Determined Not to Let Technical Glitches Get the Better of Her, PGCE Trainee Helen Got

Whizzy experiments

Determined not to let technical glitches get the better of her, PGCE trainee Helen got stuck in and found that using ICT creatively can work wonders.

As an eager and wide-eyed trainee teacher, I came into my second placement with an arsenal of new ideas and a bucket load of enthusiasm. We had had a number of sessions using Teachit’s ‘Whizzy Things’ at university and I’d had a few ideas of where, when and with whom they would be of most use. Having almost relied upon PowerPoint in my first school placement, I decided that I needed to use ICT in a more creative and interactive way. After all, no student wants to die a slow death by endless slides.

Once in my new school however, I soon realised that this would be harder than I had anticipated, as having no interactive whiteboards rather hampered my grand plans! Not to be disheartened however, I persevered and decided to “practise” using my newly acquired Year 7s as unwitting dummies (pardon the pun!). As part of their bi-weekly literacy sessions, I chose to use several of Teachit’s interactive flash resources (through the digital projector) as starters, asking students to identify correct positions for various forms of punctuation [Bingo!, Changing meaning with commas, Punctuation starter] and having fun with prefixes and suffixes. The lack of an interactive whiteboard didn’t, in the end, make any difference, although it would have been nice to have them up at the board doing their own thing. But they clearly enjoyed sitting at my laptop and taking control just as much, if not more!. As I grew in confidence, and with the learning objective ‘To explore how meaning is conveyed in poetry’ in hand, I also had my mid-ability year 8s creating their own poems from poems - a class haiku from excerpts of Craig Rainer’s ‘A Martian Writes a Postcard Home’ using Teachit’s magnet - much hilarity ensued.

Students loved playing about on my computer, being ‘the chosen one’ to sit at the desk and take charge. More importantly, using the resources allowed them to work together to pool ideas in a fun and creative way before moving onto try out their own.