The constraints of time...

I have now been at my placement school for 2 weeks. Each week my Year 1/2 class is entitled to one 45 minute session in the school's ICT suite. In week one, ICT was forgotten as the class needed to complete other tasks in the time slot. In week two I saw exactly why my Class Teacher dreads this session more than any other during the week.

Image taken from here

There are 16 computers in the ICT suite, meaning of course that the children must share a computer with a partner. This is not too much of a problem. Generally the pairs are made up of one year one and one year two. However by the time the children are in the suite, on a chair, quiet, and logged on to a computer, nearly 15 minutes has passed. The next task was to get the children to search for a website on google. I am not convinced that this is the best way to do this, surely there must be a way of putting a link on the system for the children to use. The children first had to get on to google - this was not too difficult. The next problem was to get everyone to search for the same search term, and then to get everyone to click on to the correct link. In the end, the Class Teacher and I had to go around all of the computers and do it for many of the children. Of course this is not allowing the children to develop their basic ICT skills, yet if we hadn't done this they would not have actually reached their final task.

Finally, once the children were on task, all they were actually doing was flicking through a slideshow about a book that they had been reading. Not many of them could read any of the text on the screen, and they all simply wanted to know where the games were.

My challenge for the rest of my placement is to try to think of an activity the children can do in this short session which is suitable to their age and ability but also allows them to learn something. As well as this, the basic skills of logging on, and typing need to be incorporated into the learning objectives of the lesson, and these are skills that these children still need to master.

This is expected of all other subjects in primary schools, so why does ICT seem to be the exception?