Outram Term 2 2010

I had two really positive days at Outram School this term. There was a noticeable development of a positive attitude, improvement and excitement about the work we were doing from all staff. Many staff members had new teacher laptops that seemed to almost have them singing, they were so pleased to retire their old laptops after years of report writing and lesson planning they were not what they used to be.

Many teachers are using audio recording to meet students’ needs in writing. Writing is the school’s focus for all of their action research projects this year. Stacy is using this both to motivate and support some writers in her class. She observed how powerful this audio recording is for her as a teacher also. When she is marking the children's work she can hear exactly what they have tried to write. I’m sure many teachers particularly junior teachers, have had experiences of having no idea what the students writing says when they come to read the work. This enables Stacy to mark the work and identify what to bring up with the students without having to decode the writing with the student. This avoids a situation that can so often result in the child feeling as though they have failed, as their message is illegible to the teacher. The independence and success the student is experiencing is having a positive effect on their attitude to writing.

Audio as a tool to scaffold students

At Liberton Christian School Alan is working on an Action Research project with students during writing. He has selected some students to use audio recording during the composition of their story. The students will record their stories orally and then play these back while they write this message down. This supports students to be independent writers, separating the tasks of content generation and remembering their message from actually transcribing their story. We also discussed other strategies that effective writers use particularly self-talk. Alan will make up a self-talk sheet to prompt these students to try to scaffold themselves through challenges before appealing to peers or the teacher.

Hermione the Year 3 and 4 teacher is also using audio recording in her action research. She will be recording herself and some selected students reading text and will put these onto her class wiki. The students will be able to listen to these at school and home to become familiar with the text and to independently manage their learning when they are not with the teacher.