English and ICT

Using the Web – Appropriate approaches

Activity Summary – Critical reading about children on the internet

In helping students to devise successful activities for children to engage with the Internet, we encourage them to grapple with a number of practical issues. These are associated with arriving at an appropriate balance between:

• Acknowledging and capitalising on children’s experience outside school AND support for children who are less confident in using the Internet
• enabling children to follow their own interests AND ensuring that encounters with the Internet are focused
• allowing flexible responses to tasks AND ensuring that children do engage (and engage critically) with texts they encounter

We find that the following articles are useful in presenting different perspectives on using the Internet. Pritchard and Cartwright provide a view from the primary classroom whereas Holloway and Valentine’s work is secondary-focused.

1. Pritchard and Cartwright

Pritchard, A. & Cartwright, V. (2004) Transforming what they read: helping 11-year olds engage with Internet information. Literacy, 38.1, pp. 26 –31.

This describes a small-scale research project which investigated the way that 2 groups of primary children engaged with the Internet during school-based projects. The children’s Internet use was characterised by unfocused searching, difficulties with navigating websites, and cutting and pasting chunks of information and a lack of engagement with the content. We ask students to reflect on why the children’s outcomes were disappointing. Pritchard and Cartwright suggest that more structure is needed to enable the children to read with focus and direction. Other interpretations could see the same results as linked to the children’s lack of ownership over the research process. These different interpretations have different implications for the classroom.

2. Holloway and Valentine

Holloway, S. & Valentine, G. (2003) 'Chapter 6: Cybergeographies', (Pp. 127-152) in: Cyberkids: Children in the information age. London: RoutledgeFalmer.

'Cyberkids' explores 11-16 year olds' own accounts of their own Internet use both in and out of school and provides insights into the way that uses and attitudes towards the Internet are embedded within varied pupil cultures in school. This chapter focuses on the significance of children's online activity out of school.

Having read the articles, we ask students to discuss the following statements, drawing from what they have read and their own experience. They are asked to decide whether they agree or disagree with the statements or to qualify them if they feel this is appropriate:

1. Pupils should be given well-structured tasks when asked to use the Internet.
    
2. Pupils’ Internet searches should be linked to areas of the curriculum that are currently being studied.
    
3. Pupils should not be allowed to copy and paste text from Internet sites into their own work.
    
4. The Internet offers valuable opportunities for children to take control of their own learning – we need to capitalise on this.
    
5. One of the problems of Internet research is that pupils often get distracted.
    
6. The Internet is too risky to use in the classroom. Students may be exposed to inappropriate material (e.g. pornographic, violent, explicitly commercial).
    
7. The ‘digital divide’ causes real difficulties. Some children have more experience than others in using the Internet out of school. This is problematic as some children will rely on those that have lots of experience and never learn themselves.
    
8. Appropriate sites for use in the classroom should be carefully selected by the teacher.
    
9. Some children get bored as they are not able to use the Internet as flexibly as they would at home. 

Having discussed and shared their thoughts on these statements, the students are asked to devise a list of guidelines for using the Internet in the classroom. Here is one group’s example:

• Provide purposeful contexts for Internet use and ensure that pupils are working towards an outcome that is meaningful to them.
• Provide a variety of different kinds of reasons for using the Internet, e.g. purchasing equipment for a specific project, at various stages of research process, to find contacts for a project, etc.
• Recognise the skills of those that have them and support those that do not (e.g. capitalise on peer tutoring, focus on navigational skills or critical reading during guided/shared reading.
• Encourage children to reflect on the proves of Internet searching (e.g. did they encounter any problems? How did they overcome these?)
• Ensure that the classroom ethos encourages the sharing of strategies/skills for Internet use.
• Provide opportunities for children to share/discuss favourite websites and reasons for using the Internet.

Following this, we ask the students to evaluate some examples of practice using the guidelines they have developed. Sometimes, we ask them to reflect on observed experiences in school but unfortunately, due to lack of resources, some students still lack opportunities to observe Internet use in school. An alternative is to draw from examples of practice available through the Internet or within resources which are widely available. The following have stimulated interesting debate:

Other Resources

Further resources include:

The reports published by the national survey UK Children go Online

Material published by the DfES as part of the Primary National Strategy

Material published by the DfES as part of the Key Stage Three Strategy

The QCA scheme of work for ICT at Key Stages 1 and 2

The QCA scheme of work for ICT at Key Stage 3

Articles on the MAPE site