Improving Whole School Literacy through use of ICT

There are many simple ways in which ICT can be utilised to help develop pupils’ literacy levels across the curriculum. Many of these are adaptable enough to be used at any phase of education and have uses in many subject areas. Here are a few easy to implement ideas:

Webpage rewriting exercises

Webpage rewriting exercises are a simple but effective literacy activity that can be applied to any area of the curriculum. Simply take a web page on any given topic that is far from exemplary. Ask pupils to identify the key faults with the page: it may be inaccurate; have grammatical errors; lack depth or citation etc. Pupils then use their own research to improve the content and / or design of the page.

Pupils can create their own criteria for an outstanding webpage, which can then be used as part of the assessment process. This is an effective method of developing pupils’ understanding of what the strengths and weaknesses of online materials are. They can work as an ideal introductory activity for pupils beginning to make use of an e-portfolio as it encourages peer to peer collaboration and comment and focuses on developing writing in a given context.

A generic lesson plan for this type of activity can be found here.

A webpage evaluation sheet that can be used to encourage pupils to think critically about the quality of web pages can be downloaded here.

Using ICT to Raise Literacy Levels

Webquests

A webquest is a structured online enquiry. Pupils of any age can be given a research activity that ensures that their online searches are tightly linked to curriculum aims. The concept of a webquest was developed in 1995 by Bernie Dodge at San Diego State University and since then there have been tens of thousands of webquests created by teachers from around the world. Teachers can access webquests created for all age ranges and on a wide variety of topics via http://webquest.org/index.php

St Bernadette’s Primary School have written a short guide to using Webquests in Primary Education.

A large number of secondary webquests designed for the UK Curriculum can be accessed via this database.

Partially completed presentations, reports, articles etc

Teachers and pupils are used to making use of writing frames to model written work. Exactly the same idea can be applied digitally. Provide pupils with digital templates, or partially completed files that they can use as a starting point when writing. This helps the pupil to structure their work and ensures that they are concentrating on developing their written work rather than spending lots of time concentrating on design and formatting issues. Where the learning objective is more closely related to design, simply provide the content and allow pupils to focus on that element rather than content creation.

There are ideas for making use of digital writing frames in design and technology lessons available in this guidance.

The National Centre for Language and Literacy provides a number of excellent writing frames on this page.

History teachers can find a selection of activities of this type on this page.

The Staffordshire Learning Network provides a large number of resources that help to improve standards of Literacy through Geography lessons.

Peer to peer communication

There are numerous ways in which pupils can be encouraged to develop their writing and communication skills via the Internet. One example is to ask groups of pupils to review the main news stories of the previous week and to prepare a short news broadcast about these. Recording a short newscast is relatively simple to do via a built in microphone in most laptops or through purchasing of podcasting equipment. Pupil news broadcasts can then be added to the class webpage / blog / VLE and comments about the stories, and questions where appropriate, can be added by other pupils. This ensures that pupils are writing scripts with a specific audience in mind; helps to improve speaking and listening; encourages discussion about contemporary news / citizenship issues and has the potential to enhance peer and self assessment in school. If you do make use of this idea or already do similar activities let us know as we’d love to feature this sort of pupil work on Newsanywhere.

Tags:

ICT

Literacy

Resources