Case study 3: Branscombe and Farway Key Stage 1 - collaboration between two small schools

Schools involved:

Farway Primary School
Branscombe Primary School

Aims

Our aims for these sessions were to give the children some appreciation of the use of modern technology to communicate visually and at a distance with children from other schools. It was hoped that the children would develop a greater understanding of the benefits of taking turns, speaking clearly and listening. It was also designed to give the children the opportunities to share and exchange ideas with other children, to discover how themes can be interpreted in different ways. I had hoped to see children building relationships with an opposite number.

Curriculum context

Key Stage 1 Science

Planning, research and preparation

The planning for the term's video conferencing was carried out before Christmas (and before I joined the school) and it was decided that the children should look at 'Toys'. The weekly focus was as follows - 'toys we like to play with', 'toys people used to play with', 'toys that move' and 'toys around the world'. Other than these, in the first week we also looked at our lunch boxes, with the focus of healthy eating, and in the final session we invited the children at Branscombe to join us as we sang some seated action songs.

As I was new to the school, I had not been had an opportunity to prepare for these sessions, so I was taking my lead to some extent from Annabelle, the Key Stage 1 teacher at Branscombe. We had a brief planning meeting prior to the first session and rest of the sessions were planned via a weekly telephone conversation. For the sessions looking at toys that people played with, the children spoke to the parents about toys which they had played with and then brought some of those toys to the session. In the session which talked about toys that move, the children were able to draw upon what they had made and learned from a science lesson on pushes and pulls.

The video conferences

When the video equipment arrived at the school before Christmas, the children had had some sessions when they talked to the children at Branscombe School and had a chance to become accustomed to using the equipment. They also had a link with 'The Ocean Institute' in California.

This half term the focus for the video conferencing was toys. The class was divided so that the reception and Year 1 children were video conferencing for one session and the Year 2 children the other. This gave us group sizes of eight for the reception and Year 1s and six for the Year 2s. They tended to be sat in a row on chairs with a second row of children sat on the floor in front of them. Any resources that they needed they either held or placed on the floor in front of them. The other half of the class was taken off for their library session.

Session One: Whole class

Lunch boxes
Although this session included all the children, there were actually only four children who had lunch boxes. This resulted in these four children being the main focus of the session. Our focus was data handling so we were comparing what we had in our lunch boxes and counting up how many of each thing the two classes had. We talked about healthy and unhealthy foods, compared the number of children having packed lunches to the number of children having school dinners and what effect the class sizes had on our numbers. The children were not very confident at speaking and asking questions. They also took a while to realise that they had to hold their objects still in order for the other children to be able to see them clearly. We wound up the session by telling the Branscombe children about our lunch boards which the children use every day to say whether they would like packed lunch or school dinners.

Session Two: Reception and Year 1

Toys we like to play with
Unfortunately we were unable to carry out this session as Branscombe had technical difficulties.

Session Three: Year 2

Toys we have in our classroom
Prior to this session the children had chosen their favourite toys or construction kits from around the classroom. It enabled the children at Branscombe to see what we had in our classroom and to appreciate that resources within classrooms are not all the same. The children became quite animated when it was their turn to talk about their toy, especially when it was something that they had made from a construction kit. They still do not appreciate the need to speak to the camera and hold up their object so that it is clearly visible.

Session Four: Year 2

Toys our parents played with
Again due to technical difficulties we were not able to carry out this session.

Session Five: Reception and Year 1

Toys our parents played with
Prior to this session we (the teachers) decided that Farway would talk about toys our parents played with whilst Branscombe would talk about toys that moved and that the following week would swap over. In this way we thought that it might give the children a) something to support them when they were planning to talk about the same subject and b) something to reflect upon if they had already talked about the subject themselves and could compare what they were hearing from the other children. Although the children had spoken to their parents about their old toys, not all of the children managed to bring in examples so again some of the children were not as active in the session as others. They enjoyed talking about the old toys and realised that they had to be quite careful with some of the toys.

Session Six: Reception and Year 1

Toys that worked by pushing or pulling
This was the second session where the children were alternating the subject matter. The idea that having split the information covered to give them more support did not seem to work very well. Despite this the children were happy to contribute to the video conference and it appears that the children are learning to take turns. Provided that each turn is no longer than two or three minutes, the children sit still and listen. The questioning is improving although still with a lot of teacher support.

Session Seven: Year 2

Toys that work by pushing and pulling
In this session Annabelle was unable to lead the children at Branscombe so Angela Crawford took this role.

My children were keen to demonstrate their toys but have not yet learned that they cannot move objects quickly when video conferencing as they cannot be seen by the other end

Session Eight: Whole Class

Shared songs
Branscombe shared a game with us that they had learned, which is traditionally played in the Gambia. We chose to lead a singing time which the children were all participating in very enthusiastically and we felt that there was a stronger link between the two. It led to a discussion about the slight variations of the songs that we sang - 'a wise man built his house upon the sand' and 'in a cottage in a wood'.

Session Nine: Year 2

Puppets
In this session we decided to explain to the children at Branscombe how we set about making our glove puppets. I gave each child a couple of lines of text to act as a prompt, and the children each took it in turns to speak and relate the next step in the process. However, the children were not able to think of their own words so struggled to read the prompts. More rehearsal beforehand would have avoided this happening.

Technical issues

I found that setting up the equipment was a little time consuming and it also meant that other sessions had to be finished earlier as the equipment had to be set up in the classroom and could not be set up during lunchtime due to the nature of the video camera being sited on top of the television and being at risk of falling should anyone accidentally knock into it. During the sessions I managed to freeze the screen and due to lack of any training I did not have the knowledge of how to release it.
We needed to be aware of other electronic equipment interfering with the sound (if it was placed too close). I also found that any movement affected the quality of the sound.

In the session where we shared some singing, the slight delay in the receiving of sound became more apparent. The children did not seem to notice but I was aware of how we were not in time. As I became more confident, I experimented a little and discovered how to zoom the camera in and out and move it around the room. Following the session with Angela Crawford I learned a lot about the use of the camera, especially how to move the distant camera. However, once I had elected to move the distant camera I did not seem able to move our own camera again. I expect that this was also due to inexperience and lack of training. There was a lot of waiting time between questions and answers which caused the children to be a bit restless.

Evaluation of learning outcomes

Simply from using video conferencing the children have gained some understanding of the use of modern technology for communication purposes. They began to appreciate the need for taking turns and to speak clearly and listen. They were able to share their ideas although they didn't appear to think much about the different ways that they had interpreted a theme. They didn't build any particular one to one relationships although the way that the sessions were run there was not much opportunity for this. As the sessions were held in the time available for humanities this constituted our humanities work so outside of these sessions we only had a little time for discussion.

Ideas for potential development

My personal feelings are that perhaps our Key Stage 1 children need to be interacting with children who are quite different from themselves. They are very insular children, coming from a farming community they do not have the ability to interact very well. Perhaps if the link was with a greatly contrasting school there would be enough difference to fire the children up and get them interested in children living a completely different lifestyle. However whilst conferencing with Branscombe School I would like to work on trying to get them to build relationships between individual children which they could develop using email and then towards the end of term we could either visit Branscombe School or they could visit ours and meet in person.

Lucy Mumford,
Farway Primary School

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