Eastfield Primary School

The use of ICT to support EAL and SEN children.

 As do many schools in the county, Eastfield has lots of different initiatives in place to support and develop EAL and SEN children’s language and writing skills.

The school employs numerous ICT strategies to help with this process and here are a few examples:

Sound buttons:  On learning walls so children can access the written information.

Sound boards:  To record sentences and plan story structure.

Translator pens: To help get basic information across to children new to the country. 

Clicker 5 and switch buttons:  For constructing sentences.

Google translator:  Children can type in their home language and then translate into English so that the teacher can access what the child has written.

Teachers also record homework verbally on the Learning Platform so that poorer readers can still access the work.

It would be great to hear about the kind of ICT other schools are using to support these particular issues. : )

Mr Janes

Mr Hill was interviewed by Peter Ford about his experiences of the learning platform so far.

So, now that we’re up and running with our platform, what better way of filling it with useful “stuff” than to ask the students what they would like to find there…

We’ve set up a simple discussion page, that is available on the platform – rather like Primary Pad that we were looking at with Chris Dicken on Monday at the BLT meeting.

We’ve already had some useful ideas from Year Six.

We’ll let you know how we get on.

The platform has already changed the way I’ve been thinking… approaching Literacy units for instance…

We had just started the Journalistic Writing unit – the aim was to publish a School Council Newspaper by the end of our work – or so I thought!

We had used the platform as a homework reminder – with access to the VWW (virtual working walls) and an assignment application (rather like this blog editor) – useful as 27 out of the 30 Year 6 have access to an internet computer.

Well, the following day, things changed because one of the girls, instead of writing the beginning of a report as they had been asked to do, decided to make a short video of her reading the news piece instead! (Why didn’t I think of that!)

That was it – the following day, there were 6 more videos, each one trying to outdo the other!

It was great, the Learning Objectives remained exactly the same of course – but the enthusiasm…

And we’re only in week 3 of the platform – goodness knows what will happen when the other 4 year groups go live next Monday.

John

I know that Chris has already posted about the platform 2 weeks into its life – but I just needed to add that it is the most intuitive and easy piece of publishing software that I have used – especially when compared to LPplus!!!!! and the one that everyone spent hours on before that – that disappeared into the Virtual Learning Environment!!!!

If you are trying to decide which one to have in your school – it has to be It’s Learning… aren’t you sad that you didn’t join us in the first wave!

John

If only we had had our platform up and running during our recent Ofsted monitoring inspection!!! They were pleased with what they saw then… so just imagine their reation if they’d turned up last week and saw how turned on our children are by the platform.

They saw interactive whiteboards being used extensively through the school – with good interactive content.

Much use of visualisers and recordable whiteboards – and recordable buttons on learning walls.

They were also impressed with the way the school used ICT to collect and organise data – with every member of staff taking an active roll in the collection, analysis and use of that data…

More later, when I’ve come down to earth… (If only all Ofsteds could be like that!)

John

PS how do I format the fonts etc in this?

Thanks to my brilliant teachers John & Stuart we had an amazing training day on the Friday before half term. In 3 hours all teachers in the school were adding courses to the learning platform, assigning users, embeding videos and games from websites as well as the adventurous ones filming themselves to to explain visually the written content.

The pupils in Y6 & 3 (and now Y5) have been given their usernames and passwords and have contributed to surveys, submitted homework and added to discussion boards! I am so impressed by how motivated and into the whole learning platform experience!

More recently we have set up pages for our school choir to practise songs at home with the words and accompanying music available.

 Our recent residential has a page to find out what activities pupils enjoyed the most as well as top tips for a residential. For our ICT technician and school staff we have set up a discussion board for jobs to be posted. The ideas are flowing at the moment – this is the way ahead!!!

Our It’s Learning Platform trainers have also been impressed by our start and have asked if they can feature some of our progress in an article in the TES!!! All good publicity!

Chris.

Testing, testing!

So, a couple of colleagues and myself at school are currently setting up a learning platform (LP). We are using an LP called It’s Learning and is all in all quite intuitive and easy to use both from a teacher perspective and a child’s.

We are currently trialing the LP in years three and six and it has been well received by the children. We are currently using the LP to allow access to school resources at home, complete their homework and communicate both with each other and teachers through the integrated email system.

The hope after the October holiday is to roll the LP out across the rest of the school. Before it is rolled out, staff will be trained on the basics such as setting up resources for children to use at home for subjects such as Mathematics, Literacy and Topic work, as well as posting children’s homework.

The potential of this new LP is massive and we hope to introduce application such as live streaming so that parents can watch their child’s assembly at work and for children to communicate with children from other schools via video conferencing or other written formats. There are limitations within the LP as well as some fantastic features which we will elaborate on at a later date.

Everybody is very enthusiastic and cannot wait to get started!