Ways forward with ICT: developing literacy
Presenting texts and supporting writing with ICT in
Year 2
The school
The first school which took part in this
project has nearly 200 pupils from three to
nine years. Almost 60 percent of pupils
receive free school meals, a figure which
has risen steadily from 34 percent four years
ago. A recent OFSTED report commented
that it is “a successful school with many
strengths”. Results of standardised tests
taken by the younger pupils in the school
show that a very high percentage of pupils
have low attainment in early reading skills.
By the end of Key Stage 1, however,
attainment is broadly in line with national
expectations
The teacher
The teacher of the Year 2 class which was
involved has been teaching at the school for
fourteen years and usually teaches in Key
Stage 1. She is the school’s IT co-ordinator
and has her own computer at home. Before
the beginning of the project she used it to
support her work: for example, by creating
worksheets and redrafting the school’s
policy statement for ICT. She developed her
own skills through the support of LEA
courses and trying things out on her
computer at home.
“The Education Technology centre runs
courses and there is an IT co-ordinators
meeting which I go to every term.”
The pupils
When assessed at the beginning of the
Autumn term by a standardised reading test
a number of pupils were achieving below
what might be expected for pupils of that
age. The pupils also completed a ten-minute
writing task as part of the initial
assessments. The amount written was very
short with little evidence of awareness of
sentence construction, reflected in the lack
of capital letters and full stops. In addition
the range of vocabulary was narrow and
there was little descriptive writing. The main
connective used was 'and'. Few action
statements used any verbs other than 'went'
or’ saw'.
Two pupils from the class using an alphabetical list
to help them with their writing
The aim of the project
She thinks that ICT is important not just for
the skills pupils learn, but for what if offers
in other areas.
“It’s important and getting more
important, the way things are now. I think
it can support other curriculum areas well.”
She is always keen to improve her teaching
and sets high standards for herself as well
as her pupils.
“I always feel as if there’s something you
could do better. I don’t think any lesson is
ever perfect, is it?”
The aim of this project was:
• to develop pupils’ reading and writing
skills
• to support the literacy hour with activities
incorporating ICT.
The focus was decided by the class teacher
and her head teacher.
“In consultation with the head teacher, we
decided we would like to concentrate on
literacy, with the literacy hour in mind.
We’ve had problems achieving good results
in writing, so we thought we would like to
improve the children's writing...”
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Ways forward with ICT: developing literacy
The teacher’s choices
The aims of the project were to be achieved
in two ways. The first was through
supporting the pupils’ writing. The teacher
chose to use Clicker (Crick Software) to
support the pupils’ reading and writing
skills. This was particularly to take
advantage of the speech feedback in Clicker
combined with a talking word processor
(Talking First Word/Microsoft). This
supported their word recognition skills
through the word grids when the pupils
were composing text. The talking word
processor also helped them to re-read and
improve their writing.
The pupils drafted writing at the computer
with the support of the word grid which
spoke the words selected and inserted them
into the word processing program. The
reason for this was that the teacher wanted
to help their writing composition though
shared and guided writing activities. The
word grid provided structure through the
words the teacher chose to place in the grid
to support the pupils’ writing. Speech
feedback from the word processor
supported pupils in re-reading their own
writing for sense and punctuation.
The second aim of the project was for the
teacher to use ICT to support her work with
the whole class in presenting and sharing
texts, and in teaching whole-class word
level work.
The teacher decided to use the computer to
present texts to the class in the whole-class
teaching and plenary phases of the lesson.
She used presentation software (Powerpoint
/ Microsoft Office)to help the pupils identify
the appropriate common spelling patterns
for vowel phonemes in texts, as well as to
teach specific word endings and for some
word level revision work. To do this she
used slides to present stories. At the end of
these presentations she added some extra
slides to teach or to revise some word level
work which she had identified that the
pupils needed. The feature of the program
which enabled the teacher to present word
endings, such as ‘-ing’ or ‘-ed’, by having
them move across the screen to make new
words, was particularly helpful in focusing
pupils’ attention.
The head teacher in the school was
particularly supportive in this part of the
project by providing some extra time for the
teacher to work with him, and with the
project staff, to learn how to use the
program. In addition, the teacher had access
to a computer outside of school to work on
the presentations.
Developing writing skills and ICT
skills
The teacher arranged for the class to make
two visits to clusters of computers, as she
has only one computer available to her class
all of the time.
Two pupils from the class learning how to use the
word grid with a word processor at the University
On the first occasion this was to introduce
and practise the skills needed to use the
writing software. This was partly so that
they would be able to achieve the English
objectives in literacy lessons, and so that
she could focus on teaching another group
of pupils. In addition, she arranged for
other adult support to be available in the
early part of the term to consolidate their
skills in writing with the computer when
they were back in the classroom. Again, this
was to ensure that pupils learnt the ICT
skills they needed so that they could focus
on the literacy objectives.
The first visit was to a cluster at the local
University where pupils were introduced to
the word grid program and each produced a
short piece of writing about themselves and
their school. Back at school the pupils had
further adult support in class with writing at
the computer to consolidate the skills they
needed to work independently.
The second class visit to the LEA Education
Technology centre was about half way
through the term. The purpose of this visit
was to develop an extended piece of writing
about a story which was presented to the
class using presentation software. The
talking word processor ‘read’ a passage to
the whole-class and the pupils identified
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Ways forward with ICT: developing literacy
words which the computer “could not read
properly”. They also decided where they
thought punctuation should be placed in a
prepared passage from the text. The
Education Technology centre had the
facilities to present the text using a television
screen so the pupils could see it easily and
for all of the pupils to work on their writing
immediately afterwards on the computers
which were available.
In the writing session which followed, the
pupils used the speech facility on the
computer they were using to listen to their
stories as they re-read what they had
written. The pupils were also given an
alphabetical dictionary mat for their writing
which had been created from the
presentation. This was a piece of A4 paper
which had been prepared by saving the
presentation as a text file and sorting the text
alphabetically. Pupils referred to the
dictionary mat to help them spell words
correctly which were not included in the
word grid on screen.
Presenting texts
After this visit to the LEA Centre, the
teacher prepared another story to present to
pupils back in school. The head teacher uses
a laptop connected to a TV monitor to make
presentations to parents and governors. A
computer based in the school’s library was
also positioned so that the whole class could
see and read from the screen together.
and an improvement in punctuation and
elements of the story structure, such as the
use of connectives.
These improvements suggest that carefully
planned and structured ICT activities can be
part of an approach which improves pupils’
reading and writing skills. The teacher used
the ICT activities as part of her broader
literacy teaching, and was keen to integrate
the activities into the literacy hour where this
was possible. The improvement suggests
that this approach was successful.
Developing this approach
In developing this approach in the following
term, a group of pupils used Powerpoint to
create their own book which was then
presented to the class. They used a story
setting from their reading and re-described
the events and added their own illustrations.
The printing options within the program
enabled an A4 sized class book and mini
versions (using the 6 slides per page
printing option) to be produced easily. A
few examples of word level work for
revision were included in the final slides of
the presentation and were clearly enjoyed by
the pupils.
The Night Sky
Written and illustrated byClaire, Andrew
andDean
The title slide from the pupils’ presentation
The teacher presenting a text to the class using
Powerpoint
The results from the standardised
tests and writing activity
The initial reading test showed that pupils’
scores were below expectations for their
age. After two months of work, the pupils’
reading ages had improved by an average of
almost seven months. The repeat of the
writing task also showed significant gains in
the amount that the pupils wrote (on paper),
Future plans
The teacher is keen to extend her knowledge
of the capabilities of the word grid program,
such as the facility to have linked grids, and
plans to attend a course at the Educational
Technology Centre to extend her knowledge
and skills in this area. Developing
Powerpoint presentations of whole stories is
time consuming and whilst it has clear
benefits the teacher felt that it was
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Ways forward with ICT: developing literacy
something she could develop on a termly
rather than weekly basis.
“They certainly enjoyed it, and it was a
different means of presenting the book to
the children, but it did take a lot of time to
produce.”
She felt that developing word and sentence
level work with the presentation slides
would be more practical for routine use.
Presenting the pupils’ work and developing
guided writing on screen is another option
which the teacher thought could be pursued.
Features of ICT
The teacher took advantage of some of the
features of ICT for her own benefit and
recognised the development in her own
skills and confidence. She identified some
particular skills which she had been able to
use in her teaching:
“Adjusting page layout and printing,
because when we were using the scanner
and Powerpoint, there was the chance to
change things around and present them in
different ways. Saving text and images to
use in other software packages, too, I was
really proud when I did that. I had to go
and show everybody.”
This reflects some aspects of the capacity
and range of ICT which allows teachers to
present text in a variety of forms and allows
text and images to be combined easily. In
this situation, the presentation software also
had the capacity to present information on
screen or in a variety of printed formats, as
well as exporting the text to a word
processor.
Saving the text from the presentation to print
out alphabetical lists for the pupils to use in
their writing or cloze passages for group
activities is part of a further function of
provisionality which the teacher exploited.
The pupils made use of this function of ICT
when they redrafted and improved their
writing at the computer.
to ‘read’ their writing so they could improve
it was an aspect of this interactivity.
Summary
The teacher was able to use ICT effectively
to support the development of pupils’
reading and writing skills. This was
specifically to help them develop redrafting
skills using speech feedback, and in using
presentation software to read a text to the
whole class. These activities were
incorporated into literacy lessons. However,
the teacher ensured that pupils had
opportunities to develop the IT skills that
they needed in the visits to the computer
cluster. In addition, using ICT enabled her
to develop other resources for groups of
pupils to used away from the computer. Her
ICT skills enabled her to make decisions
about how she could use ICT effectively in
her preparation and in her teaching.
Further reading
Hartas, C. and Moseley, D. (1993) ‘Say
that again please: a scheme to boost reading
skills using a computer with digitised
speech’, Support for Learning, 8, 1: 16-20
A section of the Teacher Training Agency’s
Needs Assessment materials for Key Stage
2 teachers
Assessing your needs in
Literacy, looks at grammar and punctuation
and is available in booklet form and on CD
rom (TTA tel: 0171 925 3700).
Pupils checking their writing with speech feedback
from the computer
Pupils also benefited from the interactivity
which the speech feedback offered them.
Their selection of words in the grid was
confirmed or corrected through this
feedback. Similarly, the computer’s ability
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