Literacy Matters
Experience, inexperience and ‘unexperience’
Vocabulary, literacy, key terms, what ever you call it in your class you can’t forget it’s importance!
It’s easy to think that when you’re teaching an ICT lesson on the topic of animation that your key words are going to be the following’
- Frame
- Animation
- Sprite
- Character
- Audio
But you’d be forgetting the need to highlight what is often called ‘access vocabulary’ the words that you skip over in lessons, the ones you assume students know!
Here’s an example from my lesson today that illustrates the point.
Year 10 BTEC ICT Animation class. They’re writing up their design work.
One student is commenting on how he’d not used the software we were going to use. He was getting very angry at MS Word and the spell checker, when asked why he said “Its says unexperienced isn’t a word!!”.
The look on his face was one of complete frustration. Now obviously (to you and I) that is not a word, but to him it’s the word he uses so my approach to telling him how wrong he is has to be careful and clear.
I did my best, pointed out that I could see why he’d think it would be ‘un’ but that it’s actually ‘inexperienced’.
He moved on quite happily afterwards but it made me note it down to think more about what I consider ‘Key words’ and what really are the key words!
