Monte Vista ICT Course

On Friday 27th June, the Middle and Senior team teachers went to an ICT course run by Monte Vista Christian School, California. They ran numerous workshops throughout the day about how they incorporate ICT into the classroom. Three of the workshops that stood out to us were: Flipping the Classroom, Digital Diet (global communications) and Visual Language.

In the Red Zone, we love the idea of flipping our classroom. The advise we were given was to take small steps and not to make things too complicated - it doesn't matter if your videos are not too complicated. In the Red Zone, we have decided to ask children with expertise in areas to create a learning tool for the upcoming week to share with others such as a YouTube clip on past tense verbs.

The Digital Diet workshop raised awareness of the importance of global communication and how easily it can be implemented in the classroom. For example, using quad blogs (with 3 other schools collaborating from around the world, using mystery Skype sessions in the classroom (where you are paired with a school from across the world and are challenged to guess where they are from) and pen pal news (where students evaluate a current events news article and share their opinions with another child in the world). We are planning to trial one of the above each term in the Red Zone.

We learnt about the importance of using Visual Language to enhance learning. This was simply the basics of keynote presentations as well as using images that reflect the learning being developed - using one metaphoric image during a lesson can make such a difference to a child's retention of information.

We are looking forward to implementing our ideas in the Red Zone.