Giving Children a Voice
For me, one of the most exciting effects of the new age of web technologies is its ability to give children a voice. I’m not talking about pupil voice where pupils are asked to evaluate and give feedback related to school. I’m not necessarily talking about giving learners a voice to talk about what and how they have been learning.
I’m talking about giving children opportunities to flex their personalities, shape their identities, think creatively and communicate across their entire network of friends.
As a consequence, supporting an in depth program of E-Safety becomes of paramount importance as it would be irresponsible to open a whole host of possibilities to children without supporting their understanding of appropriate use. Equally, we should not be ‘filtering the world away’ blocking anything that vaguely fits into a set of automatically flagged types of website.
The most recent example of children’s voices in our class as been in the use of Prezi. Using a free educational account, our class used it to present on specialist areas of Egyptians. Hardly revolutionary, but the mere fact Prezi is web based and the children absolutely loved using it led to a completely child led snowballing effect. A couple of days after watching each other’s presentations, a couple of children asked if they could use Prezi to do their homework. I said “yes, you don’t need to ask to use it, it’s there for you”. Over the next few days word seemed to ripple around the class and every time I went back onto the account to look at the homework, more children had created Prezis. But they were not on homework. Far from it. We had Star Wars, a wedding, rugby, space and a variety of animals:
Prezi is just one of an almost unlimited choice of tools that can be used to not only support children in their learning but give them the opportunity to find their voice. Even then, there are fantastic ‘hidden gems’ to uncover such as the short poem in the example Prezi by Holly below.
I hope that from this post, the screenshot and the example Prezi, it will encourage teachers to investigate and explore technologies to use in and beyond the classroom to help give children a voice.
