2009, Jan 15: Coleridge Community College, Cambridge

Some key points shared by Keith Addyman (Director of Technologies):

• ICT is a means to help achieve excellence, innovation and collaboration.
• Media Literacy and ICT are incorporated into subjects and assessed through the subjects. By doing so, it helps pupils to see ICT as a tool instead of being a discrete subject. Videos has also been incorporated into all lessons and subjects.
• Students go through the following stages in video production, to tell a story: Plan > Storyboard > Shoot
• Students' coursework are submitted online and assessed.
• ICT Support for staff: 1 administrator who takes care of the software application system (eg. attendance, student records) & 2 technical personnel who handle the hardware troubleshooting. Teaching assistants are also made available to support teachers in content sourcing and development.
• Staff Training: There is regular just-in-time professional development sessions aligned to the focus of the term.
• Cross Curricular Projects: A Model for Innovation involves: Whole Staff Training > Collaborative Planning > Team Teaching > Writing into SOW > Embedding. The emphasis: One time training is not enough and staff needs to practise in order to acquire skills.
• The use of IWB is made compulsory for lesson observations as it's one of the key technology integration strategies. To prepare teachers, one IWB is deployed to each department and a staff from each department undergoes training. They in turn train the rest in the department.

Keith also shared some implementation experiences:

• When pupils are introduced to a technology platform (eg. email), the school should continue to use the platform in order to create sustainable practice.
• For the 2 lessons per week, arrangement was made so that they exist as first 2 periods of the day and students can therefore work from home.
• When accessing the work from home, students have to sign in to a chatroom at a given time so that the teacher could mark attendance.
• While high percentage of students having access to computers/internet at home, school provides to computer and internet access for those without the facilities at home. Hence, there is no access problem to the virtual learning environment.
• While pupils use online discussion forum, email is still used as the primary means by teachers to communicate and keep in touch with students. (eg. informing them preparation work prior to the activity via email)
• Teachers need some coaching skills to facilitate the activities.
• On the other hand, students feedback they prefer face-to-face interaction. Hence, he suggested perhaps students could be given an option - To discuss face-to-face or virtually.

Students in Year 7-8 also work on a Portfolio along the following flow:

Some thoughts: This offers a pretty interesting structure for portfolio, whereby the learners' work/reflection is not organised by subjects, but some emphasized attributes that each learner is expected to exhibit at the end of their learning journey with the school. Perhaps we can consider a structure along this line, using our 'student outcomes' as a guide. At the end of the day, we define broad areas our students should focus on (with the parameters), yet give them the room to express and organise (from their perspectives).

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Some useful ideas from the video clips shown (http://www.parksidemedia.net/):

(a) Key stage 4 Film making (http://www.parksidemedia.net/parkside_media/KS4%20films.htm)These are work done by Year 10-11 students and used as a teaching resources for Year 7 students.

Some thoughts: This could be something that our school can consider when setting tasks for upper secondary pupils - so that their work is not just a piece of assignment, but with a larger purpose and value to it. Another idea arises from here could be - some of our SOPs could be filmed into clips and post in the site where the Induction/Orientation package is. So, such package could be multimedia too!

(b) Clever use of several clips depicting the same storyline/scene but produced by different people - for students to study and discuss how the same storyline/scene could be differently shot/depicted. (e.g. Romeo & Juliet).
Some thoughts: This is not limited to Media Critique, but it could also be used when pupils are required to carry out some "Compare & Contrast" activities.

(c) How students made use of webcams to illustrate their understanding of Science and Geography ideas

• http://www.parksidemedia.net/parkside_media/Science.htm
• http://www.parksidemedia.net/parkside_media/Geography.htm

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Click HERE to download school prospectus. Look out for

• page 5: Curriculum - timetable structure
• page 8: Home Learning
• Some terms used - Homework club (page 8); Personal Learning Planning Day (page 9)

Other Parkside-related websites

• Parkside Media Project
• Parkside Animation Project

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Some thoughts: Students are given opportunities to apply ICT skills, in particular, the creation of video clips as it's a target set by the school. Perhaps, one point to note is, while a technology tool/platform is identified, it is also important to keep in mind that the task designed should not be driven by technology... technology should serve where it serves best.

Other observations on how ICT plays a part in the curiculum: (i) Pupils use video clip to demonstrate understanding - in the case of Science (ii) Pupils create an end product of a task - in the case of producing videoclip on bullying. During the sharing, it's not clear how pupils learn with ICT.

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