Week 9: BYOD, low-resource schools, and chatty students!

Today we had a guest lecturer, Camilla, who graduated from our Degree in 2016 and now works in a low SES school and showed us how she navigated being in a BYOD situation.

Camilla’s school use a sort-of BYOD system in that the students are asked to purchase cheap Chromebooks, since everything she does with them is browser-based. This allows her to get what she wants to do done without having a gigantic financial hurdle in the way.

Camilla’s style of teaching relies heavily on the development of online material for her students to navigate in increasingly independent ways as they get older. I particularly found this interesting because she actually developed this system out of the need to keep her class engaged and working when they wouldn’t stop talking! Had my prac school access to cheap laptops and internet, I think this would have worked splendidly for my year 8’s.

Camilla also pointed out to us that this sort of online work needed to be scaffolded and introduced slowly as she reminded us that Year 7 was a huge leap in structure for young people. Her examples seemed to suggest this sort of a progression:

Beginning of Year 7: teacher centred (they’ll behave for you anyway!), introduce online submission using simple worksheets incorporated into the program. Slowly add things like longer responses or using linked programs (Flat, Soundtrap, etc.) as the year goes by. Use the PPT format over an actual website since this means that students can’t get lost navigating around a webpage.

Year 8: Using “band groups” rotate students on varied 15 minute activities that do not need to be in sequence. Only ever a limited number of people doing practical work at a time (so people can hear one another!) Using a spreadsheet on the board the “blue line” highlights to students which activity they should be working on at any time. Online submissions and activities scattered throughout. Types of activities (e.g. learning a song, listening, etc.) are revisited multiple times in a term with 4 tiers of activity sets.

Year 10: Activities are organised by activity type: listening, comp, performance. Each activity contains 3 bodies of work that make up 3 checkpoints.(total of 9 checkpoints per term). Checkpoint is made up of all pieces of work required in each section, and all pieces of work are marked at the due date of the checkpoints using a 0-3 rating. (0=non completion, 3=awesome). An assessment notification is therefore given out at the beginning of term for all 3 checkpoints. This system gives students the freedom to select the order of their activities.

While I respect this system and really love the freedom and responsibility it places on the students, I wonder how much I would enjoy it! I think it requires a lot of time and dedication to implement this sort of teaching in the classroom and I wonder how long I would last providing the same material each year. Then again, I am yet to know the immense pressures of teaching so perhaps it will be as much a relief to me to have this system as it seems to be for Camilla. Perhaps I would do a half-and-half and do a bit of both?