#ictcurric

First posted on http://web2optimist.blogspot.com/

Thursday was hot and sunny and getting towards the end of the half term holiday. And yet I spent it voluntarily in a windowless room with several ( until then ) virtual strangers talking about work. And stranger still I thoroughly enjoyed it and found it one of the most productive days I’ve had for a long time.

The event was #DADSOW3 ( Developing a Dynamic SOW for KS3 ), something we had been talking about on Twitter via #ictcurric for a while. The basic idea is for a group of like-minded ICT teachers to get together to pool ideas and work on a relevant and engaging KS3 curriculum which could turn the tide on the ‘training kids to push the right button on Microsoft applications’ style of ICT delivery. The end result will be a bank of ICT projects for us to use which will be freely available for anyone else to use and adapt for their own needs under a creative commons licence.

The day was organised and chaired by Nick Jackson ( @largerama ) and was also attended by James Greenwood ( @jpgreenwood ), Pete Astbury ( @astburyp ) and Sarah Evans ( @jennah100 ). Several more people contributed via the Piratepad we used to document the proceedings:-

http://piratepad.net/dadsow3

What was evident from the day was that we faced a range of different challenges but we were all working in the same vein to overcome these issues and revitalise ICT as a discrete subject.

There was general agreement to use APP as a framework to ensure that the projects were covering the full breadth of the curriculum. I have also found APP to be useful to evidence how the use of web 2.0 tools ties into the standard ICT curriculum.

What was particularly enjoyable about the day was the way that we could bounce ideas around and build on work that each of us had done individually. As an example I have been working on a Digital Literacy project ( which I’ve previously blogged about:-

https://sites.google.com/site/sblictyear9/home/digital-literacy/the-project

This had worked well but there were some issues:-

1. The theme of the project was Swine Flu which was in the news at the time I wrote the project but was out of date now
2. Even when Swine Flu was in the news some students questioned the relevance of researching the topic.
3. While the research element had gone well the end product – a google website documenting their research – needed more structure or purpose.

James Greenwood had been working on a similar project based around the dumping of digital waste in Ghana and other developing nations under the guise of ‘donating’ old electronic equipment. This video gave a powerful introduction to the topic:-

James’s project had involved students researching the topic and creating awareness campaigns using ICT applications and tools. Combining the two projects together gave us this initial mindmap:-

Sarah and Pete worked together on an online publishing unit which quickly developed into a web campaigning unit:-

Nick ambitiously took on two projects, one on games programming:-

and a year 7 starter unit based on a Dream Holidays unit I put together earlier this year. Nick has some great ideas for improving it and developing it and I’m looking forward to seeing the results.

On a technical note I found myself in a room full of Moodlers. I’ve not had any experience of using Moodle and need to get up to speed quickly so that I can contribute to the site we are putting together. However I’ve decided to also create Google site versions of the projects we are developing. I am moving to a new school in September which is in the process of implementing the Frog VLE and I will be able to embed the Google site resources into this. It may also make the resources more accessible for those who either do not have Moodle skills or who are tied to using a specific VLE.

I’ve also decided to break up my existing Google sites into individual projects rather than the whole year group sites that I have at the moment. This will allow a greater flexibility in mixing and matching projects and will fit better into a VLE structure where I can have assignments and discussion boards for each topic.

So my head is buzzing with ideas and I can’t wait to get stuck into developing the plans that we put together on Thursday. Maybe reports of the death of ICT as a discrete subject were a little premature.

This post first appeared at www.zoeross.com

I am particularly passionate about the ability ICT has to encourage creativity and independent thinking in students, the latter being such a bug-bear of teachers far and wide, and so I thought I would share some of the projects I have introduced over the past year to try to develop not only students’ ICT skills, but their creativity, logical & critical thought and independent learning.

I try to use free software when I can and if it supports the learning objectives. For example, using Google Sketchup to introduce CAD and 3D modelling was an idea I stole from the marvellous Mr Clarkson and my Year 9 students have been making eco-houses this term in an adaptation of Mark’s Grand Design’s project.

I have discussed Scratch and Alice at length before and, together with Gamemakerthey engage students like no other software I have taught, as they create animations and games, totally oblivious to the fact that they are learning programming skills along the way. Students are currently playing with Kodu in the computer club, having ordered a few X-Box controllers and one student has requested that Pythonbe downloaded so he can experiment with that – great independent learning!

The advantages of using free tools of course is that students can download them at home and play around with them there. I have been both delighted and surprised when some students have brought the work they have completed at home in (and had to give them serious extension work as they have finished their entire project in one week!)  I was particularly thrilled this week when a Year 7 boy was completing his History homework on Sketchup (a roman fort) because he’d seen his brother in Year 9 completing his ICT project on it at home.

And of course, the fact that these tools can be used in other subjects is the great appeal – in ICT I try whenever I can to use tools that students can and will be using in other areas. For example, using Google Earth in our movie about the Year 7 trip and creating scientific graphs in Excel, rather than the usual explosion of colour will hopefully be of great help further up the school in Science and Maths. UsingAudacity to record podcasts means they can use the software in other subjects, and of course the logical thinking required in any kind of programming is good for Maths and life in general!

In this respect, creative subjects such as Art and, in particular Graphics, are natural companions of ICT and, as web design and animation are both passions of mine, inevitably I manage to sneak a good bit of both of these into the curriculum. Ideally, students build on their existing skills and learn new ones with each project. For example, my Year 9s started off the year creating stop-frame animation, we then moved on to Flash and then Alice, so by Christmas, they had tried animating in 3 different ways. It was really great when they arrived for their assessment lesson complete with props and original ideas and began working confidently and totally independently on their animations using the most appropriate software for their idea – a real success in itself, notwithstanding the fact that some of their completed animations were excellent.

So, while I know I have been lucky to have such flexibility with the curriculum, I do believe that with a little imagination and a good look round on the web to see what others are doing, you can enliven the KS3 curriculum and make it engaging, relevant, challenging and exciting for students, encouraging them to have the confidence in their own creativity and learn independently.

Keep looking at the DADSOW3 pages for updates of our quest for a dynamic scheme of work for KS3 ICT!

Article first published on http://web2optimist.blogspot.com/

I’ve been mulling over this post for a few weeks now but coursework marking hell  prevented me from getting my thoughts into any sort of order. I believe ICT as a subject is at a crossroads. On the one hand there are brilliant opportunities to use ICT  to support higher order thinking skills across the curriculum and provide students with the digital literacy skills needed to function effectively in the digital age. On the other there is the pressure to ‘process’ students through the coursework mill to prop up school league tables. This second option is proving even more invasive with the introduction of ICT Functional Skills as a requirement for passing any Diploma.

Steve Wheeler’s ‘Stop Calling it ICT‘ post challenges both the name and the purpose of ICT lessons. Is the name appropriate with it’s focus on technology rather than learning. Do we need ICT as a discrete subject or should it be embedded across the curriculum?

James Greenwood’s article on Assessing Pupil Progress in ICT also gave me food for thought. I have been rewriting the KS3 SOWs this year to incorporate the new APP levels with it’s three strands:-

• AF1 planning, developing and evaluating
• AF2 handling data, sequencing instructions and modelling
• AF3 finding, using and communicating information

APP has proved to be a good framework for developing a curriculum which is not dominated by teaching students which buttons to press in various Microsoft  Office Applications. Like James I have been moving towards projects which incorporate various learning objectives and higher order thinking skills rather than the ‘now we will do spreadsheets’ mentality which seemed to underpin the old National Strategy lessons.

So for instance year 7 are currently working on a project about dream holidays. This involves the following activities:-

• Creating a questionnaire using Google forms.
• Analysing the data collected using google forms and Microsoft Excel
• Comparing spreadsheet applications
• Planning a holiday route using Google maps
• Use internet research to find out how much a holiday would cost
• Using a spreadsheet application to produce a model to calculate the cost of a holiday and answer ‘what if’ questions.
• Using a desktop publishing application to publicise the holiday package

Yes this incorporates the AF2 data handling elements but also covers the AF1 concepts of planning out the project at the start and evaluating the outcome and the AF3 themes of finding and using information.

This approach stills needs more work as my starting point was introducing the use of spreadsheets followed by how can I incorporate other ideas and thinking skills. I need to turn this process round to a more Challenge Based Learning model:-

But can this approach work in a discrete ICT lesson? Surely it needs a bigger focus and more curriculum time to be successful. I recently visited Brunel Academy in Bristol which has  80% of the year 7 and year 8 curriculum devoted to project based learning. Maybe the end point of the way my curriculum ideas are heading is agreeing that ICT as a discrete subject is dead. Alternatively this could be a takeover of the entire curriculum by technology enabled learning. Time will tell.

The other strand in this post is the increasing pull in the opposite direction, back to a Microsoft Application training model of ICT lessons that I’d hoped had been consigned to the past. ICT departments have long been under pressure to be a cash cow for results. Courses such as GNVQs and now OCR Nationals which are based on 100% coursework and which can turn out 4 GCSEs per student have propped up many schools in results league tables. This pressure has led to many schools compressing the ICT KS3 curriculum into yr7 and yr8 with the coursework production line firing up in yr9. The prevailing attitude in my school appears to be that any student can be given sufficient support to achieve an ICT qualification. These courses do however have a range of options enabling teachers to put together an engaging curriculum.

Into the mix now comes Functional Skills. At my school ICT is an optional subject at KS4. Suddenly from being in a sleepy back water ICT has been thrust into the limelight. 90% of the students now take a Diploma and all of them have to pass ICT Functional Skills in order to gain their Diploma. Late in the day the school is realising that this qualification needs to have significant time on the timetable following disastrous results for cohort after cohort given at most 20 hours ( GLH 45 hours ) study time. Some students are now taking the exam for the 4th time and are in real danger of failing their Diploma.

As a result the department is now under pressure to spend the whole of year 9 preparing students to take Functional Skills. To do this we would have to strip out all the digital literacy and thinking skills elements of the current SOW together with the game programming in Scratch and go back to Excel, Access and Publisher training. Pressure with year 11 has also seen a return to teaching spreadsheets as databases as a way of getting the students through. Fortunately as KS3 co-ordinator I have not been involved in Functional skills this year and I am moving to a new school in September which has not embraced Diplomas. However if this is the new vision for ICT then the sooner discrete ICT is put out of it’s misery and consigned to the history books the better.

I know, I’ve left it a bit late to be starting a new coursework unit, but the saving grace of the OCR Nationals is that you can enter candidates right to the end of the year – no May 15th-ish deadline for us. This does devalue ICT a little, over the last fortnight I’ve lost pupils almost every lesson to finish X coursework, but, we do get to claim the time back in some weird OMG-the-moderator’s-coming-best-get-Johnny-in-all-day-to-sort-his-folder way. I digress.

Inspired by James’ excellent unit 23 resources (thank you very much), we now also have a moodle course for unit 20  - web animation. Not quite ready for sharing, but will be soon. Having looked at the marking criteria, we’ve found that these two units are almost identical (marking-wise), along with unit 22, the sound editing unit. I’m sure that anyone teaching or investigating the OCR Nats already knows this, but I think I dropped a stitch somewhere.

I’ve reached a point with the top Y11 group where they have shown they can work independently (after a fashion), and will work well to get they grade that they need. I have given them the choice of Units 20, 22 and 23 as their last unit, their homework for the last week was to investigate the units and make a decision as to which they would do. Now I have four ’sub-groups’ (including the single award pupils) operating alongside each other. I’ve yet to see quite how well this will work, but it’s looking good.

I’ve prepared folders for each of them, containing the documents available from OCR for each of the units, and a quick outline of the assignment. I’ve hijacked ‘guest speakers’ from across the school for each of the units (music teacher – sound, ICT tech – flash animation), to run workshops with the kids.

Is this personalised learning, or just individual learning?

Article originally posted on james-greenwood.com

One of my department’s big focuses this year has been Assessing Pupil Progress, the new supplementary levelling structure for Key Stage 3. We didn’t have any idea what it was until our LA advisor, Pauline Hargreaves, gave us an excellent introduction to it in the Autumn term.

Key competencies

For those who haven’t yet got to grips with it, APP divides the curriculum into three distinct fields called Assessment Focuses. AF1 is planning, developing and evaluating, AF2 is handling data, sequencing instructions and modelling, and AF3 is finding, using and communicating information. Doing this allows departments to assess students’ ability across a wider range of skill sets, as well as enabling them to review their curriculum to identify any potential weak spots. Without covering each of these fundamental areas in ICT, how can we give a realistic level by the end of the first term of year 7?

The real draw, here, is that it offers a far more robust system of assessment than the old (or, indeed, the new) level descriptors. I always felt slightly uncomfortable when explaining the use of these to new year sevens: “If you do some of these things you’re a level 4c, if you do most you’re a 4b, if you do all of them you’re a 4a.” The sea of blank faces was always more than a little disheartening, especially when we did all we could think of to ensure they were as accessible as possible - 16 foot posters up in each ICT room with the descriptors in as close to pupil speak as we could get them, etc.

The real point of the division of key competencies hit home when I thought back to teaching a mildly autistic boy in a previous school who was a marvel with anything logical. He could intuitively work his way through some fairly complex spreadsheet work (goal seek, pivot tables) on his own, yet when asked to explain it, or design anything creative, you wouldn’t think the work was from the same year group, never mind the same student. He ended KS3 with a high level 6 based on the quality of his work in Excel, Access & Scratch, which of course fed in to KS4 predictions. He was placed in a top middle set which was completing OCR Nationals with a significant emphasis on graphics, which – of course – led to his grades falling like a rock.

Informing personalised learning

ICT is an intrinsically broad subject, but I think the three assessment focuses identified in the APP model cover everything nicely. Some students will excel in one particular area more than the others, and being able to identify that early means we are better able to nurture those skills, and use this data to inform setting & course choices in the current/next key stage.

At my school we currently only offer the OCR Nationals at KS4, and while they have their faults, they do at least offer a breadth of choice lacking in the majority of GCSE courses. I opted to teach (the wonderful) Unit 8: Innovation & e-Commerce to my top sets (1 & 3) for their second year. The course is largely essay-based, with a good deal of crossover with Business Studies, and radically different to everything the students had learnt in ICT thus far. The majority of students in the top set took to it very well, being perfectly well-equipped with the literacy skills to express their opinions on complex topics like legal, moral & ethical issues in ICT, or the impact ICT has had on society. However, several students in set three who had been working consistently to distinction standard in units 1 & 23 started to struggle significantly with the essay assignments.

This might all sound off-topic, but my point is this; students who excel in KS3 at finding, using & communicating information would be logical choices for an essay/report/presentation-based course. Students who excel at sequencing instructions and modelling would be well suited for a data manipulation/programming course, and students who excel at planning, developing and evaluating should be good at handling larger database/spreadsheet projects. Being armed with such information when students arrive in KS4 would better equip teachers & students to choosing the best possible programme of study.

Curriculum review

Without needing to start an in-depth review, I knew our weakest area was AF2, with only a scant look at spreadsheets that goes as far as IF statements (which is further than we’re required to go by the OCR Nationals coursework, incidentally), an introduction to (flat file) databases, and a lacklustre Flash unit. The curriculum was very AF3 heavy, which was no huge surprise as literacy levels are quite low for new arrivals in KS3 – when I wrote the year 7 SoW I wanted to ensure we were discouraging the copy & paste mentality, so spent a good deal of time hammering that home.

One year on, with a reasonably coherent scheme of work for our two-year Key Stage 3 borne out of hard work on the part of the department, I went to a subject leader network meeting where David Luke, the other Kirklees ICT advisor, put forward the idea of changing Key Stage 3 from the approach taken by many (including us) of half-termly topics on “spreadsheets”, “presentations”, “desktop publishing”, etc, that led to year 7 students learning how to use a piece of software, then leaving it behind them for a year until they came back to it in year 8.

Instead, taking a more holistic, project-based view of topics would ensure that students are revisiting key competencies regularly, building up their skills in gradual steps once per half term rather than great leaps once per year, and coming to see that pieces of software shouldn’t be pigeonholed applications that you use on their own, but that the best possible pieces of work combine many different tools. One year 11 student recently gave a truly outstanding presentation on e-commerce in which he hand-crafted icons to represent the key points of his talk in Illustrator and included a short movie – worlds away from bullet point lists & clip art.

Implementation

Once we knew what it was, and agreed that it would be a useful tool, the next question was, “How do we introduce it?” We had advice from two different sides of the same argument. One argued it’s a tool for teachers; to ensure the curriculum was covering all the bases, as well as introducing it as an assessment method, but the students don’t need to see it. The other advised giving the assessment grids to the students as part of the AfL strategy. “Students should be using these to assess their own learning – if it’s just us then nothing has actually changed.”

As a department, we agreed that presenting students with the A3 assessment grids would be over facing, and counterproductive. Our resolution was to take appropriate descriptors directly from the APP grid and set them as success criteria for project work. We maintain the overview of the curriculum, and students are getting the focus throughout their project, but without having to digest the glut of information on the assessment grids.

Teachers would then have short, individual talks with students at the end of a project after assessing the work to discuss how they think they’ve done, as well as setting targets for the next unit.

So what’s next?

I’m champing at the bit to start the overhaul of our curriculum, and now I have the cornerstone. APP is a solid foundation upon which to form a programme of study that can shape what our students learn, and how they learn it from joining the school to leaving. By involving feeder primaries, sixth form colleges and the students themselves, I hope we’ll have the makings of a truly solid scheme of work with the flexibility to keep it relevant & the robustness to ensure it lasts.