Mr P's ICT blog - Tech to raise standards!

Sat next to my Stepson while he does his homework which happens to be writing a story, "How can we describe the monster?" I say. "Big," he replies. "Ok, but I can think of some better words to use...what about gigantic, enormous, colossal???" I ask. "Big is fine," he answers. It got me thinking, how can I get him to see the value of more effective vocabulary? So many children are happy to put words regardless of how effective they maybe. They have no reason or incentive to try and improve or choose better words. Some just don't see the value to it. Well what if bigger words could defeat aliens, monsters and other ghastly demons! One of the children's favourite maths games is Math vs Zombies.  Having to apply their quick mental calculations in order to change zombies back into humans. It has them completely engaged and give their learning a purpose - the quicker they are with their maths the better score they will get on the game. L...

When it comes to learning new knowledge and facts relating to a topic, it can sometimes be tricky to find tasks that help children share their learning so that they retain the information. I have seen many lessons and work in books that just seem to involve research and simply copying it into books. I always question how much knowledge the children can recite from this approach. The iPad is now transforming the way children demonstrate their learning. Recently, I have been working with a class of Year 2 children, where we have been using different approaches relating to the same topic of 'animals in the Savannah' to show how usingthese activities are make our new found knowledge stick. We first started by generating questions that we wanted to find out: What?..... Where?..... Why?..... How?.... We had to finish those sentences and share with others on their tables and with the class to build up a list of questions that we wanted to answer. As a class we decided to fi...