Case studies Dartford Technology College

Louise Ellingham, ICT Teacher & David Ellin, Modern Languages Teacher

Dartford Technology College is an all girls school and specialist technology college based in Dartford, Kent. The school teaches students aged 11 to 18, and has 830 pupils.

Background

One class in year 8 participated in the Webit competition, it was set in ICT lessons, lasting 45 minutes per week and involved a whole class of 26 students. The project was delivered over 7 weeks.

The children were motivated by being involved in a Channel 4 competition. From the start we sold it quite heavily on this, as we have got a very 'televisual' group for children. The more serious we were about it, the more interested students were in becoming involved.

Our Webit project

We began by introducing students to Webit and encouraging them to think about ideas for their website. The top ideas were put to a student vote, the winner was 'endangered species'.

Then we moved onto demonstrating FrontPage to the students; instructing them on how to create a web page, and add tables and images.

Students were divided into four groups to make the management of the competition easier:

• Group 1 was involved in researching endangered species
• Group 2 sourced images and created animations
• Group 3 was responsible for sound and audio

Next we focused on creating paper-based designs for the endangered species website, conducting research in the library and on the Internet and hands on learning in FrontPage.

Students were involved in gathering content and images for web pages. They were encouraged to use copyright free images. Most of these were found online and were clipart images. One student decided to create her own animation of a teddy bear using a programme called GifAnimator. Students were asked as part of their homework to continue work on activities they had been involved in during each lesson.

A week to go and the website was tested for bugs but in the rush we didn't have a chance to spell-check the site. The finished site was sent to Channel 4 and we waited for the winners to be announced.

What we got out of Webit

It was a fun way of introducing students to a new package and it wasn't tied to the curriculum so students had the flexibility to create their own project. It gave them a real sense of ownership and pride in the work they created.

The students built their skills very quickly, which is always noticed with children working with IT. You show them once, you show them twice, it's done and they go away and start to use the technology. Demonstrating FrontPage to Year 8 students worked well. We don't normally start teaching FrontPage until Yr 12 but now we also teach it to Year 10 students.

Tips and advice

Year 8 students were not as patient with computers as an older year group. They were not used to computers crashing and having errors. Older students appreciate that computers aren't perfect!

Technical glitches made the project difficult at times. We fairly early on realised that we had to get the technical staff involved.