Tideway School, Southdown Road, Newhaven, East Sussex, BN9 9JL
Case Studies
Case Study 5: ICT
Students who are studying GCSE Business & Communication Systems have their own 'room' on Fronter. There are 25 students in the teaching group. They are the only students who have access to the room. Each student has his/her own private area in the room. In this area they can ask for advice and the teacher can post lesson resources that are tailored to their individual needs. It takes time for use of these areas to become embedded in classroom practice. The design of online areas is also an issue for some students. Those students who have poor literacy skills can find online resources just as difficult to use as paper based ones. By and large teaching staff do not have the design skills necessary for the creation of online learning materials that meet individual needs.
The screenshot shows the Course Work area in the Year 10 Business Room.
The room contains a WORD guide and action plan. Students can download these and save them to their school network accounts or transfer them to their own file space on the Learning Platform.
The Communication folder is a 'hand-in' folder. Once students had completed work in this particular lesson they had to UPLOAD their work into this folder for the classroom teacher to check. Completion rates for work do improve when tools such as this are used. It's also relatively easy to to select work that shows different assessment levels and post this back to students for comparison with their own.
'For many educationalists the real potential of ICT in education lies in the ability to collaborate.' (Abbott)
