Managing ICT in the classroom

I am currently at the Nelson City Cluster ICT PD Lead Teacher's Day.

We have just had a sharing time and questions have arisen about how we manage ICT in our daily classroom programme. I thought I would take a back to basics approach to describing how ICT is managed in my classroom currently and how my students produce the work that they do! (apologies if this is boring for you!)

My student's skills at the very start of the year:
My students have come to me with very basic Word formatting knowledge but no typing skills. Some can insert photos into Word. No one has any experience with blogging/wikis/podcasting etc. They had minimum exposure to the Internet/Internet games etc.

For ICT I have spent all of Term One teaching my students digital camera/photo skills and routines, skills for using equipment. It has not been the end product that is important, and it's taken a term to get the "end products" - our first video and our first podcast.

Routines we have established are:

• computer/ICT buddies - mixed abilities
• rotation system for taking digital photos - buddies goes out, take their shots (4 of each), come back and "silently" tag the next pair who goes out and takes their pics - the rest of the class is working as per normal and I am uninterupted to teach the class - it takes no effort from me because I have put in the hard yards to teach them the skills and the problem solving aspects.
• I teach one capable child the skills, they teach the next, that child teaches the next.. the trickle down effect. This allows me to keep teaching our general classroom programme.
• A "C3B4ME" policy if you have difficulty with the computer during the normal class programme.
• I want to set up an "experts" list later in the year so that students will know who they can go to for help.
  

How we manage the ICT component: the doing:

• Children take the photos, I upload them to my mac, children browse iphoto library and select best photo from the 4 that they chose. This is the photo we will use later.
• The children do the brainstorming, drafting and writing, currently I do the typing. It is not practical for my 6 and 7 year olds to do the typing, but they do type up short sentences themselves.
  
• We have a computer suite with 11 PCs. Our library time is the same time as our ICT time. Half the kids are upstairs in the computer suite; half downstairs in the library borrowing books and doing literacy activities. We have a support person, Monique, who can "teach" the class for ICT but I use her to support my students in their learning activity - roaming up and down and assisting students. We have been using Kidspiration, a web 2.0 speech bubble site and Tux Paint this term. View these posts on our class blog for what the kids have done: here and here.
• In class we have lots of mini programmes going around blogging and podcasting. We do all of these with my mac and my digital camera. We only have one computer in the room!!

These are the things we have covered so far this term in ICT teaching (that I can remember):

• What is a digital camera? What does it do? How do we hold it safely?
  
• How do you turn on the camera? How can we take a photo?
• What do we do if the screen goes black or if I have a problem?
• What do I do when I've taken my photo?
  
• How do I turn the computer on? How do I turn on the monitor?
• How do I open programmes?
• What do we have to do when we are being videoed? - how do we look/speak/act?
  
• What is a blog? What is the Internet?
• Why are we going to have a blog? Put on your thinking hats - What could be the good/bad/creative aspects of having one?
  
• How can we access our blog from home?
• What is a podcast? Why would we want to do a podcast? What should we remember when doing a podcast? (voice, expression, pausing, tone etc)

Generally the general classroom programme keeps running! I do not designate and do a full day of just ICT! We integrate it seamlessly into our programme. We only use the ICT as a tool to share, celebrate and display our learning. Children go off individually or in buddies to my "teacher corner" to do their recording or insert their pictures. I need only to show one capable child ONCE... they then can teach another child.. and then that child will teach the next!

Behind everything we do on our class blog and our podcasting sits LOADS of teaching and student's work! For example, every story you read on our class blog or read aloud on the podcast has been brainstormed, drafted and edited by the students. We are still doing the reading, writing, maths etc... and LOTS of it! The ICT is used to bring the students work and learning to life and give the students ownership of it. It also shares learning with our parents/family members.

Please post any comments or questions you have below, I'd only be too happy to help!