Research Students' Annual Conference (RSAC) 2010 - School of ...

Room 3 / Beech Grove
Room 2 / St George
School of Education Research Students’ Annual Conference (RSAC) 2010
24 November, University House, University of Leeds
Name
Email
Title
10.30 – 10.55 Parallel sessions 2
Mike Hickman
m.hickman@yorksj.ac.uk
Digital audio for self-efficacy
This workshop will focus on teacher trainee use of digital audio within an Initial Teacher Education
maths module. Given the need for trainees to develop an understanding of the importance of ‗talk‘ in
the primary classroom and within mathematical problem solving, podcasting/digital audio was
considered the most appropriate vehicle.
Informed by initial experiences of employing podcasting/digital audio to support feedback and
provide additional subject knowledge input, it is now proposed that audio material (recorded and
analysed by the trainees within group tasks) will be used to support problem-solving strategies/selfefficacy
in mathematics teaching. The ambition is for students to not only engage with vital
pedagogy for the classroom but also extend their thinking through more considered investigation of
peer responses to given problems (more than would be possible within the time constraints of a
normal session).
Key questions to be considered include: What kinds of discussions should the teacher be initiating
with children? What counts as a high quality response to such a task? The digital audio recordings
will enable trainees to interrogate their own responses (and, indeed, their approach to problem
solving), informed by work such as Mercer‘s (1995) ideas of cumulative, disputational and
exploratory talk.
Name
Email
Title
10.30 – 10.55 Parallel sessions 3
Kyriakos Demetriou
kdemetriou@gmail.com
Information communication technology: a tool for inclusion in Cyprus
In the 1990s, the philosophy of integration of children with SEN in mainstream schools shifted into a
higher target of the contemporary educational trend of Inclusion. Inclusion portrays a broader vision
of integration emphasising the rebuilding of the curricular supplies in order for them to be accessible
to all pupils as individuals and increases the likelihood that all teachers will have the opportunity to
have children with SEN in their classroom at some stage in their careers. There is strong literature
evidence that Information Communication Technology can be used as an ultimate tool to support
Inclusion and that it can help teachers to differentiate their instruction, and thus, equalize the learning
opportunities and physical access for every single student in the mainstream classroom. In Cyprus,
the single-computer classroom model provides restricted facilities to teachers who face difficulties for
embedding ICT in their instruction due to limited resources. As such, it would be beneficial to
investigate how the single-computer model can be used for promoting inclusion in mainstream
classrooms in Cyprus. My presentation outlines the framework for the study and the questions it
seeks to address.
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