It's alright to be bright

It's alright to be bright

This is the name of a new campaign launched by the National Association of Gifted Children. We all know how kids hate to be thought of as "boffins", so the idea is to raise awareness of how nice it is to be bright by organising or taking part in various activities, which culminate in an awareness day on Friday 9th May.

I love this quote from their website:

Are you ready to see if you are as bright as a 10 year old?

You can send off for a pack of materials, which I have done, but this has also made me think of the plight of bright children who are being bored into submission in their ICT lessons, or at least not being stretched. So what kind of things can the educational technology teacher do to raise the stakes on a more long-term basis?

I've addressed this problem to a large extent in my seminal work, "Go On, Bore 'Em: How to make ICT lessons excruciatingly dull", which you can purchase right now from Lulu. But before you rush off and buy half a dozen copies (it makes a great birthday present, and is better for you than Easter eggs at this time of year), here are some more ideas that I have tried to good effect.

If you want to show secondary (high) school teachers or trainee teachers what can be achieved with ICT, take them to a primary (elementary) school, or at least make them aware of what kids at even Reception level are capable of doing. Here is a conversation I had in a secondary school after the Head of Geography had shown me around.

Head of Geography: So what do you think of the database work we're doing with our 14 year olds?

Me: I think it's brilliant. In fact, I thought it was brilliant when I saw similar work being done by 9 year olds last week!

OK, that's my style, which may not be yours, but the point is: tell it how it is, and show it how it is!

Find out what the pupils in your classes do in their spare time. Here's another conversation I had in a school (funnily enough, with another geography teacher).

Geography teacher, having come into a lesson where I was supporting a teacher with her class of 13 year olds: Hey, Terry, could you show me how to create a website for the geography department?

Me: Certainly. But why not ask Valerie over there (Valerie was a pupil)? She has been running her own website for two years now.

What would be the point, in an ICT lesson, of Valerie having to sit through a lesson on creating websites? She ought to be helping the teacher take the lesson!

Think of what you think might be a difficult problem, and then make it more difficult. You might just get it right.

Ask the pupils themselves to think of their own solutions to a real-life problem. In my experience they will either come up with some ingenious solutions, or realise that they don't know how to put their solution into practice -- and get down to the business of solving that particular problem.

Think out of the box. I hate that expression, but in this context it's useful. Why is it that so many ICT lessons involve solving "problems" like adding up the scores of basketball games, or working out the number of seats you have to fill in a theatre to break even? There has to be something a bit more interesting than that kind of stuff.

Get classes of pupils to help you deliver ICT training to other teachers. I have done this, and it worked brilliantly. The teachers loved it because they had one-to-one tuition, and the kids loved it because it made them feel important and valued.

In your own mind, redefine what you understand by the term "bright". One girl I taught, who was always being chucked out of lessons for misbehaving (but not my lessons, I hasten to add), and who was in a lower stream, was absolutely brilliant at teaching ICT to younger kids. And not just trivial stuff either, but spreadsheets.

For me, the bottom line is this: children always rise or fall to the level of your expectations, and if you set the right conditions in your classroom, they will exceed your highest expectations.