Teaching Generation Z

Well, the school has released me fom my classroom teaching duties to spend some time sorting out teacher issues/ questions with our ActivBoards. Part of the deal is getting to go along with my bosses, Jo and Mary to this EDC presentation by a teacher, Alison Sutcliffe. The full title is "Visual texts: a journey of discovery by our Year 2 class." This came out of a research grant and Alison if explaining how the use of visual texts is totally different from their use. She talked about how our kids spend more time viewing than reading - she spend some time talking about the Disneyification of their content and how narrow their range is. (Certainly made me think about what my own two boys spend their time watching!)

She talked about using her interactive whiteboard to explore the text "Custard the Dragon" and the role colour can take in a text. Challenge and complexity were the key elements she measured the students' progress achievements in powerful recognition of literacy/elements of visual texts. This was mainly an exploratory activity.

Once she'd addressed the various challenges that some of her "focus" students (research terminology), Alison started describing a unit of work focussing on aspect - she used hero Web pages and a book, "Just Another Ordinary Day" where the students drew pictures to demonstrate their understanding of aspect. Now I know Alison was talking about this in the context of research, but I think my own class could easily benefit from a focus like this to extract more meaning from any texts we examine. Just a footnote about the ICT tools used - Netscape (Composer, I assume) which I used back in 1999 before I got the hang of FrontPage and Safari which is the Mac standard browser. She points that Macs are limited in terms of software for an interactive whiteboard. She also talked about the fact that a SmartBoard is touch sensitive and kids have to adopt a new way of holding the pen. This is not an issue with our ActivBoards (not all interactive boards are created equal!)