DMZ1130-0809

Researching Multimedia in Education

Tutor: Andrew Youde

Mini Projects Assignment

Student: u0870621

Nick Jackson
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u0870621

Current Teaching

I am currently employed as Head of ICT in a high achieving 11-18 secondary school

in York. I have just started my second year at the school and have previous
experience in a similar position, at two other schools/colleges in England. In addition,
I was a main scale ICT teacher in my NQT year. Other related experience in
education has involved teaching Maths and Oral English on a voluntarily basis in
India; teaching part-time evening ICT classes to working adults and ‘silver surfers’;
examining; contributing to commercial revision guides; and special needs assisting.

My present employment, although largely concentrating on the needs of ICT as a

subject in the school, is beginning to shift towards the whole school and the role that
IT plays while at the same time involving LEA and legislative factors. Having had
exposure to a variety of schools, both through employment and work with various
LEAs, I am being utilized increasingly for the professional advice I can offer. The
school I work for has a Specialism of Maths and Computing. This, in conjunction with
the current climate of ICT upheaval, sees me heavily involved in issues of curriculum
change, Learning Platforms, cross-curricular mapping and modelling.

Current Attitude to LT

Learning Technologies, in my opinion, are potentially tools that teachers and

learners can use to improve their performance. I am enthusiastic about various
applications that offer enhancement to teaching, learning and/or assessment. As to
whether they actually deliver in these respects is dependent on a number of factors.
There are issues of accessibility, applicability, flexibility and of course at the core of
any aspect of teaching and learning- people and planning.

I believe that Learning Technologies are only as useful as the teachers or learners
who use them and without consideration of short and long term implications, can be
very limited in their success. With the myriad of technologies on offer and arguably, a

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chequered history in terms of implementation, the introduction of Learning

Technologies has to be carefully planned and the use well managed.

Development Ideas

I have had exposure to a wide variety of multimedia and e-learning tools but am
often confined by subject demands or cannot easily see a great benefit to their use. I
am approaching this course with practical ideas and have a number of avenues that
have potential for development:

Learning Platforms
As previously mentioned, my employment currently involves investigation into
Learning Platforms. The school I work for has important decisions to make in this
respect and there will be a need to develop whatever application is introduced to the
school. This can then be championed both in and out of the school.

Using Learning Technologies at Key Stage 2

I have started working with a number of feeder primary schools and looked at uses
of Learning Technologies in a number of areas. An example of this is a recent
project discussed with one school for setting up and using Blogs to diarise events
relating to one of their themes in Year 3 and 4.