Week 10 - visiting school

This week we were able to go back to a local primary school in order to create digital books with the year 1 class to teach about children’s rights. The right in which our group focused on was Article 15: Every child has the right to meet with other children and join groups and organisations (UNICEF, online). Whilst planning before we met our group we discussed assessment criteria that we wished the children to meet before the end of their session, including understanding and being able to explain their right and to use the iPads to create their own digital book.

It was difficult to set targets when we did not know the children in our group, we had not met them and we did not know their previous experiences, therefore in future practice I will personalise targets to each child/small group in order to ensure they are receiving the most out of the given task.

When we were first told we would be working with year 1 children I shamefully thought this would be a lot harder due to the children being of such a young age, but upon meeting them this soon changed, the children were confident in the basic features of iPads and were able to navigate between the apps effectively. Prensky (2001) explains the reasoning for this because children are born as digital natives meaning the children will probably have used iPads or similar smart technology before entering school, which was verified by the class teacher in the first visit. Following this information it was clear that all of the children were digital natives with a sound understanding of technology (Palfrey & Gasser, 2008).

The children really engaged with creating the ‘book’ and by the end of the session all were confident to film and be filmed/voice recorded whereas at the beginning of the session a few of the children are in our group were cautious to be filmed/recorded. Children were initially shy to share their ideas but within five minutes these hesitations almost disappeared as they were able to submerge themselves in the task and ‘take control’ of their work.

When we first discussed the task with the Children they were unsure of some of the apps and how to use them but were very keen to take part and learn and offering valuable contributions to the task. And following the earlier concerns about not knowing the children’s capabilities, from working with a small group I found it was easy to assess what the children knew and understood as we carried out the task, thus allowing me to appropriately guide the children were required.

Time management was a key issue today, the children were late which meant we had less time to film and edit, which meant we had to work as quickly as possible.  Considering the children coped well and were full of ideas about what they could do.

By the end of the session all children in our group could tell us about the right we focused on and why it was important, with all children meeting the criteria we had discussed at the beginning. If I was to carry out a similar task with my own class I would allow sufficient time for planning, filming and editing individually to ensure all children created projects they were happy with

I really enjoyed this experience in school and can see how simple it can be to create similar projects; I am really looking forward to seeing the final project in week 12 and seeing the different approaches each group took.

Palfrey, J. & Gasser, U. (2008). Born digital : understanding the first generation of digital natives. New York : Basic Books

Prensky, M. (2001) ‘Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, Part  II: Do They Really Think Differently?’ in On the Horizon 9 (6)

UNICEF (2012) Children’s rights. [online] available at: https://www.unicef.org.uk/Documents/Publication-pdfs/betterlifeleaflet2012_press.pdf