While there may be people out there who think I’m an oddity for feeling like this, I met several kindred spirits at Huddersfield University this June to discuss exactly this and address the problem of dull key stage 3 ICT.

Having spent a long time revamping & firming up our schemes of work this year, I thought it might be helpful (for me as much as anyone else) to talk about the process I undertake when developing a scheme.

Step one: What do you want to achieve?

Simple case of outcomes, here. As briefly as possible, what do you expect students to come away from the project with?

Example: e-Waste

Students will learn about the problem of e-waste and use their computer skills to create an awareness campaign to spread the word to their chosen target audience.

Step two: What have you got?

Write a list. Seriously, write a list of everything that could have an impact on the project. See mine below for my e-Waste project:

• Timeframe
  • How many lessons per week?
  • How long are they?
  • How long is the key stage? 2 years? 3?
  • How many weeks should be spent on the project?
• Students
  • What do they already know? How much time will have to be spent building skills?
  • Are there any SEN/literacy issues that would greatly affect delivery of the unit?
  • How old are they? How able are they?
  • Are there opportunities for paired/group work?
• Resources
  • What resources do we already have?
  • What do we need?
  • What’s available online?
  • Are we able to buy any additional material in?

Step three: How will we know it’s been successful?

This has been complicated/helped depending on your point of view through the introduction of APP, which as I noted in a previous post I think is an excellent tool for covering every base when developing a programme of study for KS3. Because of this, it’s the yardstick I’ve chosen to measure our curriculum by, supplemented by the level descriptors. Like many schools, we’re moving from a curriculum with units based on competencies (spreadsheets, presenting information, databases) to larger, project-based units in which they learn how to do a little of each of these things. When teachers from other subjects ask why their year 10s are incapable of plotting a graph in Excel, I point to the fact that they could have gone 12 months between instances of opening up Excel, let alone using it.

ICT is an application subject, and the learning by its very nature should be applied. Having trialled a few projects last year, I’m happy to report the new approach has been far more successful than fencing off competencies – or even programs – as we have in the past.

So, when I have my focus for the project, know the amount of time & resources I have to play with, I’m able to pick out the success criteria for the project from the APP assessment grid, aiming to cover at least two Assessment Focuses.

In the example below, I’ve highlighted the areas I want to cover in the e-Safety project:

As you can see, the project is very AF3-heavy, with elements of AF1, and no AF2. As a result, I’ve planned a couple of AF2-heavy units to balance this out over the entirety of year 7, but another option would be to drop in a short data-handling exercise – possibly working with a small database of contacts to MailMerge some e-safety docs to. It’s a little crowbarred, which is why it didn’t go in, but it’s a possibility.

Step four: How are we going to do it?

Strictly speaking, a selection of suggested activities isn’t required when developing a scheme of work but as I have non-specialists working in my department, and I like to ensure everyone is on the same page, that’s what I do. Here’s the brainstorming mindmap Donna Hay (@dwsm) and I came up with for the e-Waste project at our meet:

Step five: put a bow on it

Now comes the point where we tie everything together, from resources to success criteria, in the written scheme. Most of mine have an accompanying Moodle course where the resources are hosted, so when revisiting my e-Safety scheme last half-term I spent some time checking that resources still worked (some didn’t!), added a selection of new ones and referenced them in the scheme.

My scheme of work template is something I’m quite pleased with, being as it is detailed, comprehensive but easy to dip in to. Download a blank copy to play with, or take a look at my e-Safety scheme of work by clicking the image below.

I’ve added sections in which I can address things like SEAL & PLTS; hideous, woolly notions that are otherwise extraordinarily difficult to quantify & provide evidence for. To do this, I have grids to draw from for each, so it’s a simple matter of selecting the appropriate criteria & dropping them into the scheme.

The end result is a comprehensive scheme of work in which I’ve provided my colleagues with a loose timeframe, expectations & suggestions about how to achieve them and all the resources they need… but this isn’t quite the end of the story.

Step six: You aren’t done yet!

Putting together the framework for a scheme of work is the biggest obstacle, but it’s not finished as soon as you’ve written the last activity. Projects are living, breathing things that need to evolve along with the learning they’re there to underpin. Teachers using it should add resources to the repository, tweak activities that didn’t work, or add activities they ran that did. I developed a scheme of work in my first year of teaching, and once I’d put the finishing touches on it I printed it to PDF in a fit of self-satisfaction. Schoolboy error. A scheme of work with no room to grow has a limited shelf life. Planning like this is time-consuming & labour-intensive. Don’t force yourself to redo it every year because your original plans didn’t have enough longevity in them.

The next job for the head of key stage or department – one that I could have talked about here, but felt merited a post of its own – is developing an entire key stage programme of study. Coming soon

Back in September I released my OCR Nationals unit 1 course, solely on the website. Over the course of this year, my department and I have been putting additional resources together to plug the gaps in the initial release.

These resources are now being released on a Moodle course in my new resources area as well as for download (link below), and like everything else released on this site it’s completely free to use, share & modify. Now included in the materials:

• Guideline presentation files for each assessment objective
• Video files from the Some Rights website to avoid filtering issues
• AO6: Database resources are now present on both the Moodle course and the website
• A typo in the AO5 worksheet has been corrected
• The teacher’s handbook has been updated
• Video tutorials for several functions (creating a query in Access, animating in PowerPoint) have been added

Links

• View the Moodle course in the resources area
• Download the Moodle course (.zip archive, 78.5Mb)
• Some Rights Reserved teacher page

Created to map to the OCR Nationals Level 2 framework for unit 23, these video editing resources are currently in-use in my school to great effect. Students take on the role of advertisers/VJs, creating an advert/music video to advertise a Some Rights Reserved concert aimed at promoting free music. As well as teaching aids for completing the assessment objectives set out in the unit handbook (video review worksheets, storyboard proforma, testing table, etc), 380mb of Creative Commons-licensed music, images and video are available to save directly to a networked drive for students to access.

Check out the Moodle course by logging in as a guest, or download the resources for use on your own VLE. (NB: This address is different from the first originally published due to a Moodle error)

Downloads

• Assets (zip archive) 379.4Mb
• Moodle course backup (zip archive) 88.9Mb

Our World: Cracking Walls

The Iranian elections fast became a trending topic on Twitter last summer as Internet-savvy Iranians protested the inevitable re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. This is the first documentary I’ve seen that looks at the impact the Internet is having in the Middle East. From the blurb: “BBC reporter Jiyar Gol travels across Iraq to discover the extraordinary impact the internet is having politically and socially in the country.” Posted on the BBC iPlayer today, so it should be available for a month – well worth watching.

Making Sense of Privacy & Publicity – Danah Boyd

Danah Boyd gave an excellent keynote speech about privacy & publicity at SXSW earlier this month, discussing people’s perceptions of personal privacy in the context of Facebook, Twitter, et al. Well worth a read for anyone interested in the impact of ICT on society.

Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love – Ken Fisher, Ars Technica

It’s something we tend not to think about – certainly something we don’t feel bad about – but in this age of the freemium business model reigning supreme, using ad blocking software comes with a real cost to popular websites that don’t charge for their content.

The Myth of the Techno-Utopia – Evgeny Morozov, Wall Street Journal

A fascinating essay on the issue of freedom vs censorship online.

News roundup

• BBC News: Visualising the Internet
• BBC News: Internet access is ‘a fundamental right’
• Sony accuses Beyonce of piracy for putting her videos on Youtube – Boing Boing
• The Economics of Perfect Software: Sigpwned
• Google gets little US corporate support in Internet fight with China – New York Times

• A major update to the content of Some Rights Reserved is incoming over Easter, now improved with the hindsight of a year’s use in my school. The assignment has gone down extraordinarily well, and we’re seeing significantly higher grades coming through when assessing work. If you’re looking for a well-resourced, refined model assignment for unit 1 of the OCR Nationals, have a look.
• I was reliably informed by our web developer that my unit 8 (innovation & e-commerce) Moodle course was by far the biggest drain on the web server a couple of months back. I’ve been having a blast teaching this open-ended jaunt into the theory side of ICT that I felt I’d been neglecting, and have masses of resources to share. I’m hoping to host some of them separately in order to make them available for download, but until then feel free to have a look on my school’s VLE by logging in as a guest.
• And in the final dose of what some might consider OCR Nationals overload, I’ve redesigned our materials for unit 23 (video editing), and intend to share them once I’ve had the chance to polish them off over the Easter holidays.

I have to say I’m pretty happy with the ~300 hits per day this site has been getting, considering no new content has been posted since September, but it’s time to blow off the cobwebs and get back down to the stuff I’m here for.

Updated: click here for details

Good lord it’s been a long time since I made a post. The reality is that I’ve been working on this for about four months, in and around everything else that’s been going on. It’s now just about ready for release, so here it is.

What is it?

Some Rights Reserved is a resource to be used to complete the OCR Nationals in ICT unit 1 course. The website contains resources to be used to create the required documents, presentations, databases & spreadsheets – all with an intellectual property/Creative Commons twist. The teacher’s handbook provides information on assessment, guidelines for how to complete the assessment objectives & exemplar work.

The project is based around the idea of sharing ideas – the written word, music, video – for free. As such, I’m releasing it for free.

So feel free to visit the website, and the teacher’s area for the handbook.

This is an event – the first resource to be posted borne of collaboration! Debbie Jones – @teach_ict – of Teach-ICT fame very kindly put together two of the handouts in this set covering the moral issues in ICT.

The social & moral implications of ICT are something we both have a passion for, yet I remember being taught about them when I was a student in a desperately dry, detached way. These handouts are designed to generate discussion – I’ll be using them with my OCR Unit 8 groups, splitting in to groups of 3 for discussion, then opening the floor up to the class after they describe their scenario. Subjects covered:

• File sharing
• Plagiarism
• Snooping
• Web addiction
• Censorship
• Web medicine

I hope they’re useful – we had fun making them!

Download handouts (PDF – 3mb)

There’s nothing terribly sophisticated about them, just a combination of conditional formatting, IF statements & Google’s handy “publish as webpage” feature, but they’re a very simple way to represent progress in an easily understandable way, and have helped my students a lot. It also cuts down on the amount of formative feedback necessary, so I can limit my comments to covering quality & content.

I’ve put the short walkthrough of how to use them effectively at the bottom of the post.

Unit 1: Skills for business

Unit 3: Digital imaging

Unit 8: Innovation in ICT & e-commerce

Unit 21: Computer graphics

Unit 23: Creating video

How to use them:

On the first sheet the only things you need to fill in are students’ names and forms – these are then referenced on each subsequent sheet. The front sheet contains conditional formatting in the form field to correspond with my school’s community colours – you may want to remove that.

From here you start marking work – say we start with AO1, you traffic light the bits the student has done by putting 1 for in-progress (yellow) or 2 for complete (green). Traffic lighting means Barry can very quickly see that he’s doing well, while Stanley needs to pull his socks up.

Once you’ve done, you move all the way to the right, and put a number from 1-4 in the penultimate column, 1 being below pass, 2 being pass, 3 being merit, 4 being distinction. The cell to the right of it has an IF statement that shows the grade for the assessment objective, and this is then fed into the front sheet.

I thought about using a lookup to count up the cells ticked to the left, but as much as writing that would be a minor pain in the arse (especially with kids missing a pass criteria but getting merit ones), I’ve found that when a student has completed all of the requirements for a distinction but their evidence is badly formatted, I don’t want them to see “distinction” for it until they’ve sorted it out.

This shows the front, overview sheet again, with the marks for AO1 updated.

Hope they prove useful.

If there is no citation for images, it’s because they’re from licensed stock collections, or they’re mine. The entire collection (of 17 posters at the time of writing) weighs in at around 145mb with each file being 300 DPI A3 size. I haven’t finished yet, and I’m more than happy to hear suggestions for posters you’d like to see – just add them in the comments at the bottom of the post.

Examples:

Download the entire collection as a zip file (192mb).

Update (22/08/09): Thanks to Chris who kindly let me know that box.net impose bandwidth restrictions on their free users. The posters are now available to download from james-greenwood.com as well as box.net. I’m uploading a zip file of the entire collection as I write this.

I’m toying with the idea of making a website devoted to resources specifically geared towards developing thinking skills, and awareness of the wider world… I try as far as I can to avoid the “trivial pursuits” Jamie McKenzie argued so eloquently against. Hell, it’s not as if I work hard enough (cough).

Anyhow, thought I’d share my latest effort comparing Facebook users to populations, which I am well aware is like comparing apples with legwarmers, but a fun factlet nonetheless.

Download full-size A3 version here.