A question that is always being asked between educators and parents is if mobile devices should be used in classrooms or not. The British Educational Suppliers Association carried out research and found that technology in schools especially games consoles and smartphones play an important part in children’s education. Rather than have access to a mobile phone, teachers would much rather pupils have access to a games console, such as an NintendoDS, where they can play games such as ‘Suduko’ and ‘Brain Trainer’ (Teaching Times 2013).
Incorporating digital learning into classrooms activities has proven much more effective in today’s society. Sophie Curtis, a journalist for The Telegraph, carried out an experiment in a classroom where the first part consisted of listening to a teacher talk through the themes of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and then following this up by writing her own understanding of it. The second part involved her watching a number of video clips that showed different interpretations from the famous balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, then using the internet to research each theme and interpreting them onto a laptop provided. Curtis wrote that while the first lesson was intense and required her to concentrate, the second was more interesting and at no point during the lesson did her imagination go elsewhere (Sophie Curtis 2014).
In today’s lesson, we learned to incorporate Easi-Speak Microphones into lessons. Our task was to write and ‘I am poem’ and use the digital microphones to record sound clips from the poem. We were to then explore the internet and choose images linked to the words in our poems and add the images and recordings together in a PowerPoint presentation.
Myself and three others worked in a group of four and rather call the poem ‘I am’, we changed in and called it ‘We are’. This was a fun task that I will incorporate in my classroom activities because it gets the children to use their imagination to think about their characteristics following a basic guideline and also incorporates their digital skills by having the ability to upload the voice clips onto the computer.
References:
Teaching Times. (2013). Games Consoles Benefit Children’s Education.Available: https://www.teachingtimes.com/articles/games-consoles-education.htm. Last accessed 29th Feb 2018.
Sophie Curtis. (2014). Digital learning: how technology is reshaping teaching. Available: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/11051228/Digital-learning-how-technology-is-reshaping-teaching.html. Last accessed 30th Feb 2018.
