Quality of pupils' learning
It is central to effective teaching and learning to recognise the importance of motivation as a factor underpinning a pupil's participation in a learning task. The motivation provided by using ICT tools and
Pupils will readily
respond where they can see the relevance of the tasks and studies to their
lives and to the society of which they are a part.
The communication part
of ICT encourages interaction and collaborative working and teachers should
capitalise on the opportunities that these features give them.
In Argyll and Bute a group of primary schools developed a joint project called 'Planet X'. This interactive project involved a range of media but was principally based on computers linked by e-mail, with other links such as fax and telephone forming important communications avenues. The project focused on fictional groups of space travellers who had landed in a range of locations on a hostile planet. Each group (an individual school) was allocated a different area of the planet with very different characteristics of hostility, such as a poisoned atmosphere, hostile creatures, freezing temperatures, etc. It was the job of the groups to communicate with each other and devise plans to overcome their individual and collective difficulties so that the group as a whole could survive. Each group possessed some specialist survival equipment although this was usually of use, not to them, but to another group on the planet. The whole project was geared to promote the use of ICT to facilitate communication, and resulted in positive collaboration and the deployment of a range of other skills across the 5-14 curriculum. The obvious enthusiasm and application of the pupils and their teachers was a marked feature of this initiative.
Report of school visit