Posted By: Anthony Story Date : 20 Nov 2009 11:25am
An interesting dilemma we faced recently was about developing online resources which could be used in schools. The question was should we build tools which helped teach the curriculum or tools which helped the teachers to teach the curriculum?
An important thing to remember is that there are two audiences; the teacher and the student. Teachers, while being constantly bombarded with new resources and initiatives, are still always open to new and interesting ways of delivering the curriculum and engaging their students – who are the people we needed to reach.
And how do you engage a 15 year old in a topic they show no interest in? For us the answer was through creativity.
If you take business studies for example, chances are a 15 year old might struggle with their interest in supply and demand. So, on one hand, we could create an interactive tool which takes students through the curriculum stages step-by-step; alternatively we could develop a game which, although doesn’t adhere to the curriculum precisely, covers a lot of the right ground.
In developing the Make It website, we needed a website which young people would want to consume to get our message across that manufacturing offered some very rewarding careers, but we were acutely aware that we would have to go through their teachers first, to reach them.
The research we undertook with the teachers was interesting. Teachers want to teach, they didn’t want to be merely conduits of other people’s lessons – whether interactive or not. If we could provide appealing interactive tools with a loose interpretation of the curriculum it allows the teacher enough freedom to be creative themselves in the way they deliver the content.
For us this was great. It meant we could be very creative in our approach to the themes around manufacturing; use media formats that young people like – i.e. video and games – and hype up products they identified with – trainers, iPods and PlayStations.
We could then map out the how the content we’d created related to different sections of the curriculum, and provide teachers with some really creative tools, which support their lessons, but allow them still to do what they do best, which is teach.
Happily our approach seems to be working. A month after launch the teacher resource area is the third most visited area on MakeIt.org.uk with schools all over the UK (and much to our surprise, as far afield as Australia and Japan) downloading the resources we developed.
An important thing to remember is that there are two audiences; the teacher and the student. Teachers, while being constantly bombarded with new resources and initiatives, are still always open to new and interesting ways of delivering the curriculum and engaging their students – who are the people we needed to reach.
And how do you engage a 15 year old in a topic they show no interest in? For us the answer was through creativity.
If you take business studies for example, chances are a 15 year old might struggle with their interest in supply and demand. So, on one hand, we could create an interactive tool which takes students through the curriculum stages step-by-step; alternatively we could develop a game which, although doesn’t adhere to the curriculum precisely, covers a lot of the right ground.
In developing the Make It website, we needed a website which young people would want to consume to get our message across that manufacturing offered some very rewarding careers, but we were acutely aware that we would have to go through their teachers first, to reach them.
The research we undertook with the teachers was interesting. Teachers want to teach, they didn’t want to be merely conduits of other people’s lessons – whether interactive or not. If we could provide appealing interactive tools with a loose interpretation of the curriculum it allows the teacher enough freedom to be creative themselves in the way they deliver the content.
For us this was great. It meant we could be very creative in our approach to the themes around manufacturing; use media formats that young people like – i.e. video and games – and hype up products they identified with – trainers, iPods and PlayStations.
We could then map out the how the content we’d created related to different sections of the curriculum, and provide teachers with some really creative tools, which support their lessons, but allow them still to do what they do best, which is teach.
Happily our approach seems to be working. A month after launch the teacher resource area is the third most visited area on MakeIt.org.uk with schools all over the UK (and much to our surprise, as far afield as Australia and Japan) downloading the resources we developed.
