ICT
Training
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Evaluating the impact of ICT in English
| Module 5 | Contents |
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It should be part of every teacher’s professional development to become comfortable with the use of ICT in the classroom. As more and more hardware comes into schools and as children increasingly encounter technology in a variety of contexts, it will increasingly be the norm for pupils to expect to meet and use a wide range of technical equipment in their lessons. As teachers we have to be ready to deal with this and to manage competently both equipment and pupils to ensure successful outcomes.
This has obvious implications, not the least being the clear need for regular and professionally delivered inset for all staff within the department. After you completed the initial skills audit, you probably had a good idea which areas needed to be covered by the initial training. However, your needs have probably already changed and matured, and now is a good time to review your current position.
It may well be useful to use the ICT Teacher Evaluation form after completing initial lessons to help identify your further training needs. Have another look at the ICT Needs Analysis Spreadsheet and the ICT Competencies Checklist in the Resources section. See also "Ideas For Integrating ICT Into the Primary and Secondary Classroom" Published by Lewisham Education and Community Services.
How have your ICT needs changed? How far have your training needs been met? Are you merely more aware of what you don't know, or have you been able to make real progress? What are your plans for the next stage of your ICT development?
As the teachers within the department become increasingly skilled and experienced then this should bring increased benefits to both the teachers and their department. It is clear, for example, that there is a growing amount of information and advice available to English teachers through the Internet. There are now Internet web sites which specialise in providing planning materials, ranging from an entire offer at Key Stage 3 to a one-off lesson for Year Seven poetry. Publishers’ catalogues are appearing on the web, theatre information, poetry readings, professional associations, all are going on-line and we need to be aware of this and ready to take advantage of the benefits that will come from this growing trend.
The evaluation of pupils’ progress will clearly need to be carried out with reference to the recording and monitoring of both the English content and the acquisition and/or use of ICT skills. What those skills are and how they are to be assessed should be built into the planning process. There are some very useful suggestions for planning and assessing ICT in Module 5 of the Primary materials.
Here are some points that you might well consider as a checklist of what it is valuable to consider in the process of evaluation.
- Did the lesson work as you expected? Were the pupils on task?
- Did the ICT component of the lesson help or hinder the English task? Did the pupils spend all their time mastering the ICT skills needed and spend little or no time on the English content? Could this have been avoided with better forward planning or was it a necessary part of the process?
- Was the activity planned to allow for differentiated outcomes from pupils of differing abilities? Using ICT enables us to more easily set up different ways of doing the same task for different pupils. This can be achieved either by using different software or by setting up differentiated instructions or worksheets on the network server.
- If the lesson involved pair or small group work, on what basis were the pairings or groups made? It sometimes helps to have a pupil with good ICT skills paired with a weaker one, as long as the skills are then passed on and the weaker student thereby becomes a more confident user. In the same way it may be advisable to pair a pupil with stronger English skills with one who has problems. Assessment of who did what exactly may or may not be important if the intention was to achieve collaborative working. As always, what should be assessed is what was intended in the aims of the lesson in the first place.
- It might be thought desirable to involve the pupils themselves in the recording of their own growing levels of competence in ICT by means of self assessment sheets, with the skills mastered ticked and dated as acquired. The teacher can check these records by observing the performance of the child in the class, discussing the work with the child and the evidence of the pupil’s completed work. As pupils, and their teachers, gain experience and competence, then more demanding tasks can be undertaken and existing skills developed and honed.
- Was there a product? If one of the outcomes was to be a printed piece of text, did that text fulfil the requirements set? If the purpose was for the class to familiarise themselves with the plot outline of "Romeo and Juliet" by study of the CD ROM then that may need to be tested by the old fashioned process of questions and answers.
Review your work using ICT with pupils by discussing the above checklist. What would you do differently next time? What have you learned? What have THEY learned!
Task 16
- Carry out an assessment of a lesson you have already completed, using the above checklist. Try to be objective about what worked and what didn't. How will this assessment affect what you do in future?
- Plan a new activity and build assessment into it from scratch. Review the activity using the checklist.
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