In May, around 60 sixth-graders participated in the NMS Media Literacy Assessment trial. The school devised this mobile assessment, creating an interactive quiz on the Berlin platform Actionbound, to assess our sixth-graders’ knowledge of the Internet and of social media, as well as online creation and data processing.
The school’s standards for year 1-10 are written down in the NMS media literacy curriculum, which again are in line with the Berlin Basiscurriculum Medienbildung and – more importantly – the expectations of academia and the workforce. The students were asked about fake news, cybermobbing and the Internet, and were able to create and upload materials., combining crafts, photography and digital media.
The initial feedback ro the media literacy assessment trial was very positive. Many students did quite well and enjoyed it, but nearly everyone asked for more media literacy input from their teachers. Our staff do what they can, but this is a tricky situation; the Senate requires these skills to be taught in year 1-10 (since 2018), yet has not provided Berlin schools with teaching hours or training.
In order to allow up to 20 students to simultaneously partake in this mobile and interactive assessment, we were able to use the school’s own tablets, thanks to the Friends, who agreed to this recent purchase and to IT hero Joseph for installing them in very little time. So – a big thank you to all you parents who are a member of the Friends and who have paid the IT and Library fees, your ongoing contributions are incredibly important for the IT & Media development at NMS!
In August these tablets will be handed out to all classes in year 3, 4 and 6 who have applied for them. As Flex and Year 5 are already working with tablets, this means that practically all Primary classes will have a set of four tablets for their students. NMS has a clear vision of mobile learning, focusing on differentiation and not on a 1-1 scenario for Primary. For the Secondary, we have applied for group sets of tablets and laptops from the school budget, in order to support the increasing number of projects, and project work in general.
Working with tablets allows our individual students access to the Internet, to research, write a blog post on Weebly, create a poster with Canvas or exchange information, for instance via Padlet, one of our favourites. In Math, tablets are useful for practicing certain skills and receiving direct feedback, for instance using the German program Anton. The teachers can also keep track of the students’ progress. For older students, a mathematics program like Bettermarks is great, we are trying to get funding for its use, both in Primary and Secondary. As collaboration and creativity are such important skills in this era of artificial intelligence, some groups have their own tablet for group work, whenever they require this. We generally don’t have issues of students getting distracted by online entertainment or social media, as we simply haven’t downloaded such apps – plus we have a firewall to block certain content.
Any parents who are interested in supporting the work of the IT & Media Development Group, or who wish to contribute in any other way, please contact teacher and Head of IT