The new edition of Digital Education, the free newsletter for those with a professional interest in educational ICT and Computing, has a special focus on resources you can use to teach coding. Here’s what it contains:
Go on, admit it: you still create worksheets, right? If you do, and you use Microsoft Word or OpenOffice to do so, you’ll find Teacher’s Pet very handy. It’s basically a set of macros that can transform lists of words into several different types of puzzle or test item.In each case I have kept the text of the DfE’s announcement, and then added my thoughts under the heading “Applying this to Computing and ICT”.
Today: Cognitive Development.
A couple of months ago I invited people to contribute to a survey about what they were doing to prepare for the new Computing curriculum. About 75% of my motivation for doing so was to help to spread ideas. I believe in the grass roots sort of approach to such things, as opposed to the ‘great and the good’ declaring what the rest of should be doing. Actually, to clarify, I don’t mind if the great and the good are doing it or have done it themselves. I find it tedious when people who have never been a teacher and/or had little contact with schools start issuing advice. OK, rant over!
The DfE recently announced the winners of its Assessment Innovation Fund.Over the next week or so I will report on the winners and the descriptions of their approach. These descriptions are more like thumbnail sketches at the moment. I have used them to suggest ways in which they might be adapted for use in assessing ICT and Computing. I hope you find these suggestions useful, or at least a good starting point for your own further work.
In each case I have kept the text of the DfE’s announcement, and then added my thoughts under the heading “Applying this to Computing and ICT”.
Today: Progression planners.
In each case I have kept the text of the DfE’s announcement, and then added my thoughts under the heading “Applying this to Computing and ICT”.
Today: An iterative approach.
How are teachers preparing for the new Computing curriculum, which is due to start being taught in September 2014? Some time ago I created an online survey in order to ascertain the answer to this question. Although there have been fewer respondents than I’d hoped for (though probably more than I’d expected), the results are quite interesting. Here is a very brief summary.The DfE recently announced the winners of its Assessment Innovation Fund.Over the next week or so I will report on the winners and the descriptions of their approach. These descriptions are more like thumbnail sketches at the moment. I have used them to suggest ways in which they might be adapted for use in assessing ICT and Computing. I hope you find these suggestions useful, or at least a good starting point for your own further work.
In each case I have kept the text of the DfE’s announcement, and then added my thoughts under the heading “Applying this to Computing and ICT”.
Today: Another Ladder approach.
I am always suspicious of things that everyone agrees about – mainly because I usually find myself disagreeing. I would not be so arrogant as to believe that everyone else is wrong and I’m right, but I do often think that it would be good to evaluate what is taken as read in light of our personal experience and pedagogical expertise.
Here are just three examples of what I’m talking about.
In each case I have kept the text of the DfE’s announcement, and then added my thoughts under the heading “Applying this to Computing and ICT”.
Today: A Growth Mindset approach.
In each case I have kept the text of the DfE’s announcement, and then added my thoughts under the heading “Applying this to Computing and ICT”.
Today: A Mastery approach.
In each case I have kept the text of the DfE’s announcement, and then added my thoughts under the heading “Applying this to Computing and ICT”.
Today: A scoring system.
In each case I have kept the text of the DfE’s announcement, and then added my thoughts under the heading “Applying this to Computing and ICT”.
Today: The Ladder.
How do you learn best? The reason I ask this question is that the conventional wisdom these days seems to be that people learn best through collaboration. Hence lessons are planned with as much time for collaboration built in as possible. But is this always useful?
Professor Diana Laurillard has informed me of a new course that is going to be run for teachers and others with an interest in how ICT is being used in primary education in various countries. I think it sounds very interesting. Here’s the official blurb:
This is to announce a new course on ICT in Primary Education, to run as a MOOC (a massive open online course), hosted by the University of London.
Emma, 14, describes how she and two friends created the Story Wall app.
The Story Wall was created by me and my classmates Teigan and Joe. We originally came up with the idea to help people with writing stories and how people can get stuck when writing a story. The name was created by thinking how walls and stories are everywhere and how a story could be written on a wall, but the name just came to us and sounded right.
Nearly four years ago I published an article called 25 Features of Outstanding ICT Lessons. I thought it was time to update that for the new Computing curriculum. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the original 25 have only needed minor modification, where they have needed modifying at all. Good teaching is, after all, good teaching.
By ‘outstanding’ I do not mean the Ofsted definition of that word, which I feel is somewhat narrow. Nevertheless, I have included Ofsted’s criteria in the list below, with a few comments of my own.
(c) Terry Freedman All Rights Reserved
