3.10 Introducing large ict systems into organisations
A teacher presentation for unit 3.10 Introducing large ict systems into organisations:
3.8 development methods
A brief overview of unit 3.8 development methods:
3.7 Developing ICT Solutions
A brief overview of unit 3.7 Developing ICT Solutions:
3.6 Legislation and Regulations
A brief overview of unit 3.6:
INFO 3.9 Techniques and Tools for Systems Development
The following presentation has been created. You must read through this presentation and make your own notes. Once you have covered the presentation you will be asked questions to check your understanding. You will then be given a series of exam style questions which you are to attempt.
Make sure that your notes are thorough:
Year 13 Unit 3.11 Training and Supporting Users
Our Year 13 team have finished yet another unit of theory. The slides below give an overview of the content we have worked through in this unit.
Collaborative Notes for Unit 3.12
In today's lesson our Year 13 students work in two groups to collaborate on a set of notes about different training available for different personnel within an organisation. We focused on the STO diagram and discussed how different training methods will be used depending on whether you're at the Strategic, Tactical or Operational Level of an organisation.
Here are two pictures of our collaborative notes:
Yr 13 INFO 3.12 External and Internal resources
This presentation covers the main aspects of unit 3.12 of the INFO 3 course.
ICT in Education – Why not learn from Science?
The core focus of this blog is to provide my A Level students with resources from my lessons and occasionally I'll also post news stories related to the topics we are covering. However, today I feel the need to write my opinions and ideas about ICT in Education. I would like my A-Level students and any other site visitors to leave comments on this post and let me know what you think about my ideas. If you would like to 'cut to the chase' with this article please just read the last 4 paragraphs. However, if you read what goes before you will understand why I have this opinion.
So....
Michael Gove is the UK's Secretary of Education. Most of you who visit this blog will know about his views on ICT, as discussed here back in January 2012. Initially I was delighted to read more about Mr. Gove's opinions and ideas about reforming education and in-particular the ICT Curriculum. Almost two years ago when I arrived at Dubai British School I was asked to build a program of study for Primary ICT and like Mr. Gove I felt there was need for a change. I had taught Primary as a Specialist ICT Teacher for 18 months prior to arriving at DBS and I was sure that I could make a positive impact at my new school. My aim was to make the ICT Curriculum more relevant, more engaging and easier for Primary 'non specialist' ICT teachers to teach and assess.
I started by doing LOTS of research into what was already out there, what were people/websites already offering and what was good about it and what was bad about it. I found a lot of great stuff and I found a LOT of dated, irrelevant and boring stuff too.
Now I'm someone who is VERY passionate about my subject, I love everything about ICT, I love the skills that should be taught, I love how ICT can be used to enhance the learning in other subjects and I love how it can be used to enhance the collaboration and sharing of ideas in all areas of education. So I decided that the best way to approach this new program of study for my new school was to simply build units of work that I would find fun, that I believed were relevant and most importantly that would inspire the learners.
I ended up building www.ict-ed.co.uk a site I am very proud of and a site that is still (and always will be) under development. The drive behind the site and the resources on it was to provide units of work that were fun, relevant, new, exciting and inspiring. I received a lot of praise from the staff early on as the site also focused on making the teaching of the units easy for non specialist teachers. I did this by creating over 100 videos that either the teacher could watch to see how to teach the unit or the students could watch directly and learn the content from (a similar technique now known as Flipping the Classroom). These resources have continued to develop and I have watched many lessons where a variety of teachers have taught the content of the units I have created. The students are using new technologies in their learning, they are programming using Scratch at Year 4, they are collaborating using Google Docs at Year 5, they are creating screencasts to create their own 'Flipping the Classroom' videos at Year 6 and best of all we don't have one unit where the core focus is on using Microsoft Products. This is not to say that the skills for learning how to use these applications are not needed but my opinion is these skills should not be taught in ICT lessons they should be taught in English, Science, Geography etc. where these skills can be given a context e.g. "in Science we're doing experiments where we need students to collect data, record the results and then analyse the information gathered" - let's teach the students how to use spreadsheets here! (HOW ARE WE EXPECTED TO TEACH THESE SKILLS? I can hear you saying, well I have a plan for that too and it involves Flipping the Classroom....but that's for another post).
So back to ICT and Mr. Gove. Mr. Gove says we need to go back to basics and that ICT should be more focused towards computing, learning how something works rather than simply how to use it. I agree whole heartily but this is my issue (and I know it's taken me a while to get here).....
I have shared Mr. Gove's view with some of my students, some of them love the idea and some of them don't. The same feedback was found at the thoroughly modern Lampton School in Hounslow where 35% of students did not agree with Mr. Gove's ideas. It's not only students that are worried about these changes. I think about how this would affect the non specialist teachers at my current school and how they would handle these changes. Without blowing my own trumpet I think we would manage very well due to the support I am able to provide them with via www.ict-ed.co.uk and in my role as ICT Coordinator but what about these schools that don't have ICT specialists? How are they going to deal with teaching students how to program in JAVA, Visual Basic or whatever it might be? Again this problem is for a whole new blog post.
Back to the issue at hand. If research shows that some students don't want to learn programming but Mr. Gove is right and the current ICT curriculum is boring (and I agree with this) then what do we do? My suggestion, ask the students and ask the specialist ICT teachers, who have a passion for their subject 'What should we be teaching in ICT?". Below is my answer....
Science students don't just study Science, they study Biology, Physics and Chemistry, why? Is it because Science is such a vast subject to cover? Is it because if you look at Science carefully enough you will see that there are clearly defined sub sections of the subject? Is this not the same with ICT? In my opinion yes it is!
I studied Interactive Multimedia at University, an 'ICT' course that focused on the creative element of using technology. We did video editing, built websites, created animations etc. At A Level I teach the AQA Information and Communication Technology course that has a clear focus on ICT in business. Michael Gove is suggesting that ICT go back to being more like computing where there is clear focus on programming. I'm just getting started but aren't their clear distinctions here between different sub sections of the subject?
- Creative ICT - Graphic design, web design, image manipulation, animation, 3D modelling
- ICT in Business - Information Systems, ICT Strategies and Policies, Managing ICT
- Programming - Games development, Web Development, Systems Development
Year 12 ICT Coursework Write-up
Our Year 12 team have started working on their AS Coursework projects. The presentation below outlines the requirements of their write-up as well as the process they should go through when carrying out similar projects. NOTE: The presentation only outlines the first few lessons.
