C. The MIICE outcomes related to the abilities and attitudes of learners
4. Shared planning/Organisation
This relates to learners' ability to work in a variety of modes (individually, in small or large groups, class) making best use of the teacher and the learning resources in the class, school and beyond, and showing a problem solving approach and the ability to break down a project into constituent elements
Here is a number of illustrations from schools and education authorities all over Scotland of each of the 4 components. In each case there is one or more related capacities associated with A Curriculum for Excellence
4. Shared planning/Organisation: working in groups
Friockheim Primary School (Angus) nursery class are using Microsoft PowerPoint as part of their talking book project. The outcome of the project will be a presentation on the interactive whiteboard and a book with an accompanying CD. To create the book pupils take home the class 'friend' Eeyore. The school provides them with a digital camera and in turns they can take pictures of Eeyore's adventures. Back in the class they are assisted by the teacher, Karen Kennedy, and P6 pupils from the school, who regularly work with the children in the nursery class, to add captions to the photographs and record their voices in PowerPoint
Create a 'talking book' using a digital camera and PowerPoint
"peer tutoring by the P6 pupils has worked well with a little additional support from the teacher" (Karen Kennedy, nursery teacher at Friockheim Primary)
A Curriculum for Excellence
- Effective contributors: work in partnership and in teams
Paul Manley teaches a composite P5/P6 class at St Angela's Primary School in Glasgow. He and his pupils have produced a pop video about the school and the local community as part of a citizenship project. The theme of the video is 'How to communicate with young people', and it has won a national competition
"the pupils met the social objectives of the project by working well in a group, independently of a teacher" (Paul Manley of St Angela's Primary)
A Curriculum for Excellence
- Responsible citizens: develop informed, ethical views of complex issues
John McPhee of Argyll and Bute Council speaks about some of the innovative ways in which they have explored the use of this technology to get round the considerable distances within Argyll and Bute (72 seconds on audio)
Video conference applications (national priorities website)
"Previous experience of video conferencing showed us that really there were no limitations in the way video conferencing can be used. You could use it almost in all aspects of the curriculum. The main focus in the past was on the primary curriculum - the 5-14 Initiatives. We had very good examples of pupils working with other pupils and shared activities on-line. We had good examples of staff who had a particular expertise within a primary co-operative of cluster working with other pupils and other members of staff within other schools"
A Curriculum for Excellence
- Successful learners: independent and collaborative learning
- Effective contributors: resilient
Lesley Allan, also of Argyll and Bute Council, moved from being the head teacher of a small island primary school to being a QIO with responsibilities for fostering video conference use (164 seconds on audio)
"In the very small and remote primary schools very often we're maybe only sending 1 or 2 pupils from P7 to high school in Oban. Obviously that means they have to board through the week in the hostel and sometimes for the children in the more remote islands they have to stay at weekends as well. So, they are away from home 5 or 6 weeks at a time. (And) we felt it was very important for these children and their parents that they should feel they had built up a relationship with the other children they were going to be staying in the hostel with, as much as possible"
A Curriculum for Excellence
- Successful learners: independent and collaborative learning
- Effective contributors: working in partnerships and teams
4. Shared planning/Organisation: working with the teacher
A teacher and children in Walker Road Primary School in Aberdeen use computers and drawing software to design a house; the prompts and any discussions are conducted entirely in French (172 seconds on video)
ICT and creativity (national priorities website)
A Curriculum for Excellence
- Successful learners: learning with technology
- Effective contributors: creating and developing
Neil Woodcock of Jedburgh Grammar School is a regular user of PowerPoint. Listen to Neil's presentation to the Scottish Borders Masterclass ICT event in May 2005 about some of the ways in which he uses PowerPoint to help to teach (371 seconds on video)
"I'm a visual learner; I'm a technical teacher; I like doing things with hands on; I like seeing pictures and things. I like maps. If you want me to go somewhere, if you give me some printed instructions, no good. Give me a map; I can handle that"
A Curriculum for Excellence
- Successful learners: learning with technology
- Effective contributors: solving problems
4. Shared planning/Organisation: making the most of learning resources
Yvonne Cairns is teaching an English grammar lesson to her P5 class in Deerpark Primary School in New Sauchie (Clackmannanshire). In the first part of the lesson, pupils are asked to identify verbs, adjectives, nouns and proper nouns using a passage from a 'big book' version of The Wind in the Willows. In the second part of the lesson, the language exercise is extended using ICT. The pupils type in an extract from the book and then change the colour of words in the text to show which part of speech each represents
"ICT encourages them to work more independently while also having fun" (P5 pupil at Deerpark Primary)
A Curriculum for Excellence
- Successful learners: use literacy, communication and numeracy skills
A teacher in Lismore School conducts a recorder lesson with children all over Argyll and Bute using a video link (196 seconds on video)
"OK. Now, are you ready to start? It starts on the fourth beat of the bar; so I'm going to count 1, 2, 3 and then you're going to come in; left hand at the top of your recorder; you're starting on G, there's your note. There's G - everybody got that. Just make sure you see your fingering. That's it. Well done. Absolutely smashing"
A Curriculum for Excellence
- Successful learners: learning with technology
- Effective contributors: communicating in a variety of situations
A teacher in Ardnamurchan High School uses a whiteboard for web sketching (26 seconds on video)
"Sketching - and it shows them, a step at a time, how they go about the process. Now, again, this supplements normal lessons, and so on"
A Curriculum for Excellence
- Successful learners: applying learning in new situations
Ross Angus of Lasswade High School was involved in the development of a teaching resource on design with IKEA which was shared with all Scottish secondary schools. Ross and 2 of the students from Lasswade High School explain the teaching and learning materials which were developed with IKEA (186 seconds on video)
"This one works through, or allows the pupils to select a product - from 40 from IKEA. They can look at the image, they can then answer questions and they can do what we call a re-design, a small assignment whereby they're given a task to actually re-design the product"
A Curriculum for Excellence
- Successful learners: applying learning in new situations
- Effective contributors: solving problems
Rhona Goss of Monifieth High School speaks about practicalities of using computers for learning which teachers have to confront (111 seconds on audio)
"I think we've been learning as we go; there's been a lot of areas where I think we have fallen in to the trap of thinking: now we've got the computers, that's it, we can do it. And as we've started, especially to do more project work and open-ended work, we've realised that they actually need a lot of support to use the ICT. And we have done a fair bit of work where we've started to look at the way they develop their research, so using writing frames to start the project off, helping them to think through where they're going to find the information, that it's not necessarily only ICT based, that they can use books, they can use other media as well"
A Curriculum for Excellence
- Successful learners: independent and collaborative learning
- Successful learners: reasoning and evaluating
- Confident individuals: being self-aware
Roisin McNulty of St Margaret's Academy in Livingston articulates the benefits for learning of the use of the DigitalBrain VLE which is being trialled in that school (59 seconds on audio)
"This is one of the main advantages of the system is that I do believe it will cater to the needs of a lot of pupils - cater their individual needs. Because on the virtual environment we have such a variety of activities - we've got challenging worksheets, we've got things on grammar. At the other end of the scale we've got things that are helpful to pupils who find it difficult - easier exercises- and there's also the fun element games in it too"
A Curriculum for Excellence
- Successful learners: independent and collaborative learning
- Effective contributors: communicating in a variety of situations
Four older students from Tobermory High School speak about the benefits of the use of ICT within their school, including video conferencing and whiteboard use (70 seconds on video)
"Well I'd never used video conferencing before, so it really progressed since I'd used it last, which was in second year; and they were just talking to us about rocks and we were asking them questions and they were telling us about them and showing us, with the camera, close-up pictures and things like that. Well it was definitely a progression from the last time we'd done it; I found it just amazing to see; I didn't realise it could be such a good picture and especially when you're talking about something like, when you're using chemistry or even if it's like art or something, you used to be able to show it and they had a really good focus thing so you could focus right into certain parts of the rocks to show just all these little streaks of colour and things; so you got to see quite detailed pictures, which is surprising"
A Curriculum for Excellence
- Successful learners: learning with technology
Julia Hannah is a speech and language therapist operating in Argyll and Bute. Listen to her experience of the benefits which video conferencing brought to keeping in touch with her child cases, and how the technology allowed the development of treatments for particular children (164 seconds on audio)
"Video conferencing started for me with case conferences; and it started with case conferences in Tiree. I was the speech and language therapist responsible for the children in Tiree, and the psychologist was based in Dunoon, and the children were at the school in Tiree. So we set up a 3-way link for having case conferences because sometimes it was difficult for the psychologist and myself to be there at the same time"
A Curriculum for Excellence
- Successful learners: learning with technology
- Effective contributors: resilient
Mark Pentleton of the Partners in Excellence project (East Ayrshire, North Ayrshire and Argyll & Bute) speaks about some of the ways in which ICT helps to bind their languages project, involving 1200 pupils in 29 schools (106 seconds on audio)
"Our immersion visits abroad involve school visits, street questionnaires, cultural activities, but we've also tried to incorporate the ICT element into our immersion visits. So, this means that whenever we have a group abroad, we are constantly updating the website from abroad and it means that parents and family and friends back home can see exactly what the students are doing, but also the students who are at home in class, they also have the opportunity to read diaries of the students who are out in France or Germany or Spain, which are in the foreign language and therefore they can actually use these materials in class for their learning"
A Curriculum for Excellence
- Successful learners: independent and collaborative learning
- Effective contributors: communicating in a variety of situations
4. Shared planning/Organisation: a problem solving approach
P6 pupils at Duns Primary School have been 'buddying' with children from the P3 class to develop aspects of language. Watch a report on their collaboration on the book 'Katie Morag and the Two Grandmothers' (195 seconds on video)
"Debbie Higson's Primary 6 class have been using the Digital Blue camera for some time: to write book reports and to make films about primary science and about poems. They have now started to teach children in the Primary 3 class how to use the camera"
A Curriculum for Excellence
- Confident individuals: relating to others and self-organised
- Effective contributors: taking initiatives and leading
A science teacher at Balfron High School uses the interactive whiteboard to simulate a 'difficult' experiment (160 seconds on video)
"I also recognise this as a fairly classic experiment done since the year dot. We set it up as a demonstration, we did the first part for measuring the number of bubbles which are evolving from the plant by moving the lamp slowly further away to decrease light intensity. It's a difficult experiment to do in class and get valid results for a number of reasons: it's hard to control the heat produced by the lamp, and other things"
A Curriculum for Excellence
- Successful learners: reasoning and evaluating
- Successful learning: applying learning in new situations
- Confident individuals: solving problems
Ian King of Kelso High School has developed a system for online book reviews, as part of the school's overall strategies to get young adolescents to read more books. Watch Ian's presentation about the initiative to the Scottish Borders Masterclass ICT event in May 2005 (279 seconds on video)
"I felt that this could be made more interactive and also felt that getting the review available for other pupils to read would be a good idea, as reading reviews in advance also helps them choosing what book they want"
A Curriculum for Excellence
- Successful learners: creative and independent thinking
- Effective contributors: taking initiatives and leading