VIEW FROM THE CLASSROOM
View from the classroom
become one of Northern Ireland’s leading grammar schools. Although we were already delivering an outstanding education, we wanted to make sure our young people would be ready to thrive in an increasingly competitive world. So we decided to explore how technology could help us equip our pupils with a full set of 21st century skills for tomorrow’s workplace.
What was the first step in the school’s digital journey?
T
his month, Education Today hears from Aisling Hagan, Director of e-learning at St Mary’s Grammar School in Magherafelt, Northern Ireland, on the school’s innovative approach to building technology into every aspect of teaching and learning, staff development and parental engagement. Already a high achieving school, St Mary’s is now ensuring students are not only gaining excellent exam results, they are well prepared for the next steps in higher education and the workplace.
Tell us about your school
St Mary’s is a co-educational secondary school located in a semi-rural part of County Derry in Northern Ireland. Our 1,092 pupils, aged between 11 and 18, come from a number of feeder primary schools across a wide catchment area. Founded in 1927 by the Sisters of the Holy Family of Bordeaux, the school has grown steadily to
While we were all excited about bringing creative new IT into the classroom, we knew that the best place to start our journey would be to introduce technology to the school through our staff development programme. After all, teachers can only feel confident using technology in their teaching if they are secure in their own knowledge and understanding of the software, devices and equipment they will be using in the classroom.
To build on our teachers’ digital knowledge base, technology became an integral part of the school’s CPD programme. In all our staff meetings and training days, we used new techniques such as digital mind mapping and online brainstorming so that teachers could see the technology in action and identify the best ways for their pupils to develop these skills to support their learning. Having digital advocates on your side helps enormously too. Some of our teachers became Google Ambassadors, and their role was to work with staff to show them what they could achieve through the online resources they would be using in their teaching.
This approach helped our teaching staff to gain a deeper understanding of how they could use technology to support learners right across the curriculum.
How do you use technology to support teaching and learning?
The young people we teach already have well developed digital skills and tend to be very open to trying new technologies, which is a positive starting point for us. So as I see it, the role of the school is to show pupils how they can use IT to help them manage their own learning more effectively.
A good way of doing this is to draw parallels with the business world, which is increasingly
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adopting technology to help people work smarter rather than harder.
Collaborative working through forums, networking and remote conferencing is transforming the workplace, and this can be just as effective in schools as well. Through technology we have built learning partnerships with schools in other parts of the country, and even the world, through live discussions and interactive learning walls.
In the past, if we wanted to get together with another school, it would have involved a long bus journey and half a day out of lessons. Now it is easy for our pupils to share ideas and work together on projects with children from other schools using tools such as Showbie, with minimum disruption and maximum enjoyment. Technology has a great deal to offer students in helping them to become independent learners by giving them easy and instant access to learning resources wherever and whenever they need them. To foster a spirit of self-reliance, we have encouraged our Key Stage 4 pupils to use online materials to support their studies. Pupils can access our custom-made digital textbooks, podcasts and test papers from their tablets. It's a great way to teach pupils how to manage their own information and organise their studies. I’m very pleased to say that the advent of digital resources in the school has seen a welcome reduction in cases of forgotten homework and lost worksheets.
How is technology being used creatively in the classroom?
To engage pupils with the technology they are likely to encounter later on in their careers, we have introduced techniques and equipment which are used in business, industry and higher education. One inspiring example of this is our Key Stage 3 chemistry students who have been using data loggers to carry out pH testing of a range of substances in their practical assignments. Students use the data loggers to record, store and analyse data instantly through a Bluetooth connection while the experiment is taking place, mirroring the way scientists work in commercial or university laboratories.
Before we started using the data loggers, pupils had to write the results of the pH testing in the lab and enter the data in the computer suite
May 2017
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