Part 2:
Teaching With ICT

a. Structuring Lessons

In the case study we are dealing with, the teacher has a fairly regular pattern to his sessions. He tends to start with a teacher-led introduction to the session, outlining the area for coverage in the session. In an hour-long lesson, he might restrict himself to just one aspect of the work - in this context perhaps an area of taxation or one area of the running of the Virtual factory. From the introduction, he will set pairs or small groups work to do, using either printed worksheets, a section of a CD or specific investigations on the World Wide Web. This work is structured, and he monitors progress around the class until he can get them to report back to the whole group on their progress, or summarise their progress in small groups to feed back in the next session.

Again, you might not work in exactly this way, but you probably do have a pattern that you favour as a teacher. Characterise this pattern to yourself now, and consider how the use of ICT as a resource might fit into it.

In our case study, over an introductory two-week phase of his programme, the teacher wants the pupils at this phase of their learning to be able to:

• Identify some of the economic impacts of changes in income tax and NI.
• Identify some of the economic impacts of changes to the Base Rate and VAT.
• Explain the impacts on businesses of indirect taxation, with some examples.
• Provide examples of measures businesses can take to manage changes in the economy or competitive environment.

Below is a summary of how the two separate weeks are structured to use ICT to meet some of these objectives. You will see that they are proposed as two distinct stand-alone sets of 2-3 hours' work. This is because the teacher needs to be flexible in when he can gain access to the ICT, and needs to be able to move the sessions around in consultation with other users of ICT in his school.

Take a look at the summary and then produce your own account, and your own lesson plans, showing how you would use the ICT resources we have been discussing to do the same job on this area of work. You might wish to extend or contract the time, and to fit the plans, durations and work around your own experience of working with this or a similar area of work.

Case Study Lesson Structure
Impact of Economy on Business

Week 1 - Model economic changes using the Virtual Economy (2-3 hours, depending on local conditions)

• Class introduction and targeted questions - introduce concepts/recap from previous sessions:
  • Tax and NI.
  • Base rate, VAT, indirect taxation.
  • Speculate on effects on businesses.
• Small group work (groups of two/three):
  • Each small group around a single computer.
  • Group uses the Bized site model (simple version first) to create economic changes.
  • Group creates a Word document or hand-written summary of its 'best' economy from a business point of view, and the conditions that led to it.
• Class discussion of points raised by group work - specifically the expectations pupils and the teacher have about the way the economy will impact upon business, in preparation for application of the economy to the Virtual Factory in the next session.

Week 2 - Apply the New Economy to the Virtual Factory (2-3 hours, depending on local conditions)

• Class introduction - whole class discussion to re-cap the purpose from the previous session.
• Worksheet based tasks on previous session's work - same small groups:
  • Each group takes its economic conditions from the previous session, and agrees terms under which these will apply to the Virtual Factory.
  • The group tours the Virtual Factory, noting figures and statistics for later use.
  • The group describes the Virtual Factory in terms of product development, personnel deployment, turnover and financial planning, marketing strategies.
  • The group decides how the changes it made in the economy in the first session will filter into these aspects of the Virtual Factory's function.
• Small groups feed back with responses to the activity - whole class discussion of reasons for changes, and responses to targeted questions to cover the objectives of the two sessions.

Note on timing: I've packed the whole of this work into 2-3 hour sessions over two weeks. You could take a fair bit longer with this, of course, depending on the level of the group and the amount of theory learning you wanted to propose out of it. The sessions above would be fine for the beginning of Advanced or the end of Intermediate, but obviously they would only scratch the surface of the key principles. With a more developed Level 3/Advanced Business group, or with a Business, Economics or Accounting A/S group, you could spend a bit more time and illustrate many more detailed theoretical points.

b. Managing Learning in the Classroom