Digital Media Theme 2
By the end of our Creating Images Literacy Unit, the first core element of our Digital Media Theme, the children had created their own ‘hit singles’ complete with CD Covers.
As part of this process they established their own band identities by creating a shared logo.
By focusing on teamwork and leadership skills, despite minor ‘creative differences’, all the groups overcame any disagreements they had. They then had the opportunity for their band to ‘play live’ and identify skills they would need to be successful. We used Wii Music for this and the children identified skills such as listening, timing, rhythm, teamwork and empathy. The last of these was important and we discussed the ‘ohhhh Brriiiiiaaaaaannn’ problem when poor ‘Brian’ made a mistake, talking through how he felt and what the rest of the band could have done to help him more rather than criticise him. To their credit, the class realized very quicky how they could have been in ‘Brian’s’ position and that working together and supporting each other was the only way to succeed. This ethos was then carried forward for the rest of the theme.
It was then time to switch our focus to the Year 4 Persuasive Texts unit. We started the unit looking at the main features of persuasive texts, focusing on posters and persuasive letters. The children identified what persuaded them and discussed why, creating a list of persuasive features. We discussed the bigger picture (they would be writing to record companies to sign their band, writing to their fans to persuade them to buy their single, creating posters advertising their gigs, creating a TV advert with a voice over). Many ideas came from this fantastic post on the Consolarium website.
To develop my own teaching, I am really trying to build significant Talk for Writing opportunities and deeper peer assessment into the children’s learning at the moment as they clearly make the learning process more overt. For example, the children created their own pitches persuading a record company to sign them. They performed these in front of the class and evaluated them. Subsequently, they went off in pairs to underline clauses and words that persuaded them. They then used the shared success criteria, on display throughout the theme, to discuss and write a positive comment and next steps on each other’s work. There is a great blog post here by Tom Barrett explaining how he has used Voicethread to develop peer assessment.
Recently I have also looked at how to further support target development. I have modified how I mark writing so that in the margin, if a child attempts to add in what their target is (e.g. dropping in a clause) they put a ‘T’. I will then put a circle, triangle or square around it like a traffic light, telling them if they have used it correctly. I have always encouraged the children to use the same system to self assess each peice of work they do against the lesson’s success criteria and I do the same next to theirs which they can use to evaluate the accuracy of their self assessment. I think it’s important to separate effort and attainment during feedback so I put a number inside the circle, triangle or square which indicates their effort level and is linked to a class reward system.
Another element of the theme was to create band t-shirts (art printing skills). This was clearly a highlight for the children and if I do the theme again I will definitely increase the amount of opportunities for Art and also Geography as these will give more balance to the Literacy heavy theme.
Finally, we slipped in few days at the end of the theme to create Narnia film trailers (which was at the expense of their band promo films) it worked really well last year so I thought it would be a great way of assessing their persuasion and ICT skills. We will be making the long trip over to Bradford to the National Media Museum in a week’s time, participating in a TV advertising workshop. I’d recommend it hugely, the children and parents from last year absolutely loved it and several have taken their children back there since.
I’d love to hear people’s opinions on the Digital Media theme as well peer assessment, target development and anything AFL focused that you think is worth sharing!
