Blog 12: Past and Future

Summarise and reflect on your own significant learning from this module. Identify its implications for your future role as an English or ICT subject leader. Make links to relevant readings.

As an ICT specialist, the most significant learning for me was based in the literacy side of the module, in particular the innovative ways in which I can apply my ICT knowledge and skills to provide a more balanced and beneficial literacy curriculum. The connecting, applying and condensing of knowledge in order to encapsulate the most beneficial and efficient learning within my understanding of cross-curricular pedagogy has been my focus for the module. I will now summarise the major significant points of learning from the topics of previous blogs and reflect upon their implications for my future teaching.

I began this module well aware of the stigma placed upon children of the digital age in schools with regards to attention span and the redundant negativity of it towards a mindset that is enevitably the future for children (Prenski, 2001). Well established was my view that technology was imperative to the modern classroom and my understanding of the requirements of digital natives, besides reservations about over-use. This view was supported by theorists such as Merchant (2007) and Higgins, Xiao & Katsipetaki (2012) who agree that technology increase is a vital step forward, but as a support structure for learning in order to enage and provide equal opportunity learning. On the other hand, they do state that to effectively used in this way, teachers must be trained in its usage adequately, something I already understood would rely on potential ICT coordinators and digital natives such as myself. My technology knowledge and skills at this point were already sufficient for this task, however, my knowledge and ideas for implementation of them and the adaptation of the curriculum were not.

My first notable learning point was tied closely with a topic I myself take pleasure in, that of comic books and graphic novels. I already understood their benefits for maintaining engagement with difficult concepts (Moss, 1999), and their links to visual learning, especially with younger children (Tiemensma, 2009). Even so, I was not initially comfortable with such bold application as using them to teach religion, until I shared my ideas and was reassured that they were well-founded. Comic creators were another surprise as I learned that they can offer holistic benefits to learning by aiding children to understand that meaning can be gained or presented in creative ways.

The diverse applications of Web.2 technologies aided my developing understanding of apps in practice. I learned that so long as they are used with relevance to the learning objective (Allen, Potter, Sharp & Turvey, 2001) and are up-to-date (Halsey, 2007) that they were pertinent within the classroom. This means that as an ICT coordinator, it would be my responsibility to ensure that I remained aware and interested in Web.2 developments, continuously seeking useful apps with real relevance that could enhance the learning of all children in my school and sharing that with the other teachers.

Multi-modal texts offered the most significant learning this module, reading alone did not engage me with the idea substantially enough to affect my perceived limitations of their use in school due to my own opinion of them being time consuming. Once experienced first hand during our Shirley Warren project, even with such tight time constraints, the children achieved something great. This piqued my curiosity as to their potential and once I began to get my head around their immense cross curricular applications, with the help of reflective tasks, I realised their importance for the future. It now entirely makes sense to me how they prevent children from passive readers and instead immerse them within it, obtaining the engagement of these children through multi-sensory features (Evans 2004). They can allow children with lower confidence in writing to apply other skills they may have and create work that is meaningful to them (FutureLab 2010), thus adding to their self-worth, giving them more confidence and social capital in school.

Now that I have completed this module, I feel that I could more adequately fulfil the increasingly important role of an ICT coordinator. I have become more comfortable with believing in my own ideas for application of technology in school, which is due to an increase in confidence gained through reading, practice and reflection during this semester. I now feel equiped enough with knowledge to distinguish between useful and detrimental apps and other technologies along with literary resources and can be sure that my ideas for these will be rooted in their benefits to the children's learning experience. It is important, however, if I was to continue fulfilling the role of an ICT coordinator, that my knowledge grows and develops as quickly as the technology itself and I am aware that this is no small feat.

Bibliography

Evans, J. (2004) Literacy Moves On: Using Popular Culture, New Technologies and Critical Literacy in the Primary Classroom. Abingdon: David Foulton Publishers.

FutureLab. (2010) Digital Literacy across the Curriculum. [online] http://www2.futurelab.org.uk/resources/documents/handbooks/digital_literacy.pdf (Accessed: 01/04/14).

Higgins, S., Xiao, Z. and Katsipataki, M. (2012) The Impact of Digital Technology on Learning: A Summary for the Education Endowment Foundation. Durham University: Education Endowment Foundation.

Merchant, G. (2007) Writing the Future in the Digital Age. Blackwell Publishing: Oxford.

Prenski, M. (2001) 'Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, Part II: Do They Really Think Differently?' in On the Horizon. 9:6 NBC University Press. [Online] Available at: http://britannia-spb.ru/downloads/Prensky-Digital-Natives-Digital-Immigrants-Part2.pdf (Last accessed 01/04/2014).

Tiemensma, L, (2009) Visual literacy: to comics or not to comics?: Promoting literacy using comics, World Library and Information Congress: 75th IFLA General Conference and Council, [Online] Available at: http://conference.ifla.org/past-wlic/2009/94-tiemensma-en.pdf  (Last accessed 04/03/2014).