I bought a 2 Do It Yourself site licence for our school a couple of BETTs ago now. It's been used with great success in ICT Club and with our pupil editors of our learning platform.
But today started the most exciting experience so far for me.
We have been looking at metres and centimetres in Y3 and today I really wanted to reinforce the 100cm in a metre concept and encourage the children to go into simple fractions of a metre too. It's Christmas Play rehearsal time for us at the moment so our lessons need to cater for the various stresses that brings. Yesterday using strides around the playground as approximate metres (in the rain) was a hit and seemed pretty tricky to follow.
I decided a comparably fun activity would be for the children to create a matching pairs game using metres and centimetres. To demonstrate the idea I created (in about five minutes) a simple game in 2DIY. We played it and then the children made their own paper games to practise.
But during the lesson I realised that the chance for the children to create them in 2DIY next week was the logical next step. When I asked the children for their opinion they were very excited. They had only just calmed down from realising I'd created the game just for them!
I very much look forward to seeing what they create next week - and, of course, sharing it on our learning platform.
Now if my home DIY skills were as good I might have quite a productive weekend...!
Showing posts with label ICT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ICT. Show all posts
Friday, 19 November 2010
Thursday, 26 August 2010
Teaching typing
Not actually a battle between handwriting and typing
This post was inspired by a Twitter discussion this week between, amongst others, @oliverquinlan, @APrimaryNQT, @tomhenzley and @KnikiDavies on the merits of handwriting and word processing.
Despite the humble word processor being one of the ICT tools that has been in use in schools the longest, it can often be one of the most poorly used opportunities; and at the heart of this lies pupils’ lack of speed when typing.
Over the course of last year, I made a concerted effort to rectify this with the Y5s I had the pleasure of teaching every Thursday. I introduced them to a few websites that would enable them to improve their keyboard skills, then at the start of our weekly ICT lesson in the suite they would practise. This had the added advantage of enabling me to solve the inevitable technical glitches that we would encounter at log on.
As the year went on, I gradually added more web sites to give them variety. Some of these (like the BBC Dance mat typing) were designed to teach children to touch type, but most of them were just focusing on improving speed of letter finding.
I’m sure there are many people who feel that children should be taught to touch type and I’m not disagreeing with that, but I firmly believe that children will find the way that works best for them. Some of the children would try the touch typing, not get on with it and revert to the keyboard skill sites. Others would be desperate to try to master the ‘proper’ way of doing it. Some changed their approach over the course of the year - but all of them wanted to do the typing practice; all year. They never got bored of it.
The links were stored on a page of our Learning Platform that didn’t require logging in to: this meant that they could access them even if they had forgotten their password, and also that they could practise in their own time too.
I didn’t really notice the children’s typing speed improve over the course of the year, but towards the end of the summer term, when we were working on a collaborative project, I was suddenly amazed at the speed of all the children. Also, in their review of the year, many of them mentioned how pleased they were that they could type quickly.
From a battle point of view, I’m sure there are champions for both sides of the handwriting/typing skills debate. Personally, I believe they are both life skills we should be developing (at least for the time being!); but more importantly, I feel we should be encouraging children to make a choice as to which they prefer, and which is best in any given situation.
Sites encouraging touch typing
Sites to improve keyboard familiarisation:
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