The English Department Website

English Department Information Technology Policy

The IST is wonderfully well resourced with ICT resources which teachers can exploit without the need to teach software, book resources or be hampered by slow keyboard skills

Nevertheless, the mode of working should always be determined by the educational outcomes.

There are many activities in the English classroom better done without recourse to the laptop.

In addition, Handwriting should not be neglected. Whilst one of the great benefits of ICT is the way in which students whose writing is often poorly presented can produce visually pleasing work of which they are proud, the ability to produce good handwritten copy is still highly valued (not least by examination boards) and teachers should encourage students always to use the most appropriate technology for the task

The principal benefits of IT which we seek to exploit are:

For students:

·        learning to organise & link their learning materials. Students should have a portal showing their folders with hyperlinks guiding readers from terms to definitions, between linked documents and to downloaded course guides

·        access to a range of information from the intranet and WWW

·        ease of drafting & editing – for most students the ease of  production is intrinsically motivating

·        the technology to produce a range of texts in a variety of formats

·        greater ease of communication & collaboration

For teachers:

The WWW has created a new form of text which students need to learn to read with critical insight and to create in order to understand the new conventions. Hyperlinks encourage individual selections with each navigation becoming a separate non linear engagement with the text.

Just as Media Studies has allowed students to become sceptical and informed consumers, so English teachers can help students to use intelligently the new texts and make appropriate informed judgements about their effectiveness – in particular, what values are implicit in the text, who is privileged & who marginalized by it? (see Katina Zammit guide to screen analysis Appendix I)

BECTA (British Educational Communications and Technology Agency) focuses on the benefits of ICT under 6 headings (See full article Appendix II)

1.                            Exploring & Investigating

e.g. accessing information, using hypertext to explore texts, reconstructing & searching texts & presenting information visually

2.                            Responding & Interpreting

e.g. annotate or rearrange texts to show implicit meaning, use the internet to gain understanding of social context, access drafts & different versions, explore texts through cloze etc

3.                            Reflecting & Evaluating

e.g. draft work & collaborate, save drafts to explore process, annotate work, access examples of good practice

4.                            Composing & Transforming

Change own texts by word substitution, use multimedia on webpages, merge individual work into a consistent whole, re-present texts for different audiences

5.                            Presenting & Performing

e.g. Email discussion groups, surveys, websites

6.                            Communicating & Collaborating

e.g. whole class shared responses, email conferencing, record images via digital camera

Key use at IST is in:

Storing information & linking files & folders to show connectedness of ideas

Drafting – freed from the drudgery of copying out, students can rough out first drafts, completely revise texts and produce a range of texts with different purposes and audiences from the same initial resources

Critical engagement with texts from concordances or Etexts – looking at patterns, annotating to show stylistic devices, replacing words, phrases & imagery to study effect – especially effective via interactive whiteboard

Scaffolding – especially for early critical analysis

Writing Frames – especially for GCSE Format work

Collaboration – via creation of Magazines, websites and other group work

Use of School Website - Publication & Celebration of student work & easy access to assessment criteria, schemes of work, exemplar work, study guides, Weblinks etc.

Introducing new ways of learning for example Audacity to shrink sound files for MP3 players to help auditory memory or record voice effects for drama or recording still & moving images to allow critical self reflection in Drama & English

Supporting learning through forum threads for students doing extended independent study for example World Literature or EE for IB

NB students need to be constantly made aware of the penalties of plagiarism & the unfortunate effects of uncritical acceptance of texts