- December 10th, 2008
Making the most of school staff
- satbance
- Comments: 4 Comments »
Earlier this week I visited Woodhill Primary School in Bishopbriggs to see how they were utilising games based learning, and also Glow. I was very impressed with the variety of projects the school has on the go, including the use of the Nintendo Wii, Dance-mats, Nintendo DS, Beebots, blogs and Glow. The children were very comfortable using the technology, and it was obvious that it was embedded into everyday teaching and learning across the school.
The Primary 6 Glow Olympics group was obvioulsy well used by the children, and was a great example of how Glow can really enhance a cross-curricular topic and make the most of technologies available; e.g. results from a Wii competition were posted on the Glow group. But the thing that really impressed me was that the school had trained non teaching staff to use the technology with children. A classroom assistant was doing a sterling job managing a French blog and using various software with the children, and the office staff were all using Glow regularly for admin purposes. It made me think that schools could give support staff who are confident in the use of ICT more of a chance to manage areas within Glow (within reason of course!). The benefits of this would surely include non teaching staff feeling more involved, teachers being able to use Glow more efectively, and subsequently, pupils having a better learning experience at the school. Something to consider??
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I was surprised that there was no reference to pupils being given responsibilities. Was this not happening!?
Yes, pupils were also given responsibilities – older pupils who had been given the opportunities to use any new technologies within the school were then training younger pupils. It was working very effectively and the pupils doing the training were very confident and seemed to relish the chance to train other pupils.
You say, “schools could give support staff who are confident in the use of ICT more of a chance to manage areas within Glow (within reason of course!)”. Could you explain what you mean by “within reason”?
By saying ‘within reason’, I meant without giving support staff too much work on top of their usual workload. Also, certain areas within Glow might be more appropriate for a teacher to manage; e.g. creating a diferentiated task for a specific learning outcome.