Primary School ICT Skills Continuum and Peer Coaching

At the recent Australia and New Zealand ADE Meetup, I shared a program and thought I would also take the opportunity to share it here.

Recently my school's Technologies Team embarked on a journey to create a scope and sequence of iPad skills that we expected to see across the different year levels. We saw many benefits to creating this document. Firstly, demonstrating to staff what they could expect their students to be able to do at the start of the year and assist them with their forward planning. Secondly, give clear expectations to staff about what ICT skills we would like them to develop during the year and lastly, to clear up any confusion staff had around what students can and can't do with their devices.

We worked in consultation with all members of the Technologies team and then the wider staff to come up with our finished continuum.

 

The continuum was designed to show the progression of a skill throughout the student's time in the school. While there some device and app specific skills mentioned (as these do fit in with our school environment) we did attempt to make the skills as general and as transferable as possible. Many of our students move onto schools that use different devices and software, so it was imperative that we focussed on transferable digital skills. We also focussed on skills that applied across the curriculum. The Digital Technologies curriculum already exists and we didn't feel a need to include that information here as classroom teachers should already be aware of this and be teaching it in the classrooms.

Peer Coaching

One of the concerns that some of our staff had was their own ability to perform some of the tasks and skills on the continuum. We have a large staff with a significant amount of staff turnover. This means we consistently have a stream of new teachers in the school, with most of these new staff members having limited experience with Apple software and devices. To help maintain the student development of these skills, we begun a process of peer coaching from Year 3-6. Year 3 in particular is important in our school as it is the first year of the BYOD program, which means students have access to their own personal device for the first time. In order to set up good habits and ease the burden on the Year 3 classroom teachers, we developed the iReady Portfolio to help develop the Year 3 skills.

 

The Year 5 students would meet with the Year 3 students for 10-15 minutes once a fortnight to test the students on their skills. If there was a skill that the student couldn't perform, the Year 5 student would teach them exactly how to do it. Upon completing a section of skills, the Year 5 could award their Year 3 buddy with a badge.

 

As this proved successful, we moved the program into Year 4, this time with the Year 6 students as their coaches. This meant that all students in the BYOD program were involved in peer coaching as either a coach or mentee.

 

So far we have seen a positive impact from the program. The students enjoy being a part of the program as both participants and coaches. We have also seen that there is a clear record of what the students can do. It has taken the pressure off of staff to find time to develop these skills and new staff members are able to take more time developing their own skills, without the pressure of having to teach these to their students. We also aim to survey staff later this year to see if the continuum has guided them in the planning and assessment, when they have a clear understanding of their students should be able to do confidently on their device.

I have included copies of the relevant documents to this post.