Keywords: social/soft skills, interactions (people to people and people to technology), basic technology skills
My colleague Ms L is currently teaching Year 4 (Grade 3) after working for a few years in the school’s reception program (pre-school). The two of teach the same year level so we sat down for the interview in her classroom during our shared planning time on during 4th period (11:30-12:00) on Thursday, June 3rd while our students had their Mandarin lesson. She discussed the differences between technology use between these two age groups and the importance of play: “In Reception we value inquiry through play. Yes, playing on iPads is a type of play, but it’s through play that children can learn to interact with their environment and their peers as well as appreciate nature. We want our children to go outside and tend to the garden or make mud pies…I think in Reception we only borrowed the iPads to help record discoveries during nature walks, so they used the iPads to take photos. This happens maybe once a month or two. The only daily technology use I can think of is the SMARTBoard, but even that isn’t used too frequently because they’re so young, you can’t expect them to sit for prolonged periods of time in front of a screen. And the SMARTBoard doesn’t allow for multiple students to interact with the board…I have used the SMARTBoard to play music videos, but instead of singing along, some of the students will get this zombie-like expression on their faces where they stare at the screen instead of sing or do the actions.”
When asked about technology teaching practices that could be moved up from Reception to Year 4, Ms L mentioned social skills.
“…I think our Year 4s are lacking in cooperation skills. The other day M*** forgot to charge the iPads after borrowing them so I didn’t have a full class set. The girls were good about sharing, but a couple of the boys were grabbing the iPad from each other and yelling…L** and E*** are both only children, so they only have to share at school, probably. In Reception the expectation is the students share the iPads otherwise they don’t use them…But even with these expectations, students like L** and E*** don’t know how to share then I have to take the iPad away. When the LO (learning objective) is centered around technology, it’s hard as a teacher to enforce this expectation because the whole purpose of the lesson is to accomplish a task or build a skill around technology use…Sometimes I’d rather not use technology, but how else can we complete learning objectives such as developing research skills and media literacy? I think learning how to share technology is something that needs to happen right from the start. If they haven’t learnt to share by Year 4…there’s only so much a teacher can do at this point. Then there’s also pressure to complete learning objectives. We don’t really have time to take away from the curriculum to develop soft skills.”
The other significant area mentioned during the interview was when to introduce technology more prominently into the curriculum.
“Year 2? At this stage they are at least 6 years old and have better fine motor skills and their reading ability is much better. Most apps require students to be able to read, otherwise the teacher has to spend a lot of time helping children sign in and navigate the app. Year 2 could start borrowing iPads but the screen time should be kept at a minimum. Most of the students have Smart Watches or iPads at home, so they have lots of screen time at home…Even though most of our students have devices, they don’t know basic computer skills like turning on the computer or logging in to their email accounts…This year there’s been more urgency to prepare the children for online learning. Luckily we haven’t had to teach virtually. I know I haven’t done as good of a job teaching my students how to login to their email and teams accounts. We only have the ICT lab booked once a week, they seem to forget how to login between each ICT session. Should we have the students visit the ICT lab more often? If we did, which lesson time will we take it out of? This school has lots of specialist classes that we can’t use to teach the core content. We’re teaching two concurrent units of maths right now because we’re running out of time, how would we fit in another ICT session?…I know the Year 6 teachers have been pushing to have the first two weeks of the school year set aside for setting expectations instead of starting off with the curriculum, maybe if we did that we could include learning to login to email and teams accounts.”