ICT Training for Teachers

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Using generic ICT resources

Module 3	Contents
	Generic Software (Task 6) Using Generic Software Word processing (Task 7) Publisher (Task 8) Electronic mail (Task 9) External e-mail ( Task 10) Message boards The Internet Databases and Spreadsheets (Task 11) Spreadsheets for administration (Task 12) Task 13 Forward to Module 4 Back to Secondary English Map Back to T@LENT Web Site Map

Generic Software

By generic software, sometimes called content free software, we mean all those packages which can be used in any subject context, where the user has to do all the hard work. Most schools have the standard packages which include a word processor, spreadsheet (which can be used as a database), database, presentation or desktop publishing package, e-mail package. Nowadays these tend to be bundled in 'suites', such as Microsoft Works, Claris Works (Apple Works), Microsoft Office.

The advantage of these suites is that the programs, however different in function, look and feel the same, with familiar icons performing the same function from one program to the next. If you are unfamiliar with say Word, it looks very daunting, and you could spend an inordinate amount of time learning all the functions. However, at their heart these programs are very simple to use, and you need only to learn the basics to make a start. Once you have learnt your way around one package in a suite, you will find the others very simple to use.

Discussion 

Why use generic software, when you can buy a CD-ROM which is full of ready made materials, examples, exercises and so on? Well, even the best packages won't have every particular exercise you want, and you probably already use a word processor to produce your own materials. In fact, producing your own worksheets and departmental notes is a very good way to get to learn the rudiments of word processing. How far does your own practice agree with this?

Why use generic software, when you can buy a CD-ROM which is full of ready made materials, examples, exercises and so on? Well, even the best packages won't have every particular exercise you want, and you probably already use a word processor to produce your own materials. In fact, producing your own worksheets and departmental notes is a very good way to get to learn the rudiments of word processing.

Activity

Task 6 Audit and list generic ICT software available to support learning and teaching in English in your school, both in the English Department and in the school. You might like to write this up using a word processor. If you are not already familiar with the rudiments of word processing, you should take some time to explore the package available in your school. Make sure you can do the minimum of the following: Start a new document Understand the principle of 'word wrap' Format words and sentences (e.g. Bold, Underline, Italic, enlarge the font) Copy and paste, cut and paste Save a document and retrieve it

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Using Generic Software

In this section we will look at how you can use generic software to enhance all areas of English teaching and learning. You'll probably find that you use word processors and presentation packages the most, but there are many ways of using spreadsheets and databases to excellent effect in the English lesson.

Before launching into the use of word processors and presentation programs with pupils, however, we should consider the purpose behind the proposed exercise. ICT activities can gain their own momentum, and there is a great danger, when using ICT, of being seduced by the software or even the hardware. So before undertaking an activity such as word processing, we need to ask ourselves questions such as 'why', 'what is to be gained', 'is this use of ICT appropriate', and so on.

 

Word processing can make a pupil's work look very neat, but if all that has been done is that the pupil has copied out a hand-written exercise, perhaps introducing a number of new errors into the text, then there is little purpose in doing this. Copy typing like this has little value in the English lesson, but if we use the power of the technology there are many gains to be made.

For instance, you could give a text with gaps to be filled in, or an outline text which has to be expanded, or a list of words and phrases which have to be used. By using cutting and pasting, the pupil can produce accurate written language. The editing facilities (even grammar checkers and spell checkers) can be used to the full to correct mistakes. Pupils can use clip art drawings (i.e. banks of ready-made illustrations provided with the word processing package) to illustrate their work - the addition of a visual helps to reinforce the learning. This can be particularly effective when pupils produce posters using a program such as Microsoft Publisher.

Of course, word processing tasks bring certain problems to the lesson: one concerns the painful slowness of most pupils' typing. A way round this, in addition to providing much of the text before they start, is to ensure that they use a fairly large font size: this makes it look as though they have produced a fair amount of work, which is encouraging for beginners!

Our aim must be to use the power of the word processor to the full so that pupils can eventually work creatively, drafting, redrafting and editing their work to achieve high levels of accuracy. Pupils can learn or develop many word processing techniques this way. Work presented on the screen or printed out can have the effect of making mistakes more apparent: it is harder for pupils to 'fudge' spellings and punctuation, and this can lead to significant gains in the quality of their work.

Word processing

• The key is to be objective led, not technology led. It is not very productive to expect real learning to take place by just producing neat copies of written drafts on a word processor. There may be times when this will have its merits, but it also has a number of limitations. Using a word processor is not the same as copy typing: it is far better to allow first drafts to be formulated on the word processor, so that ideas can be tried out, text moved, redrafted. You don't have to start the pupils work with a blank screen either: see some of the suggestions above for ideas.
• The following suggestions require consideration of audience, layout and media language:
  • Publicity packs
  • Posters
  • Anthologies
  • Fanzines
  • Information manuals
  • Magazine front covers

  I am sure you are able to think of many more. You'll probably soon find that for the more complex integration of text and graphics a presentation program such as Publisher is more suitable.

Discussion 

Once again we would like you to think about 'copy typing' and why we say it has such limited value in the English lesson. If a piece of work has been completed on paper, what additional advantages are to be gained by getting the pupils to type it up in a word processor? What opportunities have been lost by not allowing them to draft and re-draft on a word processor?

Activity

Task 7 Review the way you currently use word processing in your English lessons and think about any changes you might want to make to your approach. Revise an existing lesson plan, or devise a completely new one, taking into account some of the ideas above. Try it out with the pupils! Have a look at the Creative Writing case study on the TTA CD-ROM. Pay particular attention to the Analysis section where the teacher explains why this activity is so much easier when carried out using a word processor. What do you think? Can you adapt this example for your own use? Go to the section on Word Processing Activities in the English Curriculum ICT Support pages of the VTC. This section has four detailed and very different suggestions for using word processing. Choose one of these activities and see how you would adapt it for your own lessons. Try it out! NB These activities combine several different forms of ICT. You will probably want to concentrate just on using the word processing package until you are more confident.

Discussion 

A very useful side-effect of word processing is the pupils' work, if they save it, can be used over and over again, either to improve it, or to adapt it for different purposes, or even to produce extra copies to go on the wall. How can we make best use of this facility?

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Publisher

• Microsoft Publisher is a kind of simplified desktop publishing package. Check with your ICT Co-ordinator to see if you have this or a similar package in your school.

  So, what can something like Publisher offer? Pupils can very quickly produce a single page poster with a fancy title, a picture, some text. So first you will need to familiarise yourself with the rudiments of the package. Very soon you will be able to produce professional looking work, with text which 'wraps' round pictures, and 'flows' from one text box to another. To add photos, perhaps pictures of the school or the students, requires the use of a digital camera or a scanner - or both!

  Some teachers find working with Publisher is actually easier than using a word processor, because the program suggests layouts for posters or magazines, allowing the pupils to concentrate on the text and graphics. You can also 'import' text from a word processor, so different pupils can work (perhaps in pairs) on different sections of a class newspaper, and then combine all the items when they are ready.

  • Newspapers, magazines, booklets, stories and so on all lend themselves to Publisher. Other ideas to try are posters: pupils produce bold displays in favour or against a particular idea, or a publicity poster for a product or place. The ideas really are unlimited: there are templates for news letters, brochures, flyers, cards, calendars, advertisements, menus and more!
  • When working on drama it can be a useful follow-up activity to get the students to write a newspaper account - in the form of a review and in role - of the presentations as if they had taken place at a theatre. They may take digital photographs of the performances which may be integrated into Publisher and printed in using newspaper layout techniques.
  • Publisher can also greatly enhance any media work and enable the students to consider far more precisely the effects of layout, font, audience targeting, colour, framing and so on.

Discussion 

Remember, you can copy and paste between different applications, so work developed in Word, for example, can be freely copied into Publisher. Can you think of other ways in which you can exploit the easy transfer of electronic text between applications to develop pupils' understanding of presenting for different audiences and in different formats?

Activity

Task 8 Find out if you have Publisher or a similar package available in your school. Plan an activity using Publisher or a similar desk top publishing package. Go down to the section on Literature on the Examples of IT in English page on the VTC. This outline example has five brief but varied suggestions for using ICT when studying Romeo and Juliet, including some ideas which work very well on a publishing package. Choose one of these activities and adapt and expand it for your own purposes. Try it out with the pupils! Go down to the section on Media on the Examples of IT in English page on the VTC. This outline example has some activities on advertising which work particularly well on a publishing package. Choose one of these activities and see how you would adapt and expand it for your own lessons. Try it out with the pupils! NB These activities combine several different forms of ICT. You will probably want to concentrate just on using the publishing package until you are more confident.

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Electronic mail

• Electronic mail (e-mail) is excellent for enabling the students to write to a real audience. Pen Pals can be set up on the Internet. Year 7 students can have a dialogue with pupils in the feeder primary schools. It may be that you are able to set up an e-mail address that your year 11 students may reach during study leave to access responses to their questions. This has to be monitored and has a number of implications!

Some schools have a network messaging system which allows pupils to send notes to each other either inside the same room or elsewhere in the school. (Schools that do not have such a system can achieve a similar effect by printing out messages and physically taking them to the target area.) It is very easy to think of tasks which will exploit this - a newspaper day, for instance. The TTA CD-ROM has a similar example (Debating) where the pupils e-mail information to a designated editor who then assembles the various documents.

Discussion 

What are your aims for using e-mail in the English lesson? To help pupils develop care in the accuracy of their writing? To exploit the speed of electronic communication? To exploit the authenticity of the communication? ... ?

Activity

Task 9 Investigate the messaging possibilities in your school and plan an activity using internal e-mail

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• E-mail is now very much part of the global communication system, and there is no reason why schools should not make full use of this exciting medium. If you are planning to e-mail messages to another person or school, you do need to take care that everything is set up in advance, otherwise there is a danger that the messages will go unread and unanswered.
  
  One advantage of e-mail is that it is electronic: it is easy to draft and redraft a message you want to send until it is correct. Another is its speed. Provided the exercise has been set up properly, a meaningful response can be expected very soon. A third is its cheapness: it costs no more to send one message to one person than it does to send one message to thirty people. And it costs no more to send a message to the other side of the world than it does to send one to the other side of the street. A further advantage which schools can put to great use is that the responses are also electronic. You can put the messages you receive into a word processor, remove unwanted parts of the message, change the font size or the layout, and make use of the text in different ways, for instance in a newspaper. Or you could put the information into a database (better still: get the pupils to do this!) and use it as a stimulus for further work.
  
  

Again, remember that you can copy and paste between different applications, so work developed in a word processor can be copied into an e-mail program, and text can be taken from an e-mail message and pasted into a spreadsheet. How can you exploit this facility?

Task 10 Find out what e-mail provision there is in your school. Experiment by sending messages to yourself, then to a friend or to your tutor. Have a look at the E-mail Guidelines on the Lewisham ICT Advice site. You will need to establish a code of conduct in your school if you are to make extensive use of e-mail in your lessons. Plan an activity involving e-mail It could be along the lines of getting pupils to compose stories for a feeder primary school, and asking the pupils for different endings, or it could involve asking an expert for information needed for a task.

Sometimes called bulletin boards. Using these is similar to using e-mail, except that the messages go to a 'common area' where anyone else with access to the bulletin board can read and answer them. Students can engage with questions on a number of issues. For example there are areas where literary questions are asked and responded to. However, they are open to abuse, unless they are closed for particular groups, so be careful before recommending a bulletin board to your students! The Talent Conference Area is an example of a closed site.

The DfEE has launched Kidsnet, a completely closed site for school children. You might like to have a look and think about the merits of such a site. There is a section for grown ups as well!

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The Internet

We have already mentioned the use of the Internet as a source of information such as newspaper articles, and the importance of developing a school policy for using the Internet, if only to protect yourself against accusations of allowing students to access unsuitable material. (See the links to good practice policy guides on the Lewisham ICT Advice site.)

The Internet can also be used for presenting the students' work. Publishing individual pupils' work so that it can potentially be seen by the whole world (or at least by parents at home if they have web access) can be very empowering and motivating.

Your school may already have its own web site, and your ICT Co-ordinator will be able to tell you how to add pages to it. If you are starting from scratch you will want to give some thought to how a school web site should 'look and feel'. Try to have a look at some other sites to see what the possibilities are. Some teachers have their own 'home page' and are happy to add examples of students' work so that the pupils can see what their work looks like when published.

Web publishing is on the one hand very easy - if you have a simple web designer package, such as Claris Home Page, or Microsoft FrontPage, or even if you know how to save Word documents in a web page format (generally known as 'HTML') you can soon produce quite respectable-looking pages; on the other hand there are a number of technical issues which are beyond the scope of this course, so we do not propose to go into any more detail here.

Many of your pupils have probably already published their own web pages, either on their own home site or on the school server as part of their ICT lessons. How can you exploit their familiarity with web publishing and use it to your advantage in the English lesson? At the very least, you could have an interesting discussion about the different appearance of web publishing compared with paper publishing.

The Lewisham ICT Advice site has some Web Publishing Guidelines and other links which you will find useful. Many of the suggestions for pupils' work using publishing and word processing packages will work very well on the web.

You can also collect web pages and save them locally for use 'off-line'. Over time a useful set of pages can be amassed which the school can use as its own mini-version of the net: this is generally referred to as an 'intranet'. What sort of pages would you collect? Howl would you keep them? How could you use them?

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Databases and Spreadsheets

A database is quite simply an ordered and searchable collection of information. We have given examples of CD-ROM and Internet databases where pupils can access information needed for a task. You can create your own database where information can be stored, sorted, searched and so on. A spreadsheet is a kind of numerical database, but modern spreadsheets such as Excel have so many text handling facilities that they can be used as databases as well - saving you and the pupils from having to learn how to use two packages!

Your school might also have a simple database package which all the pupils are taught to use: ask your ICT Co-ordinator what is available.

Creating your own database (or spreadsheet database) is not difficult. Pupils can build up databases of characters in a novel, scenes in a play, they can collect information on a topic (holiday destinations, professions, housing and health hazards in Victorian times) and so on. They can then search for specific information needed for a writing or discussion task, or in a role playing exercise (a simulation of a tourist office, employment agency or a dating agency. They can also present the information in different numerical and graphical forms and discuss their findings.

You should perhaps prepare the layout of your first database or spreadsheet exercises. When you and your pupils are more confident you can leave some of this part of the task to them.

Building a spreadsheet or database in an English lesson seems to some English teachers to be straying into the work of the maths department! How can we ensure that we are using ICT to support the English lesson rather than the other way round? What are the English aims of this exercise? How is the pupils' English being supported and developed?

Task 11 Devise and carry out a simple database exercise. Use one of the suggestions above, or you could try getting the pupils to collect information on the content, layout and design of different newspapers, or the coverage of the same story in different newspapers.

 

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Spreadsheets for Administration

The spreadsheet truly comes into its own as an aid to your personal and departmental administration. You need only write a year list once in a spreadsheet, and then you can use the program to sort the names, split it into class and set groups; to record marks and produce totals, grades and rank orders. One of the expected outcomes of this training is that :

18. Teachers should know how to use ICT to improve their own professional efficiency and to reduce administrative and bureaucratic burdens including
(a) using ICT to aid administration, record-keeping, analysis, reporting and transfer of information.

Remember: spreadsheets can help you in two very different areas. They are a great teaching and learning tool, and they can be used for keeping departmental records, converting marks to percentages, producing class and year order lists, and in automating dozens of other chores. How could you make better use of spreadsheets as an administrative tool?

Task 12 If you aren't familiar with spreadsheets for administrative purposes, now is a good time to find out more. Indeed, just as many teachers come to use word processing in the classroom as a result of using a word processor to ease the burden of producing worksheets, notes, exams, others come to realise the power of spreadsheets in teaching as a result of using them for administration. As a minimum you should be able to do the following: Know the difference between rows and columns Understand cell labels Enter text, numbers and formulas Sort data Add up a column of figures Format text and numbers (e.g. turn numbers into neat decimals or properly formatted currency) Produce a chart (such as a pie chart) from your data.

Some of these suggestions make sense when we use spreadsheets for administrative purposes, but do they have a place in the actual English lesson? What about presenting data in different ways, including these numerical and graphical ways, and getting the pupils to describe and discuss the results? Does that have a place?

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Activity

Task 13 This has been a very long module, covering a large number of topics. Here are some further ideas which might help to summarise the variety of activities for you. Try to familiarise yourself with all the kinds of generic packages mentioned. Evaluate a piece of generic software in order to see the strengths and weaknesses and identify how it might support your teaching. A proforma to help you do this is available in the primary core materials. This could be posted to the electronic conference to stimulate discussion with other colleagues. Do other people in your department use subject-specific software? Would they let you observe them in action? You will probably have to help out in a practical session! If you are already confident with ICT, try to expand your knowledge of the Internet by researching different sites or setting up a database for departmental use. Should each member of the department have a ' tracking sheet' which identifies student achievement and progression? How could this be simplified with the help of available technology? While you must ensure that all use of ICT is objective led, do not forget that it is also supposed to be fun! In the curriculum 2000 document it states that teachers of English should encourage 'reading for pleasure'. ICT can provide your pupils with many alternative avenues for reading for pleasure. I firmly believe that learning should be pleasurable and ICT has a place in ensuring that students and teachers broaden their experiences in a way that is challenging but also enjoyable. Try and get a copy of the text 'Resources for learning. IT in English' available from NATE or Becta. On page 27 you will find a nice grid which matches computer use to language outcomes. There is also a text titled 'Literature review' which is available from the same institutions and follows a similar format in identifying ICT appropriate tasks for the English classroom.

You should also distinguish between using ICT for your own research (for example, searching the Internet for resources to use in your lesson) and for the pupils' research (for example, where they search for answers to the questions you have set them). If you enjoy using ICT as a tool, there is a good chance that the pupils will as well.

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