Fife Education Digital Literacy and ICT

In our ICT elective this week we had a visit from the Fife education team that specialise in ICT. They went through and explained a number of areas within ICT for example games based learning, Music and ICT and programmes such as comic life and pivot that can be used to enhance the learning expereince within the classroom. I felt this was an extremely informative and useful session as we were not just sitting listening to people talk we were given the opportunity to use the software for ourselves which made it far easier to understand and allowed us to begin to think of the different ways we could use it within the classroom.


One point that I felt that each person from Fife education made very clear was all forms of ICT can be used in differnet contexts to help support cross-curricular learning. I feel that Games based learning in a context lends itself very well to cross-curricular learning and to the Curriculum for Excellence principles of depth and breadth. (Scottish Government 2009). A depth of learning would be shown by the fact that children will be able to take the knowledge they learn from one subject area and apply it in another to deepen their understanding of the topic or conext as a whole. The principle of breadth would be shown through the wide range of subject areas that would  be covered and they would all be linked through the games based learning context. An example of this is using Guitar Hero as a context. The link below takes you to the videos which explain how one primary school class used Guitar Hero as a context and all the learning that was able to take place through that context.
http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/sharingpractice/g/guitarhero/introduction.asp

One of the tools we learnt about, that is used within many schools is Comic Life. Comic Life is a piece of software which allows you to create comic strips. It is set out in a way that children would find easy to use. It allows you to choose the layout of your comic, the style, size and colour of the text, it gives you a choice of speech bubbles and also allows you to choose different pictures that can be added to your comic. It is also possible to draw your own pictures and uplod them.
Although I had heard about Comic Life I had never used it myself or seen it being used within schools before this input, so I found it a very useful tool to perhaps use in furture placements if possible.
 I feel that this software would relate to the principle of personalisation and choice within the Curriculum for Excellence (Scottish Government 2009) as the children would have the freedom to choose what style of layout, text or pictures they would like to include in their comics. I also believe that it relates to the principle of relevence as many children still read and love comics today, and will be able to make a link between the comics they read and ones they are creating at school.
Comic Life can be used across the curriculum and engages, motivates and can support children who perhaps struggle to write down their ideas and much perfer to draw their ideas with captions. It also allows children to be as creative as they want and put their own individual style to the comic.


(Sarlitto 2003) explains some of the key benefits of using comics in education;
- A great visual Representation of Knowledge

- Presents what is essential
- Easier to remember a visual graphic containing key information
- Engaging through thinking, creating and writing.
- Perfect avenue for writing dialogue
- Incites students with low interest in writing
- Helps organisation through storytelling and storyboarding
- Using visual images convey meaning to a story or topic
- Develops creative and higher level thought processes
- Develops composition techniques through visual-verbal connections
- Enriches reading, writing, and thinking
- Serves as and assessment and evaluation tool
- Sequencing promotes understanding

Overall, I found the input from Fife Education extremely informative and very useful. It was great to have the opportunity to try out the different software as well as learning how it is related to the Curriculum for Excellence. I had not heard or seen any of the software being used before and I now feel I have the confidence and knowledge to on furture placements use some of it in the classroom. 

References

Scottish Government (2009a) Curriculum for Excellence: Principles for Curriculum Design.

Available at http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/understandingthecurriculum/howisthecurriculumstructured/principles/index.asp   [Accessed 05/02/12]

Comic Life in Education (2009) 

Available at

http://plasq.com/education/

[Accessed 05/02/12]

Scottish Government (2009) Sharing Practices

Available at 

http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/sharingpractice/g/guitarhero/introduction.asp?

[Accessed 05/02/12]