Informal Blog Task 10 & 11: Multimedia and Multiliteracies in the Primary School: Linking Theory and Practice (Part 2)

Informal Blog Task 10 & 11: Multimedia and Multiliteracies in the Primary School: Linking Theory and Practice (Part 2)

It was great to be back in school working with children. It really puts into context all of the learning we have been doing in university and allows an opportunity for me to experience the problems that may be encountered.

Turning up to school not 100% sure what you’re doing reminded me of my days on placement. We spent a little bit of time preparing before the children arrived. It was great to be using the technology with the children; however, we did encounter a few problems.

At first I and the other teachers with me found it hard to work alongside the children. We had spent time planning and preparing and had a clear idea of what we wanted to achieve, to begin with it became very much us directing the children. The children seemed engaged but I am not sure how much learning was going on at this point. However, later in the morning, as we developed more confidence, we began to work better with the children. Listening to the ideas and thoughts and allowing them to make decision about the project and to discuss what was working well and what was not.

A couple of things became difficult during the morning. The children were very enthusiastic and at times they could become too excited by using the technology, this lead to disruption and difficulty. This could be due to the fact that we are not actually their teachers and they had never met us before.

Also during the morning we came into a minor technical problem when one of the iPads we were using would not Airplay on the screen. Although a minor problem, it just highlights the issues or situations you could be in when the technology fails. If this had been a class project we would not have been able to all huddle around the small iPad screen and it would have resulted in the teacher having to majorly alter the session.  If technology fails it could cause periods of wasted learning time, I believe this is an issue easily overcome by teacher’s being trained in the technology so that can fix any problems that may occur and they won’t have issues due to user error. It is also important that teachers have a back-up plan if something does go wrong, for us we were all able to be able to see the iPad screen but this won’t always be possible.

We ended the day having worked with the children to create an effective two page spread about one of the UNCRC articles. The children and us had a lot of fun and I feel we really learnt a lot from the experience.