Aims and Background:

In partnership with The University of Birmingham, School of Education, Swanshurst Training School came into being in September 2000.

The Training Schools project was initiated by the Dfee in 2000 and involves around fifty schools within England and Wales. All the schools are examining ways to make the initial teacher training experience more effective. Swanshurst School has chosen to examine the way we use ICT in the classroom and the way we train teachers to use ICT effectively. This project is planned to run over three years, culminating in a Conference to be held at the University of Birmingham sometime in Year 3.

Our role was defined in by the Dfee in their Training Schools directory as...

“Swanshurst School is promoting deeper understanding of the role of ICT in teaching and learning, including exploring the ways in which ICT motivates pupils.

The school is engaged in a project to evaluate training, and uptake of new teaching methods relating to the use of ICT.

The findings will be disseminated to all mentors, senior mentors, trainees and tutors in the University of Birmingham Partnership.”

Our intended plan involves working very closely with our PGCE students from The University of Birmingham during their school-based time with us. We will initiate and support a program of lessons within the PGCE students main subject areas. These lessons will aim to achieve and enhance effective subject teaching while incorporating ICT. We will investigate innovative techniques and teaching methods that are made possible by using ICT and evaluate the various outcomes.

 

 

Swanshurst School:

Swanshurst School is a single sex girls school within Birmingham LEA. Situated on the south side of Birmingham, in Billesley. We have 1800 students between 11 and 18 including a sixth form of around 200 students. We are a Beacon School for our work with ICT and ITT mentorship.

ICT is taught in a cross curricular fashion in KS3 and KS4 although the students do have ICT lessons for 1hour a week in year 7 and the equivalent of 40 minutes a week in Years 10 and 11. We have ten networked ICT suites based in subject areas as well as two extensive library based ICT facilities. We also have a separate ICT room which will be used exclusively for our Training School and City Learning Centre activities.

The Training School room has been designed to facilitate the integration of ICT within a number of subject areas. We have therefore tried to make it a flexible working area that can if needed, be easily adapted to meet the needs of the different disciplines. It was also one of our aims to make the ICT unobtrusive, we didn't want another "computer lab". So although we do have 10 networked Pentium III computers we also have a number of lap tops utilising radio networking technology. We also have video-editing facilities.

Here are some pictures of one of the first student lessons this Spring term. Trudi Marsh and Eleanor Langston created and delivered a lesson on the "Terror" of the French Revolution. Details of this lesson can be found in the History subject area.