Got back from my holiday in Cornwall yesterday and the new term is looming. Time to crank up the work brain again and finish off that very over-optimistic To Do list I compiled back in July. I need to make sure I've got everything possible sorted as it's going to be a very challenging term. The school was given notice to improve last October and one of the main targets was to improve our A*-C including English and Maths. The target was 50% - our results came in at 41% - hardly any change from last year so it looks like the writing is on the wall re Special Measures. The fact that a massive amount of work has been done in the last year and the results hinged on less than 20 students cuts no ice.
That said, the only thing I have control over is the department I manage. We have made real progress in the last 12 months. If I'm playing the numbers game Year 11 results have improved from 74% to 98% for 1 GCSE equivalent and from 14% to 38% for 2 GCSE equivalent. However this is OCR Nationals options groups and students had 5 hours a fortnight for 2 years. Practically all should have achieved the 2 GCSE. Unfortunately when I started 12 months ago very little of the course had been completed in year 10 and we have had to cram most of the course into one year. A similar clear-up had to be undertaken with the year 10 core ICT groups who do not have ICT in year 11. So far 75% of the cohort have passed - not bad seeing as we have have had only around 35 hours to cover the whole course.
I've had less success in trying to find a replacement for the OCR Nationals. I've researched thoroughly and discussed endlessly and thought deeply and blogged repeatedly and in the end I'm doing nowt this year. I can't find a KS4 course which meets the needs of my core ICT groups and given that the government have still not come up with any concrete decisions in response to the Wolf report there seems little point in compromising and spending time and energy developing a course which may need to be scrapped in twelve months time. I thoroughly dislike OCR Nationals and desperately want to see the back of it but for the next year at least stability and regrouping is more important than a knee jerk lurch to another unsuitable course. I found I couldn't overcome my embarrassment at the thought of delivering ECDL training and other qualifications I have considered would require a massive amount of work to make them into meaningful and engaging courses. So for now I've tidied up my new spec resources and am concentrating on ensuring that students have as meaningful a course as possible and are achieving the best they can within the constraints we have.
Things are brighter with the BTEC level 2 course which I implemented as the option course. The new year 10 course is oversubscribed, despite students having experienced a year of OCR Nationals and I have been able to implement both the Designing Computer Games and Computer Systems units which have gone down well. I've spent quite a bit of time over the holiday finishing writing several units so that students have a choice of units and can work more independently.
KS3 is what I need to spend some time on in this last week of the holiday. I've had to completely rewrite the curriculum over the last year as most of the stuff being delivered was still based on the old strategy lessons and was totally focused on MS Office. Given everything else going on over the last year I've been writing it piecemeal and for some of the topics running the same lessons for both year 7 and year 8. With OCR Nationals starting in year 9 it was my last chance to teach year 8 some interesting stuff such as Scratch programming. Also the majority of teachers for ICT in KS3 are non-specialists and I didn't want to introduce too many new things at once. I've written google sites for year 7 and year 8 but I now need to go back and map out the SOWs against the APP levels and get the big picture - what is missing and what didn't work? Also the duplicated stuff for year 8 needs to be replaced.
On top of all this is the increasing debate over the ICT curriculum. I've been involved in #ictcurric and the related moodle and google sites resource banks for a while and there has been much debate on twitter using the #ictcurric hashtag. This week Google's Eric Schmidt has raised the profile of the debate further. In his MacTaggart lecture he said he had been 'flabbergasted' to learn that computer science was not taught as standard in UK schools'
and stated:-
"Your IT curriculum focuses on teaching how to use software, but gives no insight into how it's made. That is just throwing away your great computing heritage,"
This has been picked up in this Guardian article today:-
Many blogs are being written looking at what can be done about the current state of affairs, these being two that have floated across my twitter stream in the past hour or so:-
But what does this translate into in a school like mine which is struggling to stay out of special measures and is desperate for the results that a course like OCR Nationals can deliver? A school that teaches KS3 ICT as a cross-curricular SOW with RS and PHSE, using non-specialist teachers? A school so under pressure from OFSTED that it felt unable to release me for the training required to run Apps for Good as an extra-curricular activity? A school that has yet to implement student email accounts? How do you implement the changes required, given such a background?
So far, step by step has been the answer. I've introduced game programming via Scratch in year 7 and 8 and the Game design unit in BTEC. I've introduced more impact of ICT topics such as one on social media:-
I have also introduced the BTEC Computer Systems unit. Budgetary constraints (ironically from having to pay for printing all the screen prints for OCR Nationals ) means that I unlikely to be able to fund the hardware necessary for the BTEC Installing Computer Hardware unit that I'd hoped to run this year (unless some of my scrounging/begging efforts pay off).
Going forward I'd like to run the BTEC software development units but my programming skills are very rusty - I was a programmer in the early / mid 90s but it's years since I programmed in anger. I've got my fingers crossed that I can brush my programming skills by getting onto this pilot:-
I already have Alice and Kodu installed on the currciulum desktops and just need some time to get to grips with the applications myself. However, given the staffing of KS3 ICT I think some of this is going to have to be extra curricular which will reduce the number of students I'm going to be able to reach.
I have to get rid of OCR Nationals next year but am still no nearer to finding a replacement. I'd also like to introduce GCSE Computing but this would probably be at the expense of losing one of my BTEC groups.
So next step is to sit down with some flip chart paper and lots of coloured marker pens and start to map out what I'm aiming for next and how to get there. Hopefully by the end of the week I'll be able to blog about what I've come up with. Any ideas or suggestions gratefully received.
I usually use this blog to reflect on my teaching practice and document my progress as I strive to become a better teacher. However tonight on the eve of tomorrow's strike I feel I need to explain why I feel so strongly about the issues involved that I am striking for only the second time in my life.
First a little background. I'm 47, a widow and a single parent. I took my degree in Computer Science and Manufacturing as a mature student ( obtained a 2.1 if Mr Gove is interested ) and worked for HSBC for 13 years as variously an analyst programmer, process manager and project manager before deciding to retrain as a teacher in 1995. My reasons for doing were hopelessly idealistic - I wanted a job which made a difference and gave me a an opportunity to pass on my lifelong love of learning. Thanks to the additional bursary of the (now scrapped) Fast Track teacher training scheme I was in the fortunate position of being able to afford a sizeable pay cut in order to put this idealism in to practice.
During my time at HSBC I managed teams of over 90 people and developed IT systems which have been rolled out across the country. I was eligible for annual bonuses of nearly 40% of my annual salary and I still have the non contributory final salary pension which was part of the recruitment package when I was first employed ( since closed to new recruits ). I worked hard, was successful and regularly got high achiever ratings for my performance reviews ( resulting in higher bonuses ). I sometimes had to work late and occasionally at weekends when there was an impending deadline but I never had to work as hard or for as many hours as I now find myself doing week-in, week-out as Subject Leader for ICT. I try to keep Friday nights and Saturdays free ( although at times of pressure this slips ) but other than that I am working every evening until at least 10pm and most of Sunday. At least half of most holidays I am also working. It's a punishing schedule and not one I could envisage continuing with until I'm 66.
Part of the reason for the long hours is that I'm passionate about my subject and keen to be involved with national collaborative projects such as the #ictcurric resource bank. However a large proportion of my time is spent marking coursework ( I have 7 100% coursework classes in KS4 alone ), writing reports, producing resources and planning lessons. ICT is a fast moving subject and I need to continually update my subject knowledge. I've only been teaching 5 years but in that time I've taught 7 different ICT courses at KS4 alone. And don't get me started on the ever changing whims of central government, the changes in goalpost and the jumping through hoops that we are continually subjected to.
Despite all this I love my job and would not wish to leave the teaching profession. For better or worse this is what I signed up for and I still derive great job satisfaction from seeing students I have taught succeed. Only last night I had a former student contact me via Facebook to tell me that he had obtained a merit in his BTEC level 3 course. However I feel that the current government has no respect whatsoever for teachers and is treating us with utter contempt. We are subjected to constant sniping from the education secretary who seems to see no value in any any form of education which does not mirror his own public school experience.
The pensions issue is the final straw. Teachers had their pensions reviewed in 2006 and agreement was reached then to make them affordable and sustainable. Now the government has turned round and wants us to pay more (up from 6.8% to 9.8% of annual salary), get less and wait longer. I'm likely to be paying an extra £80 a month ( when my salary is frozen for 2 years ) and lose £1800 per year in pension if I retire at 60. Can you imagine buying a personal pension and having the insurance company deciding to impose such change of contract terms? Teaching takes energy in the classroom and a massive workload outside the classroom - I cannot envisage being able to carry on at the current rate when I'm 66. Presumably this is what the government is banking on with many teachers being forced to take early retirement and therefore reduce their pensions still further.
When you apply for a job you take into account the whole benefits package. When I worked for HSBC it was a non-contributory final salary pension, annual performance related bonus and a good salary. Even though I have now left they are honouring the pension terms they offered me at the interview. In general though the usual agreement in the private sector is larger salaries but lower pensions. In contrast the public sector generally offers lower salaries but has a more generous pension scheme - it's a trade off - now we are being asked to take the lower salaries and a lower pension. Put simply it's not fair.
As a final note - tomorrow's Independent front page:-
I've not written any posts for months. Too many challenges at school with OFSTED breathing down our necks and too many other calls on my time. Also, to be honest, at times I've been struggling to remain optimistic both about my own practice and the state of ICT in education in general. However the fog is starting to clear a little and it's time to start thinking about planning for next year. By far the biggest decision I have to make is what to do about the core ICT course for KS4.
Currently we are delivering OCR Nationals as core ICT for all of year 9 and 10 for one hour a week and BTEC IT for Practitioners as an option for year 10 and 11. As I've previously written I find OCR Nationals to be all that is wrong with ICT qualifications - students following a ticklist, taking screen shot after screen shot to prove what they already know. It was depressing to hear from a fellow ICT HoD that her school was having to resubmit their unit 1, in part, because the students didn't have a screen shot of having opened a file ( to join the screen shots of finding a file and selecting a file to open ). Similarly we have been picked up in the past for not having a screen shot of before the student has created a folder or showing what happens when you put the wrong password into a password protected document. What possible educational value does this serve?
So I've been looking for alternatives most of the year. The first thing I had to find out was whether I had a choice to make. With the eBacc not including ICT and the future of vocational qualifications in the balance post Wolf Report there are tales on the internet of schools dropping core ICT at KS4. Given some of the difficulties we've experienced this year with reluctant recruits I wouldn't be totally heartbroken if SLT went for this option. However I received assurances that core ICT would remain and that I was free to decide what course to deliver.
So over to me. Got to admit an early contender is do nowt ( as a former project manager I was always told that you should give this option serious consideration ). When I started as subject leader in September every single course was new to me - OCR Nationals ( old and new spec ), AS Edexcel Applied and at my instigation the new spec for BTEC ICT Practitioners. I had to write all these courses plus a total rewrite of year 7 and 8. I'm tired and I don't want to write anymore courses this year. We need a year of stability without more changes. Added to which I have a cast iron excuse - there has been no decision by the government re vocational courses - what's the point of writing another course that might have to be scrapped once the government finally get their act together?
However in my heart I know that this is a truly poor course that adds little to students knowledge and understanding of ICT. And it is unlikely to survive post Wolf report. OCR have already said that the last registration in it's current form is August next year. Can I in all conscientiousness subject another year group to this course? And on a purely practical note we currently have 17 level 2 classes on 100% coursework courses being delivered and marked by just two teachers - the marking load is crippling.
So what to put in it's place? I've blogged previously about trying to combine Functional skills and the Diploma linked level 2 project. My concern with this is putting the whole year group through a 2 hour exam. Even if there is a level 1 and 2 option the logistics of putting over 160 students through an exam that requires access to ICT suites with no more than 15 students to a room in a one week window is challenging to say the least. Also the course would need to be very carefully written to ensure a meaningful course.
I really like BTEC First IT Practitioners which is what we deliver as an option at KS4. You can make it a really techie course by choosing the computer systems and installing hardware options. It is also flexible enough to go for a more creative option with animation and computer game design. For a couple of my students it's also a business course by choosing units such as the Doing business online unit. However it is not suitable for core ICT. In the time available ( one hour a week for 2 years ) we could only offer the compulsory first unit - Communicating in the IT industry and one optional unit which would not give a very rounded course. Also unless we also ran the level 1 option it would not be suitable for the whole cohort. Given that we teach mixed ability groups this could be difficult to manage.
I've had a look at BTEC IT Users which is a possible contender. At level 2 is has a 1/2 GCSE equivalent Award ( 70-80 GLH ), a 1 GCSE equivalent Certificate ( 120-130 GLH ) and a 3 GCSE equivalent Diploma ( 280-285 GLH ). There are also foundation and level 1 options available. There are 3 fundamental units which cover Functional skills so could put higher ability students in for the exam. However these are not compulsory and there are a wide range of units to choose from, including Using Collaborative Technologies and a Specialist Software unit which allows you to use any software to meet the criteria ( Scratch or other game design software for example ). According to the flyer it has been developed in consultation with employers to address skills gaps. My thinking if we go for this option is an initial unit taught to all students and then using a google site and the VLE to offer range of units that students can work more independently on. This would allow the more able students to achieve the higher awards and allow them to tailor the course to their own interests. However there seems to be little in the way of resources available from Edexcel ( few model assignments and the only text book available is foundation and level 1 ) and it would mean a lot of work in developing the assignments. It's also 100% coursework so no let up in our marking load. I emailed Edexcel a couple of weeks ago querying whether a student could be entered for both the BTEC IT User and BTEC Practitioner course and have not received a response so far. As I've no plans to change our option course this is a crucial piece of information.
The BCS Digital Cre8tor course is a course I have a soft spot for. It has modules on animation, photography, videoing, audio and moving image language as well as units on creating DVDs, multimedia presentations and sharing online. All the resources are available online and students are able to work independently to complete the projects. It has 1/2, 1 and 2 GCSE options and is an engaging course which also lends itself well to enrichment day and after school activities. However it covers none of the MS Office / traditional ICT skills, a good thing in some ways but it is preparing the students sufficiently for using ICT in other subjects and in the world of work? It would also cause some logistical challenges re practical work.
The most controversial option I'm considering is the EDCL also from BCS. Prior to becoming a teacher I worked for HSBC for 13 years and the bank sponsored all employees to take the course. It is well known and well regarded by employers and covers all the basic skills required for ( non IT specialist ) employment. The Complete Learning Solution package is £55 per student ( OCR Nationals is £42.50 ) and includes online resources, unlimited access to diagnostic tests and exam fees for each of the 7 units ( resits £5 ). Exams are online and on demand and there is no coursework hence reducing the workload for the department. The first 3 units are at level 1 and result in a certificate of ECDL Essentials. These units cover basic housekeeping / file management ( a weakness of many students ), using the internet and emails and safety and security. Certification at this stage means that even with the whole cohort taking the course they should all come out with something ( OCR Nationals minimum grade is a Pass at level 2 ). The next 4 units are at level 2 and cover Word Processing, Spreadsheets, Presentations and Improving Productivity with IT. My thinking if we went for this option is to use the diagnostics to identify gaps in knowledge and concentrate on teaching students what they do not know rather than getting them to prove what they already know ( a key OFSTED criticism of ICT teaching ). With the online exams on demand more able students could fast track through the course leaving time for more engaging activities. Ideally this could be Digital Cre8tor ( though cost may well be a factor here as DC would be an additional £39 per student ). So why is it a controversial option? Possibly because there is no figleaf of higher order thinking skills or 'engaging' projects to work on. It's a skills training course pure and simple and as ICT teachers we don't like to see ourselves as simply MS Office application trainers. If you've read any of my previous posts you will know that it is antithesis of everything I'm trying to achieve as a teacher. And yet this year trying to cram a cohort of reluctant year 10 students through the 1 GCSE OCR Nationals in one hour a week ( with very little work having been completed in year 9 ) I am often not even achieving the training of MS applications objective. Many of my students probably could not complete the same task independently a week later - we have simply produced the screen shots required to obtain the qualification. Maybe ECDL is the more honest qualification - it does what it says on the can and doesn't pretend to be anything more.
I've other options still to research. Nick Jackson has suggested MS Office Specialist Certification or Adobe certification. GCSEs I've discounted as a whole cohort core option but maybe I need to look again. Trouble is I'm running out of time and may end up with the default 'do nowt' option of another year of OCR Nationals.
This week's Education White paper - The Importance of Teaching - has given much food for thought and not much of it positive. A white paper on teaching in the 21st century which mentions blazers as many times as ICT ( and even then refers to ICT only in terms of sharing services ) does not bode well for equipping students to be ready to participate successfully in the Digital Age. Similarly the changes to the league tables so that school are measured on the number of students that get five good GCSEs in English, Maths, Science, a humanities subject and a modern foreign language gives no recognition of the need to be digitally literate. Placing these subjects as the key measures of school success will also squeeze out other subjects in the curriculum. ( In additional this narrow interpretation of success, harking back to a 1950s curriculum will condemn a large number of students, and their schools, to be labelled as failures ).
A final blow to ICT as a discrete subject is the indication in articles like this one from Toby Young - Cornucopia of Goodies - that vocational qualifications will no longer be included in school league tables. In many schools ICT has retained it's place on the KS4 curriculum as a result of being able to deliver up to four GCSEs to the league tables via qualifications such as GNVQ and more recently OCR Nationals. As these qualifications are coursework only and can be delivered in far less curriculum time than traditional GCSEs they have been seen as a cash cow for results, particularly for lower ability students. Removing them from the league tables will seriously threaten their place in the timetable. Most ICT departments are already starting to review the ICT GCSE options and will face a battle for curriculum time if they wish to continue to offer vocational courses.
So decisions need to be made. Through my involvement with #ictcurric I am aware that there is a lot of progress in developing the Key Stage 3 curriculum so that it is relevant and engaging. As I've previously blogged, however, all this seems to come to an end as soon as students enter Key Stage 4. I've taught a range of level 2 ICT courses and not been entirely satisfied with any of them. DiDA was on the right lines but I felt that it foundered on the assessment with students struggling to understand the mark criteria. I'm personally a fan of BTECs which I feel gives the opportunity to develop different strands such as hardware maintenance / upgrading as well as the applications route. However I'm having to have a bit of a rethink at the moment with regards to the new specification. For the extended certificate both Unit 1 and Unit 2 are mandatory. I've developed a combined scheme of work focusing on job hunting in the IT industry:-
The first assignment which involved students creating a blog went well but progress has been slower on the next two assignments - characteristics that employers are looking for and writing a CV and covering letter - which I'm now appreciating are very focused on literacy skills. I have four EAL students in the class and several lower ability students and it's just not engaging enough in it's current form. I need to have a rethink on how I could cover the criteria in a diferrent way or alternatively break up the unit by mixing it with a more practical unit.
I have inherited a situation whereby all year 9 and year 10 students complete the single award of OCR Nationals on one hour a week ( with no year 11 provision ). I was not a fan of OCR Nationals before I started to teach it and now I've had three months teaching it I am even less so. For the single award only one optional half unit can be covered together with the mandatory unit 1. For a number of reasons, a sizeable number of my year 10 students made very little progress last year and we are now still ploughing our way through such mind-numbingly boring tasks as creating a 3 slide presentation or taking screen shots of creating folders and shortcuts. If I was starting from scratch or had more curriculum time I'd be rewriting it to give it some sort wider context and make it more relevant and engaging. However faced with trying to get the entire cohort through by the end of the year I find myself at times delivering the course in the very manner criticised by last year's OFSTED report into ICT teaching -
'Accreditation of the vocational qualifications is based mostly on the assessment of coursework... Consequently, they are often demonstrating what they can already do rather than being taught new and more difficult skills. Sometimes, teachers direct students’ work too much. In some of the lessons observed during the survey, teachers led their students through the steps necessary to demonstrate that their work met the accreditation criteria. Students were able to meet the criteria, whether or not they had understood what they had done.'(Page 31)
My only alternative, unless I can get additional time in year 11, is that half the cohort will fail. However I do not feel that I am developing any sort of digital literacy skills with these students or giving them the transferable IT skills they will need in the future. I am simply processing them through a qualification so that they can obtain a GCSE which will count towards their 5 A* to Cs. If excluding vocational courses from the league tables removes the pressure to deliver an ICT course in such a manner it may not be such a bad thing. The danger is that other, more worthwhile, vocational courses get thrown out with the OCR Nationals bathwater and it leave us with the dilemma of what to put in it's place.
The obvious answer is GCSE ICT. But we need to ask why so many schools have abandoned this option in the past. Apart from the lure of multiple GCSEs in the same timescales, many felt that the GCSE syllabuses were outdated and not engaging for students. James Greenwood @jpgreenwood, having reviewed various options, is of the opinion that the new Edexcel ICT GCSE is 'the best of a bad lot'. ICT departments also suffer from being seen as a choice for less able or less academic students and GCSEs may not be appropriate for many of them. Purists may be considering Computing GCSEs as a rigorous academic option which will prepare students for post 16 Computing and university courses. However in a school such as mine this would be appropriate for only a small number of students making the delivery not viable.
James Greenwood in a recent twitter post had the following suggestion:-
'My solution is single award GCSE in 2yrs. Can cover syllabus, *and* deeper learning in that time'
I'm currently toying with a similar idea. Having previously criticised ICT Functional Skills I'm now starting to think about building a Key Stage 4 course around the functional skills qualification but combining it with the project qualification brought in as part of the diploma. This allows a student to investigate a subject of their choice in depth. As both qualifications are worth a half GCSE they would add a full GCSE to the regrettably all important league tables. Far more importantly however it could form the basis of a project-based learning qualification which allowed students to develop digital literacy skills in a context of their own choosing. Such a course would need to be carefully written to incorporate project management, research, analysis and presentation skills. With the new functional skills exams focusing more on presentation of information rather than data handling completing the project could cover most of what is needed to pass the exam. Functional skills and the project are both available at level 1 and level 2 giving a better provision than the level 2 only courses. This would give a good grounding in basic ICT / digital literacy skills as a core provision which could support study across the curriculum. Alongside this ideally I would like to run 2 options groups, one GCSE ( either ICT or Computing ) and one BTEC to offer a broad curriculum.
Early stages in the idea at the moment but any comments / suggestions welcome.
My daughter has just started year 6 and is already getting worried about 'big school' next year. As I've already explained to her, year 7s are easily spotted as they have big bags and shiny shoes. They are also always getting lost. Trouble is all this could have described me at the beginning of September as I started at a new school for the first time in my career. I never escaped my second PGCE placement school becoming an NQT at the school only a few weeks after qualifying as a teacher. While the first day was still nerve-racking, having to stand up and introduce myself, I already had friends to sit with at the Inset day and knew my way round the school. This year I've not only started at a school where I know nobody but I've also started as subject leader. Scary stuff.
I started this post two weeks into term hoping to jot down my initial thoughts on the new role and the challenges I faced. Then the challenges started to mount ( including OFSTED last week ) and this post got put on one side while I tried to get to grips with all the urgent issues that needed my attention. So finally, with half term now rapidly approaching, I need to take time to take stock and review progress so far.
I think it's fair to say that my new school is quite a bit more challenging than my previous school. Attainment of students on entry is lower than average, our results are similarly below average and behaviour of some students is an issue. On the plus side we have just moved into a brand new building with impressive facilities and there are a large number of committed teachers who believe in the school.
The ICT department has had a chequered history with less than impressive results and in common with many schools has followed the path from GCSEs to DiDA to OCR Nationals. Thankfully it has not gone down the Diploma route for ICT although there a small number of students taking Diplomas at partner schools who therefore need to pass IT functional skills. In year 7 and year 8 ICT is taught as part of a cross-curricular iLearn SOW. This has the advantage of providing a context for the ICT and allows me to see the same group for 6 hours a fortnight with 3 of those in an ICT room. However it means that most year 7 and year 8 students are taught by non-specialists. This coupled with year 9 starting OCR Nationals at the start of year means that I currently have concerns about covering the KS3 curriculum, particularly the higher APP levels.
One of my first successes with KS3 was the agreement to sign up to Rafi-ki, an online learning community with schools from over a 100 countries. The community allows students to communicate safely ( it is a fully moderated site ) with other students all over the world and collaborate on projects with them. I've used Rafi-ki at my previous school and it went down very well with the students. However I never managed to break it out of the ICT ghetto and have it adopted across the curriculum. This looks much more promising at the new school, particularly as I am teaching the iLearn curriculum. We have already started to explore setting up links with schools in Napal, Uganda and Ghana as well as being invited to join a Comenius project with a school near Canterbury involving schools from Poland, Romania, Italy, Germany and Turkey. The students have just started to create their home pages which gives me the opportunity to bring in some e-safety messages about what is appropriate and safe to have on a social networking home page.
I've also set up google sites for both year 7 and year 8 and incorporated the iLearn lessons as well as the ICT lessons:-
My main challenge with KS3 is the lack of student school emails. I'd started to take emails for granted at my previous school and it is only now I'm starting to realised how much I need the students to have an email address to sign up for various web 2.0 applications. Until our VLE ( Frog ) is up and running I'm shut out of igoogle and google docs unless I go down the google apps route. With the new VLE in the pipeline google apps is probably not the way forward at the moment as I think it would lead to more confusion.
At KS4 all year 9 and year 10 are taking OCR Nationals along with the year 11 Option group. The year 10 Option group were doing additional units for OCR Nationals but I felt it did not give them a sufficiently in depth ICT course and have switched them to the BTEC First Extended Certificate. My aim is to offer two pathways for the BTEC, one software / application based e.g. websites, databases, possibly games programming and the other a hardware option, including units such as hardware installation and troubleshooting. The latter option is dependent on funding for the necessary kit. Again I've set up google sites for each of the courses:-
My main concern with KS4 is the lack of progress many seem to have made in the first year of their course. Both year 10 and year 11 are significantly behind where they should be and there is a lot of work ahead to get them back on track. The new specification for OCR Nationals is also causing problems. Year 10 started the course in year 9 and so were registered for the old spec. However we have had several students join the school in year 10 this year and they will need to be registered for the new specification - this means they will need to complete 3 units rather than the 2 the old spec required. Under the current curriculum model there is no provision for core ICT in year 11. This is something I'm hoping can be changed as the new specification has 100 guided learning hours and it will not be possible to complete the course in one hour a week for 2 years.
There is also a gap in our provision re a level 1 course for KS4. There are a fair number of students for whom a level 2 course, even one as straightforward as OCR Nationals, is not appropriate. I need to review the options and look to introduce a course more suited to their needs.
Year 12 is looking brighter. We have 13 students taking the Edexcel Applied ICT AS and I am really enjoying teaching the first unit - The Information Age. The unit covers the impact of ICT on society and gives the students a broad scope to research different aspects. Lots of my links and videos picked up from Twitter and elsewhere are coming in handy:-
Going forward I would like to offer BTEC level 3 in addition to the AS to broaden the provision on offer and also offer BTEC level 2 at post 16 if staffing allows.
Finally there are 3 wider school issues which I need to spend some time on, namely our filtering policy, e-safety and staff CPD. I'm getting very frustrated that YouTube is blocked in school, even for teachers. I use it extensively in my lessons and am currently having to use Zamzar to download videos I want to use. I am also having problems with a prevailing culture amongst students that ICT lessons = playing on games unless repeatedly caught by the teacher. While the current filtering system blocks YouTube it cannot provide me with an audit trail so I can identify the students using internet access inappropriately. With amazingly good timing this post floated past me on the Twitter stream:-
This is the first stage of working towards the ICT mark accreditation.
I delivered my first e-learning workshops at our recent INSET and they went down well. Unlike my previous school there has not been much work done on e-learning and the workshops gave me an opportunity to revisit some old favourites of mine such as Wordle, Edmodo and Piratepad
So lots to do. It's been a busy and very tiring five weeks but I can already see some progress and ( apart from the OFSTED visit ) I'm enjoying the new challenges. Now lets see if I can get back into keeping this blog updated regularly, if only so I can organise my thoughts.
Before becoming a teacher I worked for 13 years for one of the major high street banks. During that time I made something of a speciality of not fitting in. That's not to say that I was a Johnny No Mates ( at least I hope ), rather that I managed to to be slightly out of step with the thinking of those around me. When I worked in technical teams I was the non-techie, the one more interested in the business operations side of the systems I was helping to develop. So much so that I ended up 'going native' and working as a manager in the processing centre I had designed a system for ( and ending up as an end user of my own system - now there's end user testing with a vengeance ). Once out of the technical area I was the non banker amongst bankers. Far from being a hindrance to my career it enabled me carve my own niche. My perspective was at a tangent to others and my ideas a little left of field. And this was valued and rewarded. During my most productive time I was developing a management information system and rolling it out across several business areas. I was totally 'in my element' and firing on all cylinders - I could almost feel the synapses in my brain connecting I was so focused on what I was doing.
Then slowly it started to change - my element started to be perceived as my comfort zone. I started coming under pressure to get involved with projects I had no interest in and which I felt I had little to contribute to. Increasingly I was expected to become like all the other project managers in the department and fit in. This culminated in a course called 'Leading to be Customer Driven'. This was the bank's drive to turn us all into lean, mean, selling machines, maximising profit for the shareholder. Your bosses, colleagues and people you managed were all invited to give you feedback on how to become more 'customer focused' and then you spent 3 days on a residential course coming up with an action plan on how to achieve this. My feedback was fairly unanimous - you are good at what you do but you need to get more involved in the business side.
The first session of the 3 day course was reviewing your feedback and drawing up action points on a flip chart. I dutifully drew up my list, stop doing the stuff I enjoyed and start doing the stuff that bored me ( I paraphrase but you get the drift ). The facilitator came over and read my carefully prepared, toeing the party line action plan and asked me a question - so how will you feel when you've achieved this plan? Bored, frustrated and utterly demotivated was my answer. Maybe you need to look at the plan again he said before moving on to the next flip chart.
The course turned out to be one of the turning points in my life. Throughout the three days I battled with the conflict between my competitive nature and my drive to succeed and the growing realisation that I was in the wrong job. The course became a sort of group therapy as I talked and occasionally sobbed my way through my decision making process. By the end of the course I was resolved that it was time for me to move on. During the final washup I received a piece of advice that I've followed ever since - 'nurture your inner anarchist'.
So what has all this navel gazing got to do with education? Ken Robinson basically. Last year I watched his TED talk on schools killing creativity and about how we could be helping students to be in their element.
This has bee followed this year with a second TED talk:-
From my own experience I know that when I am working in my element I am happy and fulfilled and making a difference. When I am being forced to conform I am miserable and disruptive and demotivated. How many of my students have I just described? How do I reconcile this when I have 30 students in front of me and targets to meet? When a student not in his or her element is capable of totally destroying a lesson for the rest? Not got an answer and not looking for a Dead Poets - Captain, my Captain moment. Just shouldn't we be able to harness those inner anarchist and nurture them? Looks like I'm a hopeless optimist to the last.
On Friday I decided to take a flyer and do a lesson on Twitter with my year 9 group. This was a bit of a last minute decision. We had been doing some work to prepare them for Functional Skills, a SOW based round the World Cup and Fantasy football, using spreadsheets and databases. This had gone well but was starting to lose momentum now that England had been knocked out and the competition was drawing to a close. Additionally I had gradually become aware that lots of my students were using Twitter ( partly as a result of the use of Twitter as an unofficial 'back channel' in my lessons ). This had come as a surprise to me ( that they were using Twitter, not that teenagers are occasionally off task in lessons ) as conventional wisdom is that teenagers are not interested in Twitter- Teens don't blog or twitter from where I found this graph:-
However a quick show of hands at the start of the lesson confirmed that over half the class had a Twitter account. Was the research wrong or just out of date? The number of items in the news about Twitter has greatly increased over the last year. Or were my students not typical? Twitter had featured a few times in our lessons over the last year so maybe this had raised the profile. We used this video as part of the Impact of Social Media lessons:-
We had also looked at the use of Hashtags, #uksnow after the school was closed due to snow and #getmehome after several students were stranded abroad due to the ash cloud.
Having only decided the night before to do the lesson on Twitter I had a rather late night pulling together resources. Fortunately I had plenty of articles and tools bookmarked so started to trawl through my Diigo account. I always like to have a video playing while the students are coming in and logging on and this one fitted the bill:-
Here's what I came up with, needs tidying up a bit:-
I also did a shout out to my PLN to say Hi and where they were from to highlight the use of hashtags and to show how Twitter can connect you across the world and was really pleased at how many people kindly responded:-
Students were surprised by the number of people round the world speaking to them.
My main objective of the lesson ( the first of 2 ) was to ensure that students understood how to use Twitter safely. My concern was that many may be using it as an MSN or Facebook substitute as it was not blocked in school and may not understand the risks of having a public account. I got the students who were already using Twitter to explain what it was and how they were using it. It was interesting that they described it in terms of IM not mentioning the 140 character limit or RT, DM etc A couple could explain the use of hashtags so we started by looking at the hashtag I had set up and students with accounts posted tweets using it ( I wanted to make sure that those who did not have an account did not feel pressured to create one ). We had the obligatory:-
as well as the slightly stranger:-
Overall, however, the students were somewhat tongue-tied - as one said to me later 'it's no fun now you are letting us'. Remember this lesson was about Twitter itself, not using it as a classroom tool to aid another topic. We moved on to the use of different twitter tools as a way of explaining more features of Twitter. I put Twitter Followers on the whiteboard with my Twitter account to show a visual representation of followers. They were impressed by this and wanted to know how to get lots more followers, this being an aim in itself, like collecting cigarette cards when I was kid. Next we looked at TwitterSheep which creates a word cloud from your followers bios. This is mine:-
No prizes for guessing the sort of people in my PLN. When my students tried this app most were coming up with more or less blank pages. Hardly anyone had filled in their bios. I explained the process I go through when deciding to follow someone back. First I look at their bios to see if they are a teacher or in education, then I look at what they are posting to see whether it is stuff I am interested in. If they have not filled in their bios I am very unlikely to follow back. I also explained how I use Twitter partly to find new ideas for lessons. Wordle, Edmodo, Diigo and Solvr which we have used in lessons this year have all come from suggestions from my PLN as have many other resources, articles and ideas.
With students starting to fill in bios I thought it was time to reinforce the e-safety aspect and got them to google themselves. Despite having done this exercise in the past they were still shocked that google could find them, particularly if they had a Twitter account. I showed them the search results of googling my name to reinforce just how much Google can find ( in my case I deliberately cultivated a positive online presence ). I also went through some case studies of people coming unstuck as a result of unwise posts to Twitter. Many students decided to protect their tweets and as Twitter, unlike Facebook, is not blocked at my school I was able to help them do this by showing them how to use the settings. The message did not get through to all students however. Despite posting:-
and:-
this student concluded:-
So still some work to be done.
We then moved onto different aspects of Twitter use and impact which will form the majority of the next lesson ( my last with the group ). The final outcome will be a Prezi presentation on what they have learnt.
As a plenary I got students to tweet something they had learnt about Twitter that they didn't know at the start of the lesson:-
I am an ICT teacher with a passion for e-learning and web 2.0 technologies. This blog is my attempt to organise my thoughts and document the processes involved in developing an idea into a workable solution. A few of my ideas work brilliantly first time, more fall flat on the floor, most need work and refinement to make them usable. This blog is to remind me that the process is at least as important as the end result. If anyone can help me along the way with their comments I will be very grateful
You can find me on Twitter as @dwsm
