Embedding ICT across the curriculum

Weather Watch Activity Day - Tuesday 11th December 2007

What happened in Wickhambreaux village on the night of October 15th 1987?

Background Information

During the Autumn term the Years 3 and 4 children at Wickhambreaux primary school researched and learnt about “The Great Storm of 1987.” To help answer the questions below the children took part in a special activity day.

• What was the Great Storm?
• What effect did it have on the lives of those living in the village?
• What did people do after the storm?

What we did

The staff at Wickhambreaux was supported on the day by the one of the County Geography AST’s and the Cluster ICT AST. During the morning the children (working in mixed ability groups) watched archive video clips of the event before walking around the village looking for evidence of storm damage. Back in the classroom after break they used the evidence gathered to prepare questions to ask local residents.

After lunch four local residents visited the school to be interviewed. The interviews were recorded on the class laptops using Audacity. Following the interviews the children shared what they had learned about the “Great Storm” with the ASK Geography Advisor, Ian Coulson, and drew pictures of the storm on the class laptops.

Sharing our learning with others

Before writing about the event the children replayed the interviews and created “word banks” containing adjectives and terms that accurately described both the weather conditions and the resulting storm damage. Set the challenge in their reports, to describe the event accurately, the children had access throughout the writing sessions to the recordings stored on the class laptops. Reflecting on the writing activity, the staff commented, that access to the laptops had helped many of the children to successfully sequence events and add additional background information.

To assist the children with the task the Cluster ICT AST spent two mornings in the school. During this time the ICT AST helped the children i) record their work as MP3 files using Audacity and ii) use the playback facility to edit their work by checking punctuation (commas, full stops and paragraphs) and using simple and complex sentences to convey meaning. Finally to conclude the project, the ICT AST showed the children and staff how to publish their finished news reports on the “Making the News Weather Watch” web page for parents and members of the local community to view.

P. Bracegirdle

ASK Hands on Support Consultant
January 2008

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