Life in school....

I'm so exhausted and I've only spent three days in school!!! The kids in my class are brilliant and the school is very keen on their ICT work so I've had plenty of opportunities to see it in action.

The main use of ICT within the classroom is through the interactive whiteboard which is used in the majority of lessons. The children do a 'wake up, shake up' session every morning to prepare them for the day which is projected onto the IWB. Lesson activities are often prepared before the children arrive but the use of functions within the IWB programmes, allow last minute changes. I think its brilliant how you can save work so that you can revert back to spider diagrams etc in later lessons. If the teacher ever struggles to find a file, or is erasing rather than writing, the children all seem to know how to correct the mistake and love using the IWB themselves!

I have also had the opportunity to go to the library with the class, in which they are all comfortable with scanning in and out their books as if it were a 'proper' library! This kind of technology we had in my sixth form, but I never dreamt of seeing it in a junior school so I was very impressed.....especially as the children are able to use the technology themselves!

Although my class hasn't used them, I know the school uses digital cameras fairly frequently. The other yr 3 class took class pictures to add to their timeline of event and therefore added photos of themselves saying when they were born! This helped them to understand the concept of time! A new girl started in year 5 and was given a digital camera to walk around the school taking pictures in order to help orientate and familiarise herself with the school and the surroundings!

As you can tell....its been a busy week and I've basically just been observing - be interesting when we all start teaching for real in January!! Hopefully I'll be able to use a wide range of ICT resources in my lesson plans, with the existing ICT support from the school.