How can ICT support the early learning goals?

How can ICT support the early learning goals?

At our recent Learnanywhere Conference we were asked by a number of delegates about the ways in which ICT and VLE’s can be used effectively with Early Learners. Some of the issues were ones that we’ve encountered and thought about in the past: how do you make a VLE accessible to pupils at all ends of the age spectrum, for example. However there were a number of other questions that were asked by delegates which suggested that there is a need for ideas and good practice to be shared. In this post we’re simply offering a few suggestions in relation to the ways in which ICT in general can be used to assist teachers of Reception and Key Stage 1 classes to help learners hit the objectives of the Early Learning Goals and KS1 requirements.

First, a reminder of what the Early Learning Goals are:

Early Learning Goals

By the end of the EYFS, children should

Source: The National Strategies section of the Department for Education website.

These suggested are obviously just the tip of the iceburg, and we’ve not (yet) covered all of the Early Learning Goals – we’d be delighted to hear of your innovative uses of ICT to help achieve each of these goals – please send your thoughts to ideas@webanywhere.co.uk or post a description of your idea as a comment on this post.

Suggestions:

Continue to be interested, excited and motivated to learn.

Learners of all ages can be engaged through the use of age related online games, quizzes and activities. We’re well aware of the fact that there are more ‘good’ resources out there for older learners and have started to create a range of resources aimed primarily at the Early Learners. Initially these are focussed on Numeracy and Literacy and are ‘kid friendly’ in terms of design and the content is closely matched to the curriculum for Reception and Key Stage 1. See this page for the first examples.

Be confident to try new activities, initiate ideas and speak in a familiar group.

Building the confidence of young and often very shy / insecure learners is often very difficult to achieve, especially when there will be some more vocal and confident youngsters in the class. ICt can be used to develop this confidence in a number of ways. In your VLE you could have a forum that simply asks for learners to post ideas. Each idea can be rewarded using the inbuilt rewards system – encouraging learners to add ideas frequently. Similarly you can post a series of activities onto your VLE and allow learners to choose which type of activity they want to use. So long as the focus and end result of each activity type is the same, the result will be that you learn more about their preferred learning style and encourage them to try out new ideas – and this could easily involve combining the ICT activities with non ICT tasks.

Speaking in front of peers is often really difficult to persuade younger learners to do. A simple method of achieving this is to record Guided Reading sessions. These can be played back to the group and positive feedback given or posted onto the VLE. This makes pupils more familiar with the idea of other people listening to them and offers a simple method of formalising assessment of these reading sessions.

Maintain attention, concentrate, and sit quietly when appropriate.

Use timers that are built into Interactive Whiteboards, or online timers such as this one as prompts for ‘silent time’. A tool that has worked very well with older pupils in terms of focussing attention is to use a random name picker during Q&A sessions. The idea being that pupils have no idea who is going to be asked the next question and will as a result remain more focussed. See the Classtools.net random name picker for a great example of how this can be done.

Respond to significant experiences, showing a range of feelings when appropriate.

Having found this difficult to achieve with Secondary pupils myself I’m well aware that this can be a really difficult area to deal with at any level. A very simple example: thinking of the recent Tsunami and its aftermath in Japan. This obviously is something that is huge and a current affairs issue that younger learners will find difficult to comprehend. Use child friendly news footage and reports to briefly introduce the idea and then use a collaborative wall, such as wallwisher, to record the immediate reactions and thoughts of pupils. Alternatively simply annotate an image on an interactive whiteboard with the pupils comments and reactions.

What uses of ICT can you think of for these or other Early Learning Goals?

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Early Years

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