Beacon Council status 2003-2004

Use of technology

We have pioneered the development of technology to enhance and support interactive whole class teaching.

The use of the technology itself is not transformational, but in conjunction with changes in pedagogy towards an interactive and dialogic approach to teaching the whole class, the technology has much to offer both the teacher and the pupils.

What is the technology?

A large display screen has long been considered essential if the use of technology is to be embedded in day to day classroom practice across the curriculum.

Now that projectors have become affordable, the technology has become accessible to many more teachers, and the projector is connected to a laptop or a classroom PC located at the front of the classroom.

We have been working in partnership with schools over several years to find ways of bringing the computer from the back of the room to the front, and has been successful in lobbying the educational software industry for a new kind of software that can be used with the whole class as well as with individuals or small groups of pupils.

How is the technology interactive?

It is important that teachers and pupils alike can interact with the software from anywhere in the classroom - making things happen, annotating the display, saving work - without standing in front of the screen and without obscuring the display for some pupils at any one time.

This mobility is provided by a new generation of wireless pad that can be used with a pen from any position in the room. This combination offers many benefits over the more traditional interactive whiteboards, and has none of the whiteboards' disadvantages.

This breakthrough was introduced into this country by schools in Barking and Dagenham and is now gaining ground elsewhere in Europe and North America.

What impact has the visualiser had?

The visualiser is a device that can be used with the projector and screen as a replacement for the over head projector.

Unlike the over head projector however, solid objects can be shown to the whole class in full colour, with a high magnification lens offering extreme close-up views.

Coupled with the classroom computer, any of these images can be instantly captured, and then annotated with the wireless pad. The visualisers have now become an essential component of the interactive whole class teaching technology tool set.

Imagine the formation of crystals in a Petri dish on a screen 8 feet wide; the parts of a flower, a page from a fine art book, a collection of objects demonstrating textures of materials shown at high magnification - all now possible to share with everyone through the use of this technology.

Completing the picture

The local education authority was the first in the country to have connected all schools to the internet back in November 1998. The classroom computers are connected to the Barking and Dagenham Community Grid for Learning Schools intranet.

This is a high speed broadband wide area network connecting all schools, libraries, UK Online Centres and adult and community education and training centres.

Specialist areas on the Grid serve the needs of all secondary subject teachers in the borough with schemes of work, lesson plans, materials and downloadable resources.

The teachers' workload is made lighter, enabling them to focus more on teaching, through a range of online services for schools, such as continuing professional development course booking, IT problem reporting and the purchasing of computer resources.