If it's Tuesday, it must be Azuaga!

Tues 08 April 2008

An early rise for breakfast and Antonio met us outside the hotel at 8.00 am.  Today's programme consisted of a two hour mini bus drive to Azuaga for five school visits, lunch, a guided visit of Azuaga and a two hour return journey.

Azuaga has about 8,000 inhabitants.  Their school system consists of one nursery school, one primary school, two secondary schools, one adult education and one special school.

Visit 1 - Aprosuba 10 Special School (Colin Carr)

 

Aprosuba 10 is a very small all age generic special school who use different commercial and teacher written programs to enhance learning and encourage development.  Multi sensory disabilities are leveled through ICT to develop language and speech.

In one example a hyper active pupil was able to use the computer to link specific icons which enabled her to keep on task and make progress.  A second pupil who was only able to communicate through eye movement was, with the support of a teacher, able to select  colours to answer the questions posed by the computer programme.

 

 

 

The school is in the process of transferring to a new purpose built building that will expand their physical space and allow more students to access this vital provision.  On the computer front, the school are planning to upgrade to touch screens to enable greater development.

 

 

After our coffee break in a nearby café - trying out the local sweet delicacies - we walked down the street to our next school.

 

 

 

 

Visit 2 - IES Miguel Durán (Susan Turton)

 

IES Miguel Durán a12-18 secondary school with just over 500 students and our focus was on the use of ICT to teach maths and English.

In the maths lesson, the year 13 students were again sitting two students per computer but the room only had a blackboard for the teacher to write instructions on.  However, he was able to control and demonstrate on the students' computers using gnulinex.  The teacher had also set up a web site that was password protected in lycos and this was used by students to submit digital work.  He demonstrated how students could use two software programs to help solve equations and manipulate data.  The first program was on their computers - WX-Maxima and was used by the students in school.  The second piece of software was online - WIVIS and used by the students at home.

The English lesson proved a big hit with the younger Gateshead teachers.  The teacher demonstrated an innovative use of the projector as she had no white board.  Instead, a large patch of plain wall solved the problem.

The first activity was a revision of a previous lesson where students were given a series of photographs and were asked to give a title and uses sentences (in English) to describe the photos.  Mind mapping software was used to build a bank of adjectives for each photo.

Her main task was based around a scene from 'Sex in the City' and demonstrated the importance of intonation in language.  Students were allocated characters and had to read from the script (displayed on the improvised white board - the wall) in preparation for dubbing the actual scene on the DVD.  After a number of run throughs (and a few mishaps with the technology), the students had a number of opportunities to read aloud the text whilst the scene was being played.  Each time they did this, their language improved.

One of the main problems with using technology in this school was that the students stayed in their room and the teacher did the moving around.  This meant time was lost at the beginning of every lesson setting up and distributing resources.  However, the teacher always prepared a short starter to ensure pupil learning was continuous throughout.

Our final visit before lunch was to IES Bembazar.

Visit 3 - IES Bembazar (S Turton)

Here we saw how ICT was used for the teaching of Art and an actual ICT lesson.

The art/ICT teacher has three main focus areas:-

<!--[if !supportLists]-->1        Language improvement through films and industry - students had to produce their own short movie<!--[endif]-->

<!--[if !supportLists]-->2        Photography - students took and prepared an exhibition of black and white photographs using the school's developing lab<!--[endif]-->

<!--[if !supportLists]-->3        Publicity and marketing - using office software (mainly presentation) to produce marketing for a business.<!--[endif]-->

The ICT lesson proved to be very interesting with two activities going on.

The majority of the class were using Audacity to independently produce and develop their own mobile ring tones.  This allowed creativity on the part of the pupils.

The remaining students were manipulating their own digital images again allowing creativity and independent learning to take place.  These images were combined to produce a digital collage that was used as a background for marketing material.

The ICT teacher later gave an overview of the changes that were taking place and variety of open source resources available on various websites. 

After this visit, we were taken to a local, and highly recommended, restaurant for what we thought was a school dinner.  Big mistake!  It was a Michelin standard 3 course meal with wine, water and beer.  It even managed to surpass the excellent lunch in Badajoz!

After a two hour lunch break we continued with our next two visits.

Visit 4 - CP El Parque (Kelly Lewis and Katherine Calvert)

We visited a preschool for 3-6 year olds, the only one in the area of Azuaga.

It is not compulsory education but 450 children in this town attend. There is one computer in every class and a small ICT suite. This is used to teach the ICT curriculum and for ICT after school clubs.

We observed the ICT after school activities for a small group of five to six year old children. Children used a program called JClick to enhance learning in ICT as well as English vocabulary and memory. The school is very keen to involve parents and invite them to use the ICT suite two mornings a week so they can see what programs their children use at school.  All the students were confident in their use of technology including logging onto the machines and selecting the appropriate software.  They were not in the least bit distracted by our presence unlike the older students earlier in the day.

From here we moved to our final visit of the day.

Visit 5 - CP Miramontes (Kelly Lewis and Katherine Calvert)

This is the only primary school in the town of Azuaga and has 570 pupils (more than twice the size of our average primary school in Gateshead). 

We were welcomed with a regional
dance display performed by 10 pupils (10 year olds) as part of their extra-curricular activities.

 

 

There are 3 ICT suites in the school and one interactive whiteboard.  

We observed an after school ICT club and saw children working on a program called Squeak which combines paint skills and animation.  

The students were eager to complete the tasks and there were definite signs of differentiation through outcome. 

Following this lesson we moved to another group who were using the programme JClick. This program is used to teach 3 units; English, PE and Spanish. The teacher uses this programme to moderate and set tasks relating to the current unit of work.  The children worked through the tasks independently and obviously enjoyed them.

A number of teachers at this school are part of a working party developing resources with JClick and if the Junta is happy with the outcome, the resources will be made available to other schools via the region's website.  As in the UK, the major developmental problem is a lack of time within the working day to meet, plan and prepare the resources.  The group tended to meet after school and work late.  However, they had a positive view of the software and the benefits to the students were obvious and worth the effort.

After our final school visit, we had a very personal (the only visitors) tour of the town folk museum then a walk up to the 16^th century church. 

We had a fabulous day in Azuaga and left absolutely laden with gifts and mementoes of our visits. A number of them have been specially made for us on an individual basis and also included a selection of students' work.  The teaching staff were very enthusiastic and keen to keep in touch.  Ideas passed around included emails between students to develop language skills and writing for a purpose.

The journey home gave us an opportunity to review the day, prepare our reports and look at how we could make best use of all the excellent photos that David has been taking.  We're hoping to produce a video that can be displayed in Dryden and also given to the teachers here as a memento of our visit.

The crowning glory for Lee was Liverpool winning 4-2 over Arsenal!  But even he retired to bed early tonight.  Another long day tomorrow but only two schools.