. The staff have challenged current notions about class size.
The key benefits are clear to the staff. The suite might seem formidable to adults but in reality the skills and competencies of the children do not make it intimidating; they are motivated and excited. The key successes are to have produced more motivated kids than they have ever had before and to have improved the links between schools and home. This is all about ICT as an all-pervading skill and a tool to support children’s education. Using IT when it is most appropriate.
All the funding for the suite came from the school budget. The computers are leased. Jonathan claims that financing is achieved from good management of the finite resources that all schools have. They are adamant that they do not have a hidden source of finance. They are thankful to Microsoft which has helped by supplying the school with software at advantageous rates and which has also supplied support for some of the newer applications.