There is very little concrete information at the moment, but the changes at KS4 to bring in a ‘functional’ ICT are going to provide quite a challenge. Here is the timetable. Any details will be passed on to you as soon as I have them.
| 2006 | Small scale exam board trials with groups of students |
| 2007 | Start of 2 year pilot |
| 2008 | |
| 2009 | No decision yet, but if FS is to be embedded in new-style GCSEs they will start in 2009 |
FS will be offered from Entry Level to Level 4
Click hereks3-ict-summary-figures-090606.ppt to see exactly how many schools and pupils were involved this year.
For those of you aiming to include a learning log or learning diary in your KS3 ICT lessons you might like to look at the work that Lewisham LA have been involved in. The rationale behind the logs/diaries is to help pupils record the processes they have been involved in. They help to encourage pupils to take responsibility for their own work as well as helping pupils to reflect about their own work.
The Learning Logs themselves are available as MS Word versions and can be adapted for those of you not following the Strategy Sample Teaching Units. Are there any alternative ways of creating learning diaries that you have tried?
Del.icio.us is just one of several social bookmarking websites, but it is the one I have started to use when I am looking for resources and pages of interest to pass on to pupils. Del.icio.us allows me to see who else is bookmarking the same sites that I am, and then to see what other websites they are bookmarking. I can then see what they have found that may be equally as good and it saves me a lot of time. The other advantage of del.icio.us is that it has an RSS feed, this allows me to keep tracks on what other people are adding to their del.icio.us areas.
Once you register and add a few of your favourite sites to your ‘favorite’ page (ugh!) you can use the search engine to see what people are bookmarking. The obvious search is to enter ‘ICT’. You can see what has been bookmarked and save it yourself or search the bookmarks of others by clicking where it says “saved by n other people”.
Subject to school rules about bringing i-Pods etc. on site this website provides some excellent downloadable files for pupils to learn those more tricky theoretical bits. There is a wealth of other resources on the site too.
I have been working with ICT and non-ICT departments with their SEFs across the City. Others of you have asked me whether there is anything that could be used for the “Views of the Learner” section. You should have already received the database that colleagues have used to capture the data in both Viewpoint and MS Excel versions.
The questionnaire MS Word document sef questionnaire.doc allows views to be captured from both KS3 and 4 pupils and the results can be analysed in graphical format, particularly well in Viewpoint. These added to the SEF documentation provide excellent evidence of the developments (or not I suppose) of teaching and learning within departments. I suppose that you could also add a field for teacher if you wanted to do further breakdowns, but we did not.
So far about 1/3 of pupils were asked for their views per school. Admin staff were used at one school to enter the data. That may not be possible in all schools and you may wish to alter the sample size.
I would be interested to know whether any other methods are being used to provide evidence for this section. Any comments to share would be appreciated.
You may love me or hate me after this one. As a way of providing some interesting animation in web pages and in Windows Movie Maker productions I have been experimenting with a graphics package called Crazy Talk 4.0. This is great fun, hilarious in fact, but time consuming. With it you can make characters speak your narration or use text to speech to provide their script. You can also import images/photos to animate and bring to life. You’ll be hooked so be warned. The trial version lasts for 15 days.
Used carefully with pupils this could be a really engaging activity, especially if you let them animate you!
Having supported several schools during both of the onscreen ICT tests this year it is clear that there are some obstacles to pupil attainment that need to be addressed. At the last West Midlands Consultants' Network Meeting a discussion on best practice across the region and barriers to improvement led to a summative document being produced, part of which I have attached KS3 Test Pilot 2006 evaluation by West Midlands consultants.
The following are my own thoughts about this year's test and the obstacles I see to improvement. Firstly there is the test interface. Feedback to QCA about inaccessibility for less able pupils due to its readability is essential. I will be doing this via my Regional Adviser. Schools will, no doubt, be filling in reports on the 2006 test to this effect. There have been some changes to the functionality of the interface, but more are needed. Pupils need far more exposure to the test inteface and I will be addressing this at the next Subject Leaders' Development Meeting on 14th July. Next year there will be four 'past papers' for want of a better description and these can be built into the Year 9 scheme of work from September. There is a recommended model that I have shared with some schools already. Please contact me if you would like to see this before the meeting.
Secondly there is the necessity of pupils having to access e-mail. Some schools have had problems with issuing email addresses to all pupils for various reasons. If we are to get pupils into the habits of reading emailed instructions, attaching work and copying people into the address box, changes will be needed to be made to the way ICT-based work is delivered to classes. Most pupils use email accounts outside of school, but there are still some without email who struggle. There is also the question of appropriateness of language with many using 'textspeak' versions e.g. 'u' instead of 'you' etc.. This is a literacy issue, but I am worried that the test may mark this down. I'm not sure if it does or not, but will inquire.
File management is another area pupils had difficulties with. Navigating and saving to 'My Files' proved hard for some. There is also an issue with the toolbar. Pupils in some cases were opening attachments and hyperlinks in emails several times and were unaware that the icon on the toolbar changed if an application was open (with the 'switch' moving from the right to the left). One particular problem was with the database task. Pupils immediately opened the database application instead of opening the attached database file on the email and then were nonplussed when there was no data from which to check the appropriateness of the data type.
Finally there is the one task that stumped lots of pupils this year. Task 3 in test one asked pupils to complete a quiz by adding action buttons in the presentational application. I have only seen this task being done once at one school in Y7. There is no similar task in any of the Sample Teaching Units. However, there is an example of Level 5 work on the ncaction website. I'm sure that the test will always throw up something we wish we had covered better, but the advice I passed on to you was that if you had delivered the STUs the pupils would be prepared. The task therefore was as much a surprise to me as it was to pupils taking the test.
The attached file covers a huge amount of other issues and offers some ways forward. I would welcome any responses to the above and any comments of your own. I am assured that the results of this year's onscreen test are on schedule for June 30th.
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