By Michael Hilkemeijer
High impact teaching strategies for primary school teachers are of particular importance if their aim is to ultimately develop student ICT capability. This is when technology use in the classroom becomes ‘transparent’ and the students in your classroom become so focused on using ICT as a tool to achieve other learning outcomes.
Yet, many teachers still struggle to create ICT activities within context-driven activities that develop ICT capability. It remains a key issue today for many primary teachers.
So below you will see my list of instructional strategies, many of which feature in our accredited online workshop, that outline ICT teaching strategies for primary school teachers who plan to develop ICT capabilities in meaningful and context-driven learning activities.
Download this High impact teaching strategies PDF now
The development ICT capability encompasses a lot more than just the teaching of ICT techniques/skills. The ICT teaching and learning strategies you must use would need to enable you to plan and seek opportunities all the components of ICT capability.
Strategy 1 Setting Goals
In your planning stage, it is essential to determine if:
- You are going to develop ICT capability;
- You are going to support learning in another key learning area or;
- Both.
These are the goals that will help you set your learning intentions. They will relate to the components of ICT capability embedded in each learning activity.
This will also point you in the direction of meeting the national curriculum requirements in relation to teaching and assessing general capabilities such as ICT capability throughout the learning area itself.
Strategy 2 Structuring Learning and Lessons
Along with clear objectives, having high expectations and structured lessons will enable you to build on a child’s use of ICT at home. It is good practice to have an appreciation of the problems which children may face, so that you can have planned instructional strategies to deal with them.
Studies have concluded that successful teachers in developing ICT capability used the following strategy for use of ICT in teaching and learning.
- Whole class briefing on the context and activity.
- A detailed explanation to each group when they were ready to work on the activity.
- Careful choice of pairs to work on the computer together.
- A review of the key points with the group afterwards.
It will also be important for you to:
- Clarify your expectations;
- Focus their attention on what they will be doing;
- Demonstrate key ICT techniques and;
- Generate some ideas on how they might go about it.
Strategy 3 Explicit teaching
When you enable your students to use ICT such as software, then you will need to explicitly need to show students what to do and how to do it.
You will need to make explicit the principles behind the effective teaching and learning of ICT capability. It will be important that you model and demonstrate the best ICT techniques and concepts that the students need to know.
Strategy 4 Scaffolding
Together with the affordances of the environment, scaffolding plays a big role The manipulation of these affordance central to your role as a teacher and the scaffolding you use must be able to bridge the gap between the student’s abilities and the requirements of the problem if learning is to occur.
Strategy 5 Differentiated Instruction with Technology
Differentiation goes hand-in-hand with teachers being accountable for catering to different learning styles. It is a complex area which means the ability to match the level or type of task to the potential level of each child.
According to Smith and Throne (2007, p14-15), there are nine categories of instructional strategies for differentiation in the classroom. I really like this of differentiated teaching strategies as it makes clear the connections between the corresponding elements.
Such ICT teaching strategies are essential every time you plan for your students to use ICT to enhance learning in a subject.