Blog 10/11: Multimedia and multi literacies in the primary school: 2

After working with children in school, share your observations and reflections. What surprises you? What were the challenges and how might you overcome these? What have you learnt? Make links to relevant readings.

Upon meeting the children for the first time, I was impressed by their knowledge of rights respecting articles, this is not necessarily relevant to our learning in this module, however, I do believe that the understanding of rights and responsibilities can have some effect on e-safety (Byron Review, 2008). This helped them achieve two of the targets that we had discussed as a group; to understand what article 19 means for them in school, and to understand the point of the project they were undertaking, to take meaning from it.

The third target was to achieve some thing new with the Ipads, to learn a new skill. The signs of digital natives were evident in all of them (Palfrey & Gasser, 2008), all of the children participated in animation for the first time, each having the opportunity to manipulate the focus object and to take pictures using the Ipad. The children were confident in doing this, learning quickly from a previously made demonstration and input on the features of the app and applying these skills with success. The group was even able to participate in a more existential discussion about what might or might not work in stop-motion animation, proving their understanding to us.

During the editing process, which only had one small technical disturbance with an incorrectly functioning airplay, the children played a big part. We talked about types of multimedia and where they might find these in their day-to-day lives, we then introduced the idea that we would create a book using an app. This sparked good discussion as the children were excited by the idea of creating a digital book using videos that they had created that day, this discussion led to some good ideas from them for the use of sound, colours, text and pictures.

I have previously led an animation project in a whole-year 4 setting and came to understand quite quickly the time and effort it takes for children to create something they are happy with, I therefore considered that doing this with a group of year 1 children would be near impossible. I learned that I was wrong and that even children so young are capable of incredible feats with technology.

Byron Review. (2008) Safer Children in a Digital World. DCSF Publications.

Palfrey, J. & Gasser, U. (2008) Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives. New York: Basic Books.