How was it used?
The 'Far Away Fruit Salad’ resource was used to introduce various Healthy Eating Challenges that the pupils completed over a number of weeks.
Our school is a recognised ‘Healthy School’ and the challenges were part of ‘Healthy Eating Month’ within school.
Pupils had a chance to link this work to data handling, internet research, the human body/healthy lifestyle and animation. Pupils presented work across a number of different areas and topics using a large choice of programs and resources. Some pupils also utilised other resources based on the same theme from the NGFL Cymru website. Pupils also used the resource in other sessions across the month linking to DT (making a fruit salad/fruit kebabs).
Impact and Outcomes
The resource was instantly accessible for the group of targeted pupils to access. It had a simplified design which made it easy for the pupils to understand the information presented and generated a lot of discussion in a group of pupils who are often the last to contribute. Because the resource was so pupil friendly pupils felt confident that they had enough information to start their individual or group projects in the way they wanted to. Because the group found the information presented memorable it had an instant impact on skills: pupils were not worried about the content of their presentation and were, therefore, able to spend more time refining their skills and the quality of their work
Learner Feedback
‘I loved the way the information was so clear – it helped me remember it later and I wasn’t worried about forgetting stuff’
‘I never thought about where fruit comes from before and I was really surprised’
‘I could spend more time on my presentation because I remembered all the things we talked about before. I think my work is much better than before’
Other Resources
Main resource: Far Away Fruit Salad. Also used by some groups: Human Body; Healthy Eating
Pupils had direct access to the resources throughout the project via shortcuts on the school network and Eportal and could use them to gather information or stimulate further discussion in a small group (sometimes with adult support). The accessibility of the resources made it easy for pupils to ‘dip in’ or recap ideas presented in their own time.
We also used Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Publisher, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word , Ript, Windows Movie Maker, Crazy Talk, Audacity, Prezi, Lino it
Lesson Learnt
Previous sessions had been based around resources I had spent time creating myself; mainly because I felt that there were not enough resources of good quality already available. I now realise that I don’t need to spend hours creating things from scratch as there are fantastic resources available to support my teaching available via the site. I also felt that having the opportunity to run a project over the longer term (3-5 weeks rather than a fortnight challenge) meant that pupils had more opportunity to develop ideas and reflect on them. The time scale also gave them more time to work on improving and refining their targeted ICT skills. From now on I intend to plan far more open ended or longer term tasks’ so that pupils have time to allow their ideas to develop in whichever way they choose. I also felt that the children took ownership of their own learning because they were so stimulated by the initial use of the resource. It was lovely to see pupils who would usually choose to just copy and paste information from the internet begin to write their own scripts for animation and design their own clip art characters using just clip art and autoshapes: in the process learning about grouping objects and saving items as pictures for use in other programs. Pupils wanted to develop their ICT so that their work was as good as it could be, which was absolutely brilliant!
