Andrew Brown who is an educational support officer for Argyll & Bute is in the process of putting together a series of tutorials for Captivate, details can be viewed here.
Last night I attended a meeting of the Shropshire branch of UKITA at Radbrook College, it was a very interesting and informative meeting. I was invited to take part in a discussion about what skills these companies would want from our IT students, here is a list of points they made:
The next step is to set up a sub group that I will work with to develop a mutually beneficial relationship.
Margaret Wright (QCA) has just posed the question if you were creating a GCSE in ICT what would you add to functional skills to form this qualification. To me the answer is engaging and motivating uses of ICTs, I am sure there are very few if any students who want to study databases, spreadsheets and wordprocessing. We should look at a qualification that encompasses the ICTs they use outside the school environment. If students were able to submit their myspace site or their latest video from YouTube, I am sure they would engage more in our classrooms. It would probably be worth looking outside the conventional uses of ICT, look at using mobile phones, mp3 players, games consoles etc.
I think it would be great to sit down and develop a GCSE for our ‘digital natives’, it is probably something we should do in conjunction with our students, what do they think ICT is actually about. My biggest issue with ICT qualifications to date is that they are very quickly out of date, how do we design a qualification that is future proofed? Should we have a selection of modules that students can pick from, smaller modules that can be developed and replaced easily. I could see modules on internet safety, computer gaming, blogging, podcasting, internet research etc etc
So what do you think?
Becta’s ICT Excellence Awards are now open for entries!
Entering its second year, the ICT Excellence Awards aims to identify and reward whole school excellence in ICT. They look for schools across the whole of the UK approaching ICT in outstanding and innovative ways.
Winning schools will receive prize money of up to £6000, as well as opportunities to share their excellent practice with others.
The categories, open to both primary and secondary sectors, are Assessment, Curriculum, Extending Learning Opportunities, Inclusion, Leadership and Management, Learning and Teaching and Best Whole School. In addition to the schools categories and new to this year is the Support for Schools category for organisations supporting school improvement with ICT. All categories are closely aligned with elements of Becta’s Self-Review Framework and the ICT Mark.
To find out more about the ICT Excellence Awards and to enter online, go to www.becta.org.uk/excellenceawards/.
Don’t miss the deadline of 23 March 2007!
QCA will be recommending that the on-screen test for ICT at the end of KS3 will NOT be compulsary, deciding it will be an uneccesary burden for schools.
Mr Gee recommended to the QCA that the test should be used “as an integral and standardised tool for informing teacher assessment”.
We now have to wait for the DfES to make a decision on whether or not the test will be compulsary.
Personally I hope that the DfES take QCA’s advice and do not make the test compulsary. Over the last year or two when I have been working with schools in Shropshire preparing for the test the most obvious effect of the test was to reduce creativity in the classroom. Schools have been adapting their schemes of work for year 9, spending a great deal of time preparing students for the test and removing the opportunities for the students to use cool ICT tools, as the test only really covered office applications (that looked nothing like the office environment that the pupils were used to).
It will be interesting to see the future of the test, I think there is a place for it but we shouldn’t be using it to drive the curriculum we are teaching in the classroom. Maybe it will be used for the functional skills test, to give a rough benchmark on transfer or to guage a teachers basic ICT/office skills. I can’t see the test just disappearing as the DfES have invested so much money in it, I guess we just have to wait and see.
So what do you think? Is this a positive step, or has the idea of a compulsary test at the end of KS3 led to more support for the ICT department from the Headteacher and SMT, had the thought of the test on the horizon lead to more curriculum time and specialist teachers, if so will it be a negative step?
The BBC news article can be found here.
Tim Curtis from Shrewsbury High School has just created a wiki over at wetpaint where he would like teachers to upload any alternative versions to the SNS KS3 ICT STU’s (too many acronyms). Taken from the site:
Why this site?
To share the knowledge, expertise and creativity of ICT teachers.
Who can contribute?
Anyone. You don’t have to sign up to wetpaint to contribute but it would be great if you did (it will be easier to see who deserves the credit for great ideas).
How does it work?
At KS3, the units are based on the DfES STUs.
If you tweak a lesson, add a comment to that page
If you have rewritten a lesson, add it as an alternative lesson sub-page
If you have rewritten a unit, add it as an alternative unit sub-page
(I’ve tried to set up a typical structure for unit 8.2 - please feel free to add others!)Get the credit
Add your alternatives with your school in the title of the page. E.g.
Alternative Unit 7.5 from Shrewsbury High SchoolOther Key Stages and General Stuff
Feel free to develop the structure as necessary. KS4 and KS5 will be set up by qualification and then board.
If you would like to contribute then visit the site (http://teachict.wetpaint.com/)
I have just checked out how technologically enabled the area in which I live is, this can be done by visiting Spacial Literacy.org. My area, according to the site, is categorised in the E-Society classification as being in group A : E-unengaged and type A03 : Technology as fantasy. Full descriptions can be found here.
The site also lists other areas that have a similar categorisation two of which are also in Shropshire, namely Shrewsbury and Ellesmere. From looking down the list many of the areas were rural areas.
This got me thinking, according to the site people in my area are “too old, too poor or too poorly educated”. I think the biggest problem we have is access to the technology not the desire to have it or our age, income or education.
It appears that the findings have come about following a great array of research but I wonder where they got their data from, I know that three of my four neighbours have got broadband access and use the internet to shop on a regular basis. I would have to class my neighbours as Group F : Instrumental E-users.
I would be keen to hear what other people think of the results for their postcode and any other thoughts they have on the ‘E-Society’.
I have spent the last couple of days leading cpd on the use of blogs and podcasting. My audience consisted of West Midlands ICT Consultants and members of the ICT team in Shropshire. All delegates set up an ethinkblog, links to these can be found on my sidebar in the ‘Consultants Blogs’ link category.
The morning of the session was used to introduce the wordpress blog and its functionality to the delegates, I will get around to putting some notes together to explain exactly what we did over the Summer break.
After lunch (see photos) which was at the local Abbey, we returned to a hot ICT room to continue the training.
To start the afternoon off we looked at Flickr and Del.icio.us, both technologies were well received and delegates set up accounts for future use. My flickr page can be accessed here and my del.icio.us page here, with my network here(that contains links to the other consultants del.icio.us accounts).
The rest of the afternoon was set aside to producing enhanced podcasts using Garageband on the ibooks, I am still looking for an equivalent piece of software for producing enhanced podcasts on the pc. I have found Podcaster by Kudlian Software - that appears to work on the pc but there doesn’t appear to be a pc download!
The podcasts can be heard on the various delegates blogs, here is an example. After publishing their podcasts we looked at subscribing to the podcasts with iTunes, and also investigated finding podcasts on iTunes. To complete the circle I demonstrated the use of Bloglines and Newsgator as examples of RSS aggregators.
Everyone agreed that there is great potential for these technologies in the classroom, both for teacher and student use. Hopefully we will try and produce a sample teaching unit or two that are based around these technologies. If anyone is interested in assisting with their production then leave a comment below and I will get in touch. I would also be keen to hear what the delegates thought about their days experience and what they plan to do next.
The following are some thoughts about a vision for ICT in schools:
1. Access to ICT:
a. Access to ICTs whenever learners feel appropriate- this could mean access to pc’s, laptops, pda’s, mobile phones, mp3 players etc
b. ICT should be TRANSPARENT, the days of saying lets go to the ICT suite should be in the past.
c. The focus should be on the learning not the technology
d. Using technology to extend horizons beyond the classroom – in time (e.g. home/school learning; learning clubs; extended projects); communities (e.g. linking with children across the county/country/world on specific projects); experiences (virtual tours, PDA tours, games and simulations), people (e.g. video conferencing, skype etc)
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