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Using ICT to promote literacy

Richard Wilson's rural school bag

Richard Wilson

Wednesday 04 October 2006

My project on using wiki pages to embark on some collaborative writing is taking shape. The P5 pupils I am working with have almost finished their own research topics an will be putting them into a word document to make publishing easier. I am using formative assessment techniques to make sucess criteria and get the pupils to make inroads into recognising quality and spotting plagiarism. Not always easy at this level but I feel progress is being made. This is helped by our NQT, Rachel Clark who is doing the bulk of the classwork. Like many new practitioners she already has a good handle on formative assessment and when I talk of progress in this area it is really Rachel who is doing the day to day re-inforcement and I get to do all the flash bits on a Friday! I hope that by the end of October all of the P5 work will be published in a form that the pupils themselves are happy with.

The next task will be to wait for feedback and additions to their efforts on-line. It will be very interesting and exiting to see how other pupils extend the writing on offer for editing. A step in the dark!

During my work with the class I have tried to consider ways to engage those pupils for whom writing is a chore. I am familiar with the Clicker range of software and have used it to great effect. I have come across two other publishing tools which I am using and will report on their usefullness after I have used them for a bit. One is Slidestory which offers a free way to tell a story using digital photos you or your class have taken. I will be posting some examples on our web-site soon for you to look at.

The other is a great piece of quite cheap sotftware you can try for 30 days free, it is called Comic Life. It's dead easy to use, literally click and drag, add speech bubbles and add text. I tried it out with my son Lewis, now in P2, and he had no trouble geting to grips with it. We used our camping holiday pictures from Glencoe when he trounced me at fishing as a focus for his outrageous success. I am getting it installed on the nursery computer as it is ideal for recording the pupils' progress. Try it out and post a comment on what you think.

If you know of other ICT resources please let me know so I can try them out

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Don

Thursday 05 October 2006

This looks like it's going to have real impact.

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