In her earlier post Sarah gave a great overview of Surinder’s work – here are some more videos.

A year 5 pupil explained to me how to add a hyperlink to an external web page from within his wiki.

The result of about 40 minutes of an unplanned lesson… wow. (This video may take a while to load but it’s worth it! Bear in mind that all of this was planned and carried out by the class. They were told the topic of the book and everything else was left to them.)

Yesterday I went to Crocketts Community Primary School in Smethwick, and met Surinder Nandhra, the winner of the Primary Innovative Teacher award. She’s won this through her work with the school’s learning platform – and I was absolutely blown away with it all.

Rather than look at the limitations set by other teachers, Surinder has taken the “this is what I need to do, how can I make use of the VLE?” approach – and it’s produced remarkable results. And this isn’t an ICT co-ordinator with a group of gifted and talented pupils – she’s a normal classroom teacher, with a large class including 13 SEN students, of which two are physically disabled. These two are as involved as everyone else – one is a member of the school council, and proudly told me how he’d been able to teach other students how to create a wiki of the school council meetings. I sat next to the other, and watched him balance a laptop on his lap while sat in his wheelchair, and sign in to the VLE, create a wiki, and upload information he’d found online to this wiki. This created a page in what evolved into an electronic book about plants, with a page by each pupil, all linked together. I was amazed!

The learning platform is used for everything imaginable – spellings are posted; awards for hard work are announced and published; homework can be handed in online; surveys are carried out with both pupils and parents; teachers share learning resources; progress is tracked; announcements are made – the list is endless. Surinder has also recently broken down another barrier by creating a web page which her class collaboratively work on with a year 8 class from a local secondary school – something which she was told beforehand wouldn’t be possible. A group of her year 5 students told me with huge smiles how they’d had to train the year 8s to upload work to the site – what an achievment!

I could go on and on and on! Here’s a short clip of Surinder explaining one lesson she devised within the VLE – where the children experienced a kind of learning which they’d never have achieved from books.

Videos of the childen working are on this follow on post