On Friday 24 and Saturday 25th, the UCL IOE saw the first part of “Developing a Dynamic Classroom” teacher training being held, with a packed room of eager participants. The training opened on Friday with a great presentation from Rebecca Wilson, ICT expert at the UCL IOE, who took us on a journey through various useful programmes, both new and old, highlighting some features of which many are not aware. For example, making use of inserting sound files directly into Powerpoint, or turning your Powerpoint into a video. We also looked at programmes to create sound, presentations, video, and ways to convert between various media.

Next we moved on to looking at mobile technology, in particular the wide variety of educational apps available, and how they can be utilised by both teachers and students. Options for practising talking, maind-mapping, generating discussion, making and editing movies, creating books and comics and practising language were all looked at, with time given to teachers to then practice.

Saturday saw participants discussing ways in which using technology can (and does) assist in learning, as well as considering the problems that can occur when we blindly use technology. Ruan Jingjing from the University of Nottingham, and Mrs Marshall from Long Eaton School, Nottingham, then shared with us their practice from the classroom, in particular the way that a VLE such as Edmodo, and a social network such as WeChat can be used to organise and assess students’ work, create space to practice outside the classroom, and also can provide a platform for students to link with their contemporaries in schools in China.

With some time to practice and discuss inbetween, participants were also helped through setting up and linking their own Google Sites by UCL IOE PGCE students in Computing Science, which offers another way to organise your own work, activities, plans and resources, as well as providing an environment for students to work on assignments, upload their own work and collaborate. We then finished the day reflecting on what was most useful, and what they will be taking back to their own teaching practice and classroom.

Here’s what some of the participants said:

“Excellent presentation of useful ICT resources, plenty of ideas to exploit!”

“It’s a great training for teachers in the 21st century, thank you very much :)”

“I thoroughly enjoyed all aspects of the training; I have found them useful and will be looking into them in detail.”

“This is a very new area in education, we will need sometime to get used to it. To raise awareness is very important; thank you for the opportunity.”