Using the Web – Out of school contexts
Activity summary – Kids on the net
- Work in group to read and analyse transcripts of children’s discussions of their Internet use.
- Design interview schedule to find out about pupils’ use of the Internet (and other digital reading and writing) during pre-placement visits.
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Many pupils have extensive experience of using the Internet and students need to be able to acknowledge this when planning to integrate Internet use within their planning. One way of encouraging students to reflect on the value of out-of-school Internet use is to present them with transcripts of children talking about their own experiences.
We use a number of excerpts from an interview conducted with a group of Year 6 children as part of a small scale research project investigating children’s Internet use out of school). During semi-structured group interviews, the children were asked to discuss how they use the Internet and for which purposes.
We ask the students to analyse these excerpts and discuss what these tell us about these children’s Internet use, their relationships with knowledge encountered, and the implications of this for the classroom.
The excerpts prompt discussion of issues that include:
- extensive skills and knowledge developed by children out of school (A)
- awareness of functioning of Internet and common problems (A)
- awareness that texts can be manipulated (B)
- playful use of Internet (C)
- awareness of commercial aspects of internet (D)
- ways in which use has been encouraged (E)
- limitations of school use (F)
- salience of visual features (G)
Excerpt A
- Katy: Load the Internet. go onto Google and that’s like the
- Ella: search engine
- Katy: any search engine
- Katy: and put in www.simpsons
- Ella: or just put in Simpsons, Simpson - search
- Katy: and then just look for... look for one that looks appropriate.
- Interviewer: You say there are different search engines?
- Zak: Yeah – like Dogpile...Google...Different types. So some things you type in what you want to go to and some of them you put in certain details about them
- Ella: so if you don’t know the website you put in, so say you want some certain TV programme or something and say you just type in the name of that programme and it
- Katy: with Simpsons, you might want to go onto BBC first
- Ella: yeah
- Katy: cos they put the Simpsons on
- Ella: so if you put in BBC and then it comes up with a little BBC search engine and you put in The
Simpsons on there, it comes up with proper The Simpsons.
- Katy: The official website
- Interviewer: If I went through Google, I’d get a list would I?
- Ella: Yes- it’s searching for websites that have Simpsons in the title.
- Michael: It doesn’t really work cos once I was searching for The Simpsons and I found something about
mortgage payments.
- Zak: Yeah it’ll be like the name of a company. On Google it says something like this search took 0.2
seconds and we found 300,000 results.
- Katy: It’s normally more than that. It’s like 20,000 million.
- Michael: So just look at the 1st page.
- Interviewer: Why?
- Ella: Cos otherwise the others are just rubbish... they’re nothing to do with it.
- Ella: Usually the first page is the most appropriate thing.
- Katy: The Internet doesn’t really know.
- Ella: It’s just stabbing in the dark.
Excerpt B
My cousin went on their website and got this bit on this snake and, cos he didn’t want to be wrong, he copied it and changed it and printed it off and showed him that he was wrong... he was changing the website... cos he didn’t want to look stupid.
Excerpt C
I drew this circle on a page and then I put a cross in it and I said ‘O look, holy lemon’. So I put ‘holy lemon’ in a search engine and it came up with this site, holy lemon.com, so I went on it and it was this really cool site with games and stuff on it.
Excerpt D
- Zak: Sometimes you get like something like Amazon adverts... like go to Amazon adverts and shop... it just minimises it and you can go back to it.
- Ella: Like you’ve won a big prize ... sign up to our website now and we’ll give you lots of money.
- Gareth: I just minimise them.
- Zak: I just cross them all off.
- Interviewer: You cross them all off because...?
- Michael: They’re all unuseful. They’re just a load of rubbish. That’s what I say.
- Zak: That only happens when I just start on it... there’s like a few pop-ups.
- Katy: ‘You’ve won this – your own smiley face logo.’
- Zak: ‘You’ve won a holiday.’
- Michael: I don’t go on it.
- Interviewer: so why do they do it – why do they put the pop-ups on
- Ella: Because they want to advertise things... and also usually cos they take a lot of money
Excerpt E
- Interviewer: How did you learn how to find your way around a site?
- Zak: I always kind of watched my dad and…
- Katy: ... and they show you.
- Ella: and I watched my sister on the Internet going on all these different sites.
Excerpt F
- Ella: At school, some of the sites are different from the sites we have at home.
At home we have Google but here we have Yahooligans.
- Katy: Have you heard of like the website ‘Yahoo’? It’s for kids. It’s very limited though – you can’t really do much on it.
- Zak: The search things on it – I looked and it didn’t come up with anything.
- Ella: It doesn’t come up with a list; it comes up with one site.
- Josh: It’s limited so it won’t let you on sites that have things that are unsuitable but it also blocks out things that are very useful but just fine to use.
Excerpt G
- Josh: at the bottom, it has Google with 1, 2, 3, 4,5,6,7,8, however many ‘O’s are , that’s how many pages there are... so if there’s 12 pages they’ll be 12 Os: G, 12 Os,
- Katy: Gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
- Josh: If there’s 20,000 pages, it’ll come up with 20,000 noughts. At the bottom there’s a scroll bar so you can go right and left or up and down... so if you go right you’ll see there’s blank everywhere else except for the O
- Ella: G00000000000000000000000000Gle
- Katy: and at the end it’ll say ‘gle’
- Interviewer: How do you know that?
- Katy: Just noticed it
- Ella: we notice weird things
- Zak: Go right down to the bottom to see the whole page and then I just noticed Google with the ‘o’s going off the page and then I saw the scroll bar about that small so I went all the way across
This discussion is used to lead into work on assessment of children’s experiences and discussions of approaches for supporting these children’s further development in the classroom.
Assessment of children’s experiences
In preparation for school placements, Sheffield Hallam University students are expected to complete a number of tasks during pre-placement visits to their school. One of the tasks we give asks them to talk to a group of pupils about their out of school literacy use. This enables students to gain insights into pupils’ experiences beyond the classroom and highlights opportunities to build on interests during their own placement. Linked to the current emphasis on ‘assessment for learning’, this also provides students with an opportunity to encourage children to reflect on their own learning. Design a schedule (or literacy conference) that aims to find out more about the online experiences of the pupils you teach. Here are some starting points:
- What kinds of reading do you do at home?
- Do you have a computer at home... If so,
- Have you ever sent an email to anyone?... Who? why? Do you know if anyone else in your house has sent one?
- Do you ever play computer games? Which ones? What do you like about them?
- Have you ever been on the Internet?
- What kinds of websites did you visit?
- Have you searched for information? What? How did you search?...
 
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