I've always been a huge fan of Lego - indeed I probably have nearly £2,000 worth of models on display in my collection at home (which is still growing). Over the years, I've read about, been trained in and taught a variety of brick-themed projects in school, most notably:
programming Lego WeDo sets for improving programming skills.
What I feel that's been lacking though is actually giving children the opportunities for using Lego to build and play with in less structured, more imaginative experiences.
A few days ago, I found myself visiting a Lego show just about four miles away from school and was captivated by the sheer variety of the builds on display both in their technical structure and creativity - indeed, the winners of Channel 4's Lego Masters were also there presenting some of their work to inspire young builders.
With the increasing trend for schools to become advocates of STEAM subjects, along with this desire to further use Lego to enhance learning, it got me thinking about some tasks children could be given to create and solve using Lego. A quick web search brings up many ideas for very specific building challenges (e.g. to build models of things like a house, animal or rocket), but this brief (at the moment) list should give you an idea where my thinking is going - activities that children can do outside of formal lessons which encourage some form of open-ended creativity and the development of their imagineering skills (to use a Disney phrase):
Build a marble maze or run (think holding a board at an 80 degree angle for a ball to move down through obstacles).
Build a series of models using no more than 10 bricks on each.
Build a mosaic picture.
Build with a partner, using just one hand each so you have to support/communicate with them.
Build a bridge between two tables to hold a weight.
Build a balloon-powered vehicle and race it with others.
Let me know what you think - is Lego imagineering something that schools should be promoting?
As the final few weeks of the autumn term now arrive, I thought I'd collate all of my festive primary computing lessons into one place for you to either deliver to your children or give you inspiration to do something similar:
I find covering algorithms the trickiest part of primary Computing because they are hard to find technology-themed resources for which actually teach children about them and which improves their learning - I refuse to teach them using cooking analogies because I think this is more focused on writing instructions which should be done in English, yet beyond simply writing down arrows for a Bee-Bot to move, I've found little else online that is actually helpful.
For these reasons, I've spent a while trying to carefully come up with a sequence of algorithm lessons which show clear progression between year groups, are all linked to technology and are hopefully suitably challenging for pupils. If they are of any help to you, they are:
In addition to these specific lessons on algorithms, I also regularly refer to algorithms in my actual programming lessons (which can all be found here), such as by adding in challenges into each session that involve children having to improve their programs by adding extra code which follows an algorithm (e.g. Can you make the baddy hidden at the start and then shown when a 'Level 2' button is clicked on? Can you include a countdown by timer by adding a new variable that equals 30 at the start, decreases by 1 every second and stops the program when it equals 0?).
I recently discovered/realised that YouTube didn't exist when I started working in school - I'm sure it was blocked by our web filter for its first couple of years too.
How things have changed over the past decade though - the site is now the place to go to for watching video clips online. Movie trailers, music videos, TV clips, unboxing and reviews are all hugely popular and every brand and organisation near enough has a YouTube presence to engage with its current and potential future audience/customers.
In the primary school where I work, YouTube can only be used by staff who access it logged in as a staff member onto a computer. This is primarily to prevent children from accidentally (or deliberately) accessing content which isn't suitable for their young age (which as a school we'd end up being responsible for), although it also stops our Wifi connection from becoming too congested and stops children being distracted watching entertainment videos when they should be doing somethingelse - we are an educational establishment after all. All this should make sense and sound reasonable - and I must say that this setup works well for everyone we find.
During my e-safety lessons in Computing, I spend lots of time teaching children rules for how to stay when safe online and what they can do to seek help or advice, if needed. Many of these lessons have a strong focus on the need to only send nice, polite messages to their friends and not to share personal information to strangers.
One aspect of this is me teaching them the importance of only joining age-appropriate sites since age restrictions are there to protect children from unmoderated, more 'adult' scenarios. I dedicate a whole lesson to covering which sites are, and are not designed for children to use and why - Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat being the obvious main three designed for over 13s. The elephant in the room here though is YouTube since Google do actually allow children to have a login and watch content via YouTube Kids (https://support.google.com/youtubekids/answer/7555328?hl=en&ref_topic=7554316).
It's now reached a point in time where I think children are both keen watchers and creators of YouTube video content (aka vloggers) and that this is widely accepted in society - just look at how many subscribers some of these child vloggers have, or watch their appearances on CBBC programmes like My Life for endorsements (https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/watch/my-life-born-to-vlog) or see the huge crowds going to meet them make star appearances at special events like SlimeFest and the Digital Kids Show.
Back in school though, I admit to skirting around the YouTube age 'issue' by never actually naming it it in my e-safety lessons but instead just teaching generic tips for making videos and sharing them online - public v private, positive attention v bad attention, praise v trolling etc.
I am slowly becoming convinced that this needs to change however, and that I should, if not need to, be specifically teaching children how to manage a YouTube account and how to shoot their own videos to become YouTubers themselves. But how to do this safely is something that I've been wondering about for ages and I may now have just come up with an idea...
Consider these three points:
Throughout the past year, I've been running half-termly photo submission challenges across the school, inviting parents or the children themselves to email me in in themed photos (e.g. doing an unusual sport, showing a pumpkin carving, doing a science experiment at home etc.) which I then collate into a slideshow to put up on the hall screen during one dinner and on the school website later. These have been extremely popular - I normally get about a third of the school joining in and this seems to be growing.
Our Year 4 teacher organises a very successful weekly pupil presentation session in their class whereby a handful of children can sign up to talk for a set time about a topic they are passionate about to the rest of their classmates.
Without bragging, I feel quite confident that I'm very capable of getting an online audience for content and good at managing social media hits.
Lying in bed last night, I had the idea of perhaps asking children to send me in short videos/vlogs/presentations from home (up to one minute long say) about their own passions which I would moderate and then hopefully upload to the school's YouTube channel where they could get shared with all our subscribers. This would give children the chance for their content to be shared on a popular channel where it is likely to get watched, whilst ensuring they remain safe by it being moderated first and me turning off some YouTube engagement options, like commenting, to avoid any negative feedback from viewers. Putting the onus on the children to create the videos themselves doesn't give me any additional work and, if anything, allows children the chance to use some video editing apps I've taught them about in Computing beyond school, such as iMovie and Clips, both by Apple, for a real purpose.
Now this is very much just an idea at the moment - there are many things that I would need to properly consider before staring such a project (such as: video recording rules for children, parental permissions needed, ideas for video themes - like CBBC My Life perhaps, promotion methods, which year groups to let send in videos, which YouTube engagement tools to turn on/off etc.) but I do think that it could have potential and be a great platform for showcasing our pupils' talents beyond the classroom.
I've recently recorded some videos for my school's website aimed at parents, explaining how our children use bar modelling to solve maths calculations - see here.
To make the videos flow easily, convey the correct mathematical steps/terminology, be about three minutes long each and look professional, I used a few tricks that I thought I'd share in case others wanted to do similar at their school.
First, I collated the questions that I wanted to record on the videos. This included sequencing them in order of difficulty and having a go myself at slowly working out the answers to check they could be solved (as well as leaving me with a WAGOLL which could be referred to during the recording). You can find a good progression sequence for bar modelling here.
Next, I downloaded a grid background 'image' onto an iPad - I've created a plain grid image and a half blank-half grid image for bar modelling questions:
I inserted the relevant grid image into a new Explain Everything slide and added a text box with a particular question in it. I then locked both of these in position so they couldn't be moved accidentally.
I then wrote a script of things that needed to be said during the commentary, broken down into small steps, to sure that everything I wanted said was mentioned:
To record the question being solved, I actually did it in two parts - working out first, commentary later. This meant that the working out could be recorded in tiny segments to ensure accuracy and neatness, and any corrections made easily. I had the script beside me so that I could estimate how long to leave for the narration of different parts.
Once the video was recorded, I then exported it to the iPad's camera roll and inserted it into a new iMovie movie.
In iMovie, I then showed a confident upper KS2 child the final part of the video with the solution and gave them a moment see what was going on. I passed them the script and simply asked them to record themselves reading it and to fill in any quiet bits with their own ad-libs, like explaining how exchanging or carrying was going on in a calculation.
The aim of the videos are to explain the method to others, not to test the child doing the recording, hence why I opted to pre-record the method and ask them just to narrate it. Indeed, the actual calculations being shown are fairly simple for a confident Y5/6 mathematician so it wasn't like the task needed to be a challenge for them.
To finish, I just exported the finished video online to embed and share onto my school's website.
Each video took about 15 minutes in total to plan, record the working out, record the voice over and upload to the web. Simple, quick and hopefully very useful for our parents.
Please let me know if you've found this guide/method useful!
With bar modelling becoming an increasingly popular way of solving maths word problems, I set myself the challenge a few months back to create an Excel spreadsheet that would randomly generate different types of bar modelling questions along with suggested bar model designs, their answers and a printable worksheet.
I would greatly appreciate any feedback - please try it out with your children and let me know of any bugs they might find so I can fix them.
One of my targets this academic year has been to set up a pupil group I've christened the 'Technology Team' at my school - several Year 6 children with whom I could do a variety of computing-themed enrichment activities. They are not 'Digital Leaders' - as I teach every class Computing myself and am quite confident that my lessons cover a curriculum that is comprehensive enough, I felt that they were not needed in my school. Instead, I would focus on doing extra tasks with the Technology Team which are slightly more creative than I'd do in a normal lesson and which could be more successively delivered to a small group than in a whole class situation (which requires greater differentiation and less support from me).
Whilst all the children were really enthusiastic and keen to take part, the biggest challenge that I had was actually coming up with the activities to do with them. You might think that I'd find this pretty easy, but trying to plan what was effectively an extra lesson every week for very technology-savvy Year 6 children which developed their skills in a fun way and was sufficiently different to what I already cover with them in my computing curriculum, was actually quite a task. They didn't want to do lots of on-screen programming work every week (as there are only so many online games moving characters around mazes one can do and we mutually agreed that moving onto text based stuff would be slightly too boring for a club) and they obviously didn't want to repeat stuff from lessons (like do yet more e-safety work).
Again, they are not 'Digital Leaders' who - when you search for examples of practice in other schools online - spend lots of time learning apps to support class teachers in Computing lessons (which we don't need) or even just meet once a half-term to do a big thing like a video school tour (which I once did a few years back very unsuccessfully and vowed never to repeat again) or green screening (which from experience I think requires an excessive amount of work for very little gain over just filming in front of an IWB).
Instead, I discovered that they wanted to: make mini things to take home that night, solve programming 'quest' games and learn skills they see staff doing daily in school which I don't already cover in lessons (i.e. make classroom resources).
I kept the same six children in the group all year so I could experiment with different ideas and get feedback on what they felt were the best and worst activities to know how I could improve on them next time. Here is a quick summary of what we found out:
Some of the Least Favoured Activities (I won't do these again)
I'd been extremely interested in showing them the BBC Micro:Bit - having been part of the initial feedback group at the BBC when it was in its Codebug phase - but on actually trying one out for myself I unfortunately found it to be quite temperamental to operate and slightly too technical to do anything more with than program scrolling messages on. Not worth the hassle.
I found what appeared to be a cheap app-controlled paper plane motor online which looked amazing - in practice though you needed to have amazing origami skills for the plane to be able to fly under the weight of the motor.
The online Rapid Router game proved to be a good find initially, with the children liking programming the robot around using Blocky-based commands - sadly their interest began to wane after about 20 levels when the paths became too long for them to visualise easily. Remember it's a club - they want fun stuff that isn't too hard.
Making a potato clock was actually a great little activity where they loved connecting two potatoes together to act as a battery to power an LCD clock. Unfortunately however, it only needed 15 minutes to do so I under ran quite a bit that week.
These electric paint robots were very hit-and-miss, and I think they needed a perfectly steady hand to apply the paint to create perfect circuits, which not all of my children had.
Some of the Most Favoured Activities (I will do these again)
Teaching the children how to operate the sticky label machine was lots of fun - especially changing the font and adding Windings-style symbols.
Designing Avery sticky labels to print out and take home to give out to their friends was loved by everyone - it's often easy to forget how much children love stickers.
Making a banner in 2Publish+ and laminating it was actually a surprise hit.
Creating a 20p stylus (using these instructions) was surprisingly quite straightforward and genuinely impressed the children.
I came up with a way of making a cheap cardboard photo frame with a sheet of laminate as the 'glass' which they all enjoyed decorating and making one week using this template I made in Word.
For two lessons, I taught them how to use Flowol to construct flowcharts to control mimics for the first half, followed by letting them explore some logical thinking games on the Math Playground website for the second half. They enjoyed the variety here.
They all liked making crafty robots, although next time I would save money and let the children design their own covers rather than buy them ready-made.
I've used Pivot Animator several times in the past and as usual, making stop-frame animations of stick figures dancing and doing gymnastics was lots of fun - we even had some dabbing!
Tucked away in a cupboard, I found a CD-ROM of the classic Crystal Rainforest game from Sherston so I took the opportunity to use it with the group and they all liked racing through the quest adventure with each other. This was brilliant and took several weeks to complete - it's a shame they aren't produced any more for people to still buy.
Plastic key rings are surprisingly cheap to buy online I found out (e.g. these) so that was an easy week - design a front and back in Word, printing them out and snap them inside the case to take home. Simple, but they all loved it.
Rollercoaster Tycoon Classic is my favourite computer game of all time so when it came out as an app I decided I just had to show it to the children (it does have some excellent STEM links when constructing and testing rides). Of course, they just loved designing and managing their own theme park - who wouldn't?
As well as these activities, I also taught my Technology Team how to use the school DSLR camera and trained them up in using it to capture events in school that I wasn't always around for, such as assemblies. This included tweeting the photos with a pre-written tweet template so they would go online and embed on our school website instantly. They all liked taking their turn at doing this and it proved to be a huge help in showcasing things which parents don't actually see.
At the end of the year, I would say that my Technology Team has been a success overall, although I would consider making a few adjustments in future to make it run smoother:
Have more children take part - I think the demand is easily there to enlarge the group by a few places.
Get children in Year 5 to complete a short online application form at the end of the year to make the selection process fairer.
Change the group mid-year - I easily have about 15 weeks worth of lessons that work well so if the demand is there, it makes sense to just repeat them with different children from the class to make my planning easier and give greater exposure to the sessions (my plans can be found here).
Involve the children on a rota for controlling the hall laptop during assemblies - this is currently allocated as a Year 6 'job' but would be better if the Technology Team children did it instead.
Let the children support our Year 6 dinner time library monitors tweet mini book reviews from other children (using this prompt sheet).
Add some Lego programming into the mix which I didn't get the chance to do this year - Lego Boost which comes out in August looks particularly impressive from all the preview material from the CES in Vegas back in January.
There you go - that's my twisted take on Digital Leaders. How would you implement a 'Technology Team' in your school?
This is tenth year now that I've been making a slideshow for our leaving Year 6 class using either PhotoStory or now Movie Maker - http://www.parkfieldprimary.com/parkfield/leavers-videos.html. I've always used Believe as the soundtrack, but this year I'm using a different piece of music. I canvased opinion on Twitter and came up with this shortlist from which I got the Year 6 pupils to vote for their 'favourite'. I'll share their choice when I publish the video in July, but in the meantime, here are all the suggestions I had to help inspire you create one for your school:
I've spent many, many hours this weekend working in Excel to create a random maths question generator.
You just choose which questions and their levels to include in your activity and it automatically produces you a slide of random questions and their answers - perfect to use as an activity to start the day off or to use as a warm up activity in a maths lesson.
Please download it, use it with your class and send me a comment about what you think of it!
Here is my list of all the companies and products that caught my attention when I visited this year's BETT Show on the newly-named 'Purple Saturday':
Virtual Reality appeared to be this year's buzz-concept with Google, Discovery Education and Class VR all offering solutions to help integrate them into purposeful classroom contexts, although personally I am yet to be convinced how the cost and amount of equipment needed (remembering that 1-1 devices is a requirement) can not be significant barriers when Google Streeview offers a similar service with much less hassle for free considering the frequency with which most teachers would actually go on virtual field trips anyway in lessons.
Mini programmable 'robots' also seemed to be quite popular, with Phiro, SwapBots and Kubo Robotbeing three in particular that caught my eye as being quite interesting, although I await to see which items from these often small, start-up companies actually succeed in bringing in an effective, alternative method for doing basic programming when the Bee-Bot and Pro-Bot work so well in my school for covering these skills already.
Beacon Computing Curriculum Toolkit is a new scheme of work launching at the end of March - let's hope it actually contains resources for delivering actual lessons, not just unit overviews.
Data Harvest now have an iPad app for connecting their Vu+ Data Loggers with via Bluetooth, which could be worth investigating as a way of better integrating ICT into science investigations.
Showbie launched the tools to be able to schedule assignments to be: locked, read-only and editable which will be very helpful.
little Bitscontinues to grow and improve every time I see it in action - it's a fantastic product for bridging that awkward gap between what is 'programming' and what is 'electronics' and I certainly need to get some for myself. There are some lesson plans here.
EasyRead Time Teacher looks like a great product for helping children learn how to tell the time.
#KidgsJudgeBett ran again this year which I always this is a brilliant idea for helping children engage with stands and for encouraging companies to make interesting stands:
For anybody considering introducing https://www.showbie.com/ in their school, here is a collection of resources that I've created that you might find helpful to share with your staff and students:
Over the years I followed the development of mobile technology for children with great passion and I think that now is finally the time to declare that I think that giving every pupil an iPad would have a huge, positive impact on their learning. The quality of their components (inc. camera quality and weight), the features available on iOS (esp. when iOS 9.3 gets released) and the range of software to install on them are all just so good that children would be able to use them easily to produce high-quality work.
How much would it cost?
The cheapest iPad on sale at this moment in time is £219.
With the Apple Volume Purchasing programme, schools can buy apps to install with a huge discount - up to 50%. Excluding website subscriptions (e.g. Discovery Coding, Pearson Bug Club, Doodle Maths etc.), my list of paid apps that I would recommend to use with a KS2 class comes to about £30 per iPad before the discount is applied:
Popplet
Comic Life 3
Explain Everything
Book Creator
Touch App Creator
Superimpose
Life Cards
I Can Animate
Ghostblasters
Wipeout Wall x ÷
Drawing Pad
This put the the total per device at no more than £250, this comes out at £7,500 for a set of 30.
* This doesn't include the cost of any cases, storage/charging trollies or styluses.
How would 1:1 iPads help organisation in lessons?
Less photocopying - share links to websites, PDFs of (scanned) documents
Sharing screens (in iOS 9.3)
No booking issues - iPads can be used when wanted
Easier management for feedback
Easier way for pupils to respond to feedback
No sharing of iPads with children who they don’t get along with
How would using a iPad class management service (e.g. Showbie or iOS Class) complement/replace book work?
Greater personalisation of tasks as it is easier to share differentiated tasks (e.g. maths questions)
Easier to distribute and collect in work than by hand.
Children have their own personal reference guide/library of useful resources to refer to independently as required (e.g. maps, dictionaries, the English Descriptosaurus etc.)
Feedback can be given using sound as well as annotations.
The need for children to do some handwriting in English to meet/exceed the expected standard for writing and the need to do mathematical drawing and calculations on paper in preparation for written maths SATs has to be considered.
The set up would only be practical once iOS 9.3+ becomes available pre-installed on new devices and this is just described as being ‘in the spring’ at the moment.
There is no device requirements listed for iOS9.3 - it could be that it needs to utilise iOS9’s split-screen function for the screen sharing tool to run which only works on iPad Pro, iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 4 which cost more than the lowest spec iPad Mini 2.
Would 16GB of local storage on the devices be sufficient?
Where would the devices be stored during the day and night?
Where would the devices be plugged into the mains for charging?
Would cases be desired?
Would styli/’Apple pencils’ be required?
Would a ‘spare’ iPad be required in case one has a technical problem?
What are your thoughts on 1:1 iPads in the primary classroom?
Here's this year's list of new and noteworthy products that I discovered at Bett 2016 today:
Lego Education have launched WeDo 2 alongside an iOS app for programming models (albeit a whopping 1.61 GB in size be warned). I'm always a big fan of Lego resources like this, although I do find the high cost for the number of sets required for a class for what would be just a handful of lessons at most a big factor in deciding if it's worthwhile.
TTS have released both a new tactile reader for programming the Blue Bot using a visual language (although I would personally just use their Pro-Bot with a screen already on the device for just a fraction more) and an Inspire app whose link I can't yet find on the App Store but which promises to contain over 400 free lesson openers written by subject advisers.
Discovery Education Coding now have free code versions of their online HTML and Python programming tools available - I just hope that a save function will become available on iPads in the future.
The battle between Codebug and the suspiciously similar BBC Micro:Bit has now got a bit more intense - the Micro:Bit (which has lots of sensors but requires an ugly AA battery pack to work and whose longevity after the so-called 'Year of Code' is over is anyone's guess) had lots of cool demonstrations of it's capabilities on show; meanwhile the Codebug (which has no sensors but has a small cell battery just stuck on its back) has now launched lots of great accessories to buy online and has a full-page advert in this month's Teach Primary magazine promoting it's suitability for primary classrooms. I was also inspired by this tweet and this tweet with inspiring ideas for using the Codebug. I expect that the BBC is going to do a big media 'push' on the Micro:Bit soon when it eventually starts being handed out to Y7 pupils, although the Codebug is already in use in primary classrooms like this one and has got workshops happening in local libraries with it over half-term. I genuinely can't predict which product will come out on top...
Doodle Maths - a product which my school is now using successfully to boost up skills with target children during morning registration (and at home too) has just launched a new times tables app which seems to have potential.
Both Kahoot! and Squizr look like new alternatives to other online game-making tools which you might want to investigate.
Daydream Education have a new app to support their KS2 maths posters which could be helpful
Smart have a new tech-based dry erase board - see their website for an explanation and decide for yourself if this is a worthwhile product or not.
Explain Everything - the amazing content creation tool which I now think is better than Smart Notebook - has just announced a range of new features like a collaboration tool (although how this will compare with iOS 9.3's new screen sharing feature I don't know)
Braingo could be a product worth keeping an eye on (thanks to @primarypete_ for finding it) - it appears to be a bingo game covering a vast range of topics.
I've designed these mini factoid books today primarily to encourage children to be create when doing my school's learning log homework tasks and thought other people might find them useful too. Please share them with others!
Over the years I’ve followed a number of primary school projects online in which children are given the opportunity to lead their own pathways in what they learn during lessons, focusing on developing skills through topics that interest them. These include:
Inspired by this work, I’ve attempted to implement a similar approach on a couple of occasions in my ICT/Computing lessons and thought I’d share some of my evaluations on their impact with you.
The first – and probably most important – decision which I had to make was when exactly to run the projects. Whilst I eventually opted to do them with Years 4 and 6 once I had covered all my essential skills lessons, it is worth noting that given a reasonable amount of planning there is no practical reason why they couldn’t be done with any year group when you consider the amount of child-led, independent learning that goes on in EYFS settings.
The second decision to make involved how much freedom I was going to give the children in the topics they worked on and with the two classes I actually ended up using two different methods – with one I felt that I gave them too much independence as the quality of their final, finished pieces of work suffered with me not being able to effectively support every child each doing completely different tasks; with the other I felt that their understanding of how to implement skills suffered as I gave them too much guidance from which many just copied.
The third decision that I needed to consider was how the project work was going to be presented to the children. In comparison, the two different methods I used both worked reasonably well – one involved the children being given a grid of generic tasks from which they had to select which to do (e.g. ‘Use Pic Collage to create a collage of photos of a place or country.’ ‘Use Keynote to create an animated scene using build in and build out events.’); the other involved children being given a booklet of tasks that got progressively more challenging as they worked through it.
For anyone wishing to implement independent projects in their classroom, I would therefore make these recommendations to make the lessons as successful as possible:
Give the children a limited selection of task descriptions so that they are given some choice in what they do, whilst restricting the variety of different activity types that you actually need to support.
Do not allow the project work replace discrete skills lessons – a statutory curriculum still needs covering and children still need to be taught several theory topics which obviously can’t be covered through project work.
Consider carefully how you are going to provide the children with effective adult support – written feedback could be given in between sessions so children have targets to work on or children could be invited to visit your ‘genius bar’ for advice, for example.
Think extremely carefully about who decides when a project is completed to a good standard – my experience has shown that children will want to rush through tasks to move on quickly, not appreciating that the quality of them is then suffering. Perhaps give children a set amount of time to do each task before moving everyone on at the same time to the next one, rather than allowing them to move on mid-lesson.
Give the tasks meaningful contexts, making reference – where possible – to who the intended audiences for them are.
Ensure that children are aware of what skills they are developing by doing a particular project and what ‘level’ they are working at so they know what to do to improve – good/great/super, must/could/should etc.
Give children examples of what good quality pieces of work like so they can visually see what your expectations are. One approach that I found has worked extremely well is annotating the skills used and getting the children to tick them off once they have done them:
I hope these suggestions are helpful and please do let me know if you've found any of them helpful.
When the old ICT national curriculum was disapplicated a few years ago, I immediately set about writing my own, more modern, and more relevant ICT curriculum for KS1 and KS2. This has served me well for the last three years, however, as my lessons have gradually transitioned to have more of a computing focus to them, I have recently realised that it needed updating.
With half-term finally here, I've just sat down and created this mind map explaining how the learning intentions for my computing lessons are organised into the subject strands specified in the new framework document:
Points to note:
I've divided Computer science into a 'theory' and 'programming' strand so the two very different types of lessons they cover are separate.
I debated where to put the LIs for how networks work - in the end I went for Computer science because I felt that it was more of a 'theory' topic than a Digital literacy 'online life skill'.
I've missed a few LIs off until I can think of decent lessons to teach them - types of storage media (including measuring file sizes), CAD and programming D&T products being three examples.
I don't plan on changing my method for writing long-term plans, as described here, but instead just slightly tweak the design of the LI slides I use in lessons and make the very generic 'To design a computer program' LI that I currently use be more specific to the skill being covered (which is very easy now I've opted to use Discovery education coding).
What do you think of this computing curriculum overview?
The 'flipped classroom' approach to teaching and learning is one that I've been aware of for quite a while (having first spotted in this blog post by @bradflickinger in 2011) but I've always just filed it away, whenever it has come up, as something that is only really appropriate and useful in secondary school environments with highly motivated students.
Its popularity appears to have grown and grown in recent years, however, and this weekend at BETT I finally found a teacher (@chriswaterworth) in the UK who has implemented it in their primary school with great success - see their presentation:
As you can see, flipping a classroom doesn't remove the teacher fully from the learning process but instead changes their role and the structure of their lessons to have greater impact upon their children's learning. In simple terms, the children access some materials online at home prior to a lesson (pre-reading if you like) and possibly do a short challenge or activity related to it. The teacher can then monitor the results, thus enabling them to focus more time in the subsequent lesson to: discussing the topic, addressing any misconceptions or problems and applying skills to meaningful contexts (e.g. word problems in maths or investigations in science).
The homework tasks and activities - especially with younger children - shouldn't be too long or challenging, from what I can gather. They shouldn't take long to create and generate little marking, but should provide a quick snapshot of who has completed some pre-lesson work and how well (at a basic level) they seemed to have understood it.
Examples of pre-lesson tasks that I think children could be made to easily complete include:
reading an extract from some text;
researching facts from a specfic website;
searching for and comparing images relating to a particular topic;
finding a location on a map;
taking photographs of something;
watching a screencast video explaining how to do a specific skill.
Examples of simple online assessment activities which could be set to monitor children's completion of the tasks and their understanding of them (e.g. using the free Edmodo website that I absolutely love) could include:
replying to a message (e.g. writing their prior knowledge on a topic, thinking of a good opening for a paragraph, sharing a fascinating fact discovered etc.) (see this example);
taking part in a poll (e.g. to make a prediction for an investigation or to decide which aspect of a topic they want to spend more time learning in class);
From my reading, teachers who've had success with flipped learning have done so not because they have dictated that children must do the pre-lesson 'homework' but because they have instead challenged the children to do the work beforehand and the children - being naturally keen to: learn, be curious and want to impress their teacher - have chosen themselves to do it. The popularity of doing the work at home has then naturally grown as the children want to keep up with their peers and appreciate the value in being given much more target support in lesson times.
Have you used flipped learning in your classroom? I'd love to read any examples of other primary schools where it has been successful in!
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