ICT and Literacy

One of the first lessons i taught was split into 2 one hour slots; one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The objective of the lesson was for children to write about an imaginary world they had previously designed using the Revalation Art program. There description of their imaginary planets was to be presented using Power Point, hence the lesson was a lesson in how to describe a setting and how to use Power Point.

Sometimes I have been sceptical about the use of ICT in my school becuase I don't think it is always used to good effect. Rather, much of the time it's 'laptop day', so the teachers have to think of something to do with them so that the laptops can be seen to be being value for money by parents and governors. However, in this instance I could saw how fantastic ICT can be at encouraging children to engage with a task.

The key to it was that I could start the lesson by showing them by Power Point which was animated and had sounds and looked really good. This motivated them to make something equally as spectatcular.

The end result was lots of really amazing Power Point presentations. They had lots of pictures in and the children learnt how to format slides and animate text.

The only problem was that the use of the laptops made the quality of the children's writing go down. They spent much longer faffing around with pictures than they did on written content.