Connecting Classrooms

From ICT Register Wiki

Connecting Classrooms creates Ripples

In the summer of 2007 I met with the Headteacher’s of my feeder junior school and our secondary school when the result of an informal conversation indicated that we had independently decided to work for the International School Award. As Head’s we felt this would be an excellent opportunity to strengthen the links between the three schools and we could work on various projects together. All three Head’s felt that our children from 4yrs to 16yrs needed to develop their understanding of Global Citizenship. We had an exciting year and we were all successful.

As a result of this successful collaboration we applied to be part of the British Councils Connecting Classroom Project. This three year project develops links from a cluster of schools in England to six schools in the sub Saharan area of the world. It builds upon children’s knowledge of other countries, enables them to have a greater understanding of cultural similarities and differences both with our English schools and with their own African partners. Our application was successful and a representative of our cluster flew to Belfast to make connections. The Belfast event was hugely successful and we made connections with both primary and secondary schools - three schools in Uganda and three schools in Cameroon. The Ripple Effect Cluster was born!

We decided that we would launch the cluster by inviting teachers from both Uganda and the Cameroon’s to England for a week. The following year Uganda and England would visit Cameroon and in the final year Cameroon and England would visit Uganda. It had been agreed in Belfast that when teachers visited the different partner schools we would all get involved and teach as we felt that would break down barriers and enables us all to share good practice.

We soon encountered major problems in maintaining effective communication between the three countries. Both e-mails and landline phone calls were not always working. We knew that if this partnership was going to work we had to overcome this problem or all our children would miss a valuable learning opportunity. We could not rely on the annual exchange visits; it was our role as adults to ensure that we kept going to solve these problems. We felt that giving our partner schools access to our learning platform would help this communication problem.

As an infant school we had been investigating effective ways to engage parents in their children’s learning and we decided we wanted to launch a Virtual Learning Platform. This enables our parents to find out what their children are doing at school, how they can best support them and enables them to work on activities’ together. As a school we have invested a lot of time looking for the best learning platform for us and decided to go with Unservitiy. This platform gives us the flexibility we need, it is easy to use and we are able to make it personal for us. The graphical interface makes the Learning Platform accessible to all our learners of all ages and abilities. It is also easy to create structured learning activities and they provided excellent planning support and training sessions specific to our needs. We will use these facilities to support our communication with our partner schools.

Our partner schools joined us for a week in Horndean – Hampshire. The week was really successful and friendships were forged. We spent much time in introducing our partners to our platform ensuring that we created an area for them to download photos, create a forum or a quiz. During the week we made time to train our friends and make sure they were confident in their use of the platform. Since they have returned home they have revisited and added to their pages.

We are looking forward to starting a forum with them as we all feel this will be an immediate way of building links between the children. Alongside this each partner school now has ‘webcam’ facilities; this will allow observations and face to face conversations between teachers and children. As the time difference is minimal we are planning to have the webcams on throughout the school day, so that our children can compare lunchtimes, playtimes and class activities. This will allow conversations in the future about our schools lives.

This is such an exciting and valuable project; we are at the early stages but our access to technology and in particular our learning platform means that all the children in the project can be actively involved. It will be interesting to see the impact this project will have on our schools.

About the School

Horndean Infant School is a County Infant School situated in East Hampshire. The school initially achieved the NAACE mark award and then subsequently the ICT Mark and has gone on to achieve a 2nd ICT Mark. It has also won the Becta ICT Excellence Award in the Primary Curriculum category. At the school ICT is embedded into everyday teaching and learning. The impact of ICT on the children’s learning is evaluated at all levels through work sampling, classroom observations and year group evaluation. Horndean infants are developing the use of children’s skills audit interviews so they can include the children’s views in their evaluation of ICT. Recently 12 year 2 children worked together to create an International website and won the Buzzwebz competition. Winning Entry