Have you ever noticed that as ICT coordinator you are responsible for a million things around school? The VLE, blogs, website, microphones, cameras, laptops, photocopier(?) and oh yeah, the ICT curriculum. Regular readers will know I’m trying to improve ICT across the whole school and I want to remove some of these minor roles from my day-to-day life. So I’m going to give them to the children.
Kristian Still has a very successful Digital Leaders programme at Hamble College and after a brief chat with him last month (and Chris Mayoh and Dawn Hallybone) we thought about how this would look in primary. So after Christmas I will be inviting children to apply for the role within school, we will even be offering famed writing –civil engineering classwork help service for all people interested. The children will need to fill out a short online form asking why they should be considered and then I will choose and briefly interview them until I have my team. I envisage starting with about 6 children. I will obviously have overall responsibility for them, but I think that some children have shown huge potential and I want to tap into that. So, below I have listed the responsibilities they will have. Most of these will be infrequent or maybe weekly. Most they can do at home or in their lunchtime if they wish. The role is not compulsory and I might not get any applicants, but it will be interesting to see the response.
So what do you do in your school? Do you have a list of ‘silly’ jobs that the children could take over? Or better yet, new jobs that they could take responsibility for?
Digital Leaders will have the following responsibilities:
Website/Blogs/Online
- Uploading new photographs into each year group area of the website
- Editing/adding to some areas of the website
- Converting documents into Flash and embedding them within the website
- Write blog posts for your class and comment on other blogs across the school
- Reset/change password for children that have lost or forgotten theirs (Blogs, Purple Mash etc)
- Helping staff to upload pictures/videos to their blog
ICT Clubs
- Plan and lead ICT club at lunchtimes for 3/4 and 5/6 (1 day each)
- Possibly lead an after-school ICT club
Other
- Change photographs on the TV screen in the reception
- Turn on, and choose, a webcam to play in the hall during lunchtimes
- At times, and with your class teacher’s permission, support teachers across the school when they teach ICT and use new hardware or software
- Organise competitions e.g. a drawing competition in Purple Mash
- Possibly attend events and other schools to share ICT learning
- Attend after-school training for staff and parents – with your parents’ permission of course!
- Trialling new software as required
Mr Addison will:
- Make sure you have enough training and accounts with a suitable level of responsibility to manage the tasks above
- Provide you with software to trial so that you can use it as part of the ICT club
Great idea for developing leadership skills throughout the school. Look forward to hearing how it develops.
We set up a similar group a few years ago at hawes side but it sounds like you are going into more detail Ian! The children absolutely love their role within school, it is key to the use and development of technology and who better to try out the tools they will be using than the children themselves. Have a look at my blogpost http://smichael920.wordpress.com/2009/10/13pupil-voice-at-hawes-side/ hope it is helpful
We use Fronter (VLE) at school and I’ve just started up a Fronter Leaders scheme with some children. Together we sat down and decided what skills/knowledge a Fronter Leader needed to have – almost like a set of QTS standards! It was really useful doing this in collaboration with the children because I had some initial ideas, but they really added to the process. Each Fronter Leader-to-be has a checklist of these ‘skills’ and they have to be signed off by me when that child shows they can do it. We also decided together that a Fronter Leader’s role will be to:
– promote Fronter in their class
– help pupils in their class with technical issues
– help their teacher (and other staff) with technical issues
– feedback ideas to me about what is/isn’t working with Fronter and any other ideas they have
I can see the role developing and evolving as we go, but enthusiasm is at a high at the moment and eventually the plan is to have a couple of Fronter Leaders in each KS2 class. I think giving children responsibilities regarding ICT is definitely the way to go!
Excellent idea, Ian! Keep us posted as to how it goes. Are you offering any extrinsic incentives other than access to software?
They might get a badge…but nope. I don’t think I’ll need to.
I love this idea and I’m not ashamed to say that I will definitely pinch it for my own school. It’s so true that tree are quite a few jobs that could be carried out by a Digital Leader Team and like your school and no doubt every school in the country, there are many children who have the necessary technology skills to succeed in such a role. It will also give them confidence to promote ICT throughout the school and improve their leadership skills. A great idea and one which I’ll look forward to following myself.
Great stuff, Ian: do keep us posted on how it develops…
I guess we’ve been doing the same sort of thing, but in a less formal way: some students maintain the daily newspaper on the public web site, some run the radio station (actually a blog made of mp3 files), and all are made very aware that the capture or creation of content has to be followed by some application – if they take photos or record sound files, for instance – then they have to make sure they’re edited, uploaded and used somewhere. This ‘whole school culture’ approach has, to be honest, patchy results.
I’m with Kevin – definitely an idea worth stealing!
I love this idea Ian and (once again) think I might ‘borrow’ it for using in my own school. I love the fact that it’ll help with my own ICT workload as well as promoting ICT throughout the school in general.
Quite exciting really!
Superb idea. I used to do it (not in as much detail) when I was last working in a school. The kids loved the responsibility and given my time, made afar better job og things than I could ever do!
I am really keen on ICT in school and anything exra I can learn about it would be very interesting for me.
I really enjoy all types of computer work and the idea of learning so many new things really appeals to me.
I also want to be better than my Dad and do things that he cannot. This will be a great surprise to him.
I am keen to give my time and continue with the work after school.
Please consider me for this important role.
“Ian Addison’s Blog
I did an asembly with the other digital leaders telling the children and staff what we do and we showed them a little rowl play.I think they learnt what could happen to you if you tell people your adress.please do not send people your adress!
This website incoured me to be a digital leader.
can any one give me an idea that I can do with the children at school:)?