Norwegian Delegates Visit Wallace

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On Tuesday 28th April, The Wallace High School staff and pupils welcomed a group of twenty visiting Norwegian teachers to the school.  The visit had been requested by the University of Ulster who were facilitating a tour for the group who, as part of their staff development were visiting Ireland to see how other schools use ICT to support teaching and learning.  The teachers were from the Pedagogisk utviklingsleder School in Oslo which, like Wallace, is a leader in the pedagogical use of ICT.

Ann Sørum Michaelsen from the school was recently featured on the BBC programme Click, about her work http://annmichaelsen.com/2014/03/22/bbc-click-visits-our-school/and she has been at the forefront of ICT-based innovations across Norway.

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We were therefore very pleased to be asked to share our own innovative practices with them.  Mr David Cleland (Vice Principal) began by providing an overview of our ICT strategy over the course of the last 9 years, charting the development of Wallace’s trail blazing ICT provision to date.  Dr Jane McMath (ICT Coordinator) then outlined the iPad one-to-one initiative which was, at the time, unique in Northern Ireland schools including an amusing account of how the ICT strategy team ended up snow bound in Edinburgh during one of their research expeditions.

The floor was then given to three of our pupils: Olivia Aughey (Yr8) showed how she used the basic apps of Numbers, Keynote and how mind mapping apps can be used as an effective revision aid, Zach Benson (Yr10) then demonstrated how he uses the VLE ‘My Big Campus’ to access resources, notes and quizzes and to participate in class discussions and finally Stacey Burns (Yr12) skilfully presented how she uses the Garage Band app for GCSE music and GCSE Pod for her French studies.   A few of our guests also had the opportunity to visit some classes and experience first-hand the use of ICT in our teaching and learning in the school, talking to teachers and pupils about their experiences.

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The Norwegian group expressed their appreciation and admiration for the ICT provision in the school and in particular how eloquent and informed our pupils were and it is hoped that we will be able to establish more concrete links with the Pedagogisk utviklingsleder School in the future.

Last modified: March 8, 2017