Year 1 pupils get writing with ONE in Aurélie Colas’s class

Aurélie Colas, teacher and VLE advisor at Frédéric Joliot-Curie school in Palaiseau, has been using ONE since the start of the year. She told us about setting ONE up in the school and explained how she’s been using the VLE with her year 1 pupils.

Using ONE as a way to communicate with families

All of the school’s teaching staff quickly saw how useful ONE would be to keep parents informed about school life and share the children’s activities. Some teachers particularly appreciate the fact that pupils can comment on published content when they have the necessary permissions. This means they are both involved in transmitting information to parents and gain awareness about writing. The school has already set up a dozen blogs to communicate on sporting activities, arts and science projects in class, meetings with guest teachers or pupils from other schools, and special school events.

The blog as a class journal

Aurélie Colas uses her ONE blog as a class journal, posting accounts and photos of her pupils’ activities in the classroom. Birthday celebrations, cooking, music education based on West African percussion instruments, shows, pupils’ art projects; parents are kept up-to-date with what has been happening in class each week.

At the start of the year, the teacher would update the blog on her own. To get the pupils used to the ONE interface, she now publishes posts in front of the class. She has also started training her pupils so they can post on the blog themselves, and several have already contributed. She also encourages the children to react to new content. Once the post is visible on the blog, pupils are invited to comment on it using the class computer.

“I use the mailbox as a writing tool”

Ms. Colas uses the ONE mailbox to get her pupils writing. Whenever pupils perform an action on ONE (updating their mood or saving their profile photo), she sends them a message. The pupil in question is invited to write a message in reply. When the pupil’s reply is not a full sentence, the teacher goes over the exchange in class to work on sentence construction. Over the last few weeks, some pupils have even started contacting their teacher through the mailbox, without waiting for her to send a message first!

Although getting to grips with the VLE requires a lot of concentration from year 1 pupils (handling the keyboard and mouse, thinking about spelling, etc.), ONE is now a daily fixture in the classroom and the children love showing their families what they’ve been doing at school and the photos they can be seen in!