Page not found – Daniel Stucke's Witterings

Looking 4ward 2 seeing #OpenBadges team today to tie in with our new #ICTCurric http://bit.ly/ShcoWj & also seeing #Scratch 2.0 #MozFest

Our New ICT Curriculum #ICTCurric Probably worth reading my last post about the disapplication of the previous ICT Program of Study and our plans to take it’s place at KS3 before proceeding with this one. So what have we done in the 4 months since my last post? Our fabulous ICT Department have thrashed out what we believe to be the key elements of an ICT curriculum for 2012. Taking inspiration from many places (again see the last post) we’ve come up with a core set of topics which we believe will support our learners in accessing our two KS4 qualifications if they decide to do so in the future (GCSE Computing & Creative iMedia), whilst giving them the digital skills and literacies that we believe they will need to be successful in all areas of their future learning and work. Our core topics are: Living Online Publishing Online Formal Digital Communications Researching Online Digital Presenting Visual Programming & Control Text Based Programming Handling Digital Data Digital Imaging Digital Video Digital Sound Project Planning Project Evaluation We’ve decided to call our new curriculum ‘ICT’ - after much debate we decided it still fits the job nicely! We’ve also throughly embraced the idea of using badges to reward and assess progress. We’re fortunate that I’m also responsible for data and assessment at our school so I’ve kindly given us permission to scrap National Curriculum levels entirely for KS3 ICT. In their place come our Badges, these will eventually be in Bronze, Silver & Gold levels for each topic. It’s an interesting experiment but we really believe that knowing you’ve achieved a Silver Award in Digital Presentation and a Bronze Award in Living Online will mean far more to learner and parent than being told they are working at a 4b. Time will tell. We have been carefully constructing the learning objectives / learning outcomes for the badges and learners have been collating their evidence towards these using Realsmart rPassports. They’re being awarded on Edmodo for now, eventually we hope to use the full Mozilla Open Badges framework. To give you a feel for these here’s one objective from the Living Online badge: I can use social networks safely because I have: reviewed the security and safety settings of my social networks analysed my contacts and ensured that they are appropriate and can see only what I want them to discussed the potential dangers of social networking, highlighting typical signs of danger described how to report suspicious or abusive behaviour that I might encounter online chosen the right social network for the right communications and interactions Please feel free to see more detail on our wiki and feel free to offer your comments here. It’s very much a work in progress, we’ve got a framework in the background and are trying to keep a half term ahead of ourselves throughout the year. It’s interesting to note that since this whole adventure started with Mr Gove’s original invitation to ICT teachers to embrace this new found freedom, he has since decided to retract that and come up with a new program of study, as far as I can tell behind closed doors from the very educators he encouraged to take up the mantle. Hopefully it will bear much resemblance to what we’re doing here. If not we’ll probably carry on with what we feel is right any way. So far it’s been a really enjoyable start to the year. Staff have been enjoying teaching relevant skills and literacies to the students and they are getting the hang of badges. As we start awarding the first badges over the next week or so I am confident it’s going to really take off. I’m also really positive that when we get onto the likes of Digital Presentation we’re going to start seeing students using lots of evidence from other subjects to support their badges. I hope that this in turn becomes a nice guide to staff in other departments as to the actual ICT skills of our learners. With my Maths teacher head on I think it would be great to be able to look at a glance at the specific skills of my class and know in advance if they have experience of managing data or doing basic programming. Historically other teachers wouldn’t really have a clue as to the ICT skills of a student, making integrating ICT in other subjects more difficult. Exciting times :)

“@danielstucke: Our New #openbadges ICT Curriculum #ICTCurric… http://bit.ly/Shc2ir”

Our New ICT Curriculum #ICTCurric Probably worth reading my last post about the disapplication of the previous ICT Program of Study and our plans to take it’s place at KS3 before proceeding with this one. So what have we done in the 4 months since my last post? Our fabulous ICT Department have thrashed out what we believe to be the key elements of an ICT curriculum for 2012. Taking inspiration from many places (again see the last post) we’ve come up with a core set of topics which we believe will support our learners in accessing our two KS4 qualifications if they decide to do so in the future (GCSE Computing & Creative iMedia), whilst giving them the digital skills and literacies that we believe they will need to be successful in all areas of their future learning and work. Our core topics are: Living Online Publishing Online Formal Digital Communications Researching Online Digital Presenting Visual Programming & Control Text Based Programming Handling Digital Data Digital Imaging Digital Video Digital Sound Project Planning Project Evaluation We’ve decided to call our new curriculum ‘ICT’ - after much debate we decided it still fits the job nicely! We’ve also throughly embraced the idea of using badges to reward and assess progress. We’re fortunate that I’m also responsible for data and assessment at our school so I’ve kindly given us permission to scrap National Curriculum levels entirely for KS3 ICT. In their place come our Badges, these will eventually be in Bronze, Silver & Gold levels for each topic. It’s an interesting experiment but we really believe that knowing you’ve achieved a Silver Award in Digital Presentation and a Bronze Award in Living Online will mean far more to learner and parent than being told they are working at a 4b. Time will tell. We have been carefully constructing the learning objectives / learning outcomes for the badges and learners have been collating their evidence towards these using Realsmart rPassports. They’re being awarded on Edmodo for now, eventually we hope to use the full Mozilla Open Badges framework. To give you a feel for these here’s one objective from the Living Online badge: I can use social networks safely because I have: reviewed the security and safety settings of my social networks analysed my contacts and ensured that they are appropriate and can see only what I want them to discussed the potential dangers of social networking, highlighting typical signs of danger described how to report suspicious or abusive behaviour that I might encounter online chosen the right social network for the right communications and interactions Please feel free to see more detail on our wiki and feel free to offer your comments here. It’s very much a work in progress, we’ve got a framework in the background and are trying to keep a half term ahead of ourselves throughout the year. It’s interesting to note that since this whole adventure started with Mr Gove’s original invitation to ICT teachers to embrace this new found freedom, he has since decided to retract that and come up with a new program of study, as far as I can tell behind closed doors from the very educators he encouraged to take up the mantle. Hopefully it will bear much resemblance to what we’re doing here. If not we’ll probably carry on with what we feel is right any way. So far it’s been a really enjoyable start to the year. Staff have been enjoying teaching relevant skills and literacies to the students and they are getting the hang of badges. As we start awarding the first badges over the next week or so I am confident it’s going to really take off. I’m also really positive that when we get onto the likes of Digital Presentation we’re going to start seeing students using lots of evidence from other subjects to support their badges. I hope that this in turn becomes a nice guide to staff in other departments as to the actual ICT skills of our learners. With my Maths teacher head on I think it would be great to be able to look at a glance at the specific skills of my class and know in advance if they have experience of managing data or doing basic programming. Historically other teachers wouldn’t really have a clue as to the ICT skills of a student, making integrating ICT in other subjects more difficult. Exciting times :)

Our New ICT Curriculum #ICTCurric - Probably worth reading my last post about the disapplication of the previ… http://tmblr.co/Zm_sKxWPDP-P

Anyone got any nice little programming tasks/challenges that take under an hour and develop if statements / loops? #ictcurric

The Future Of ICT There has been much said about the subject of ICT in secondary schools since Michael Gove spoke at BETT. I wrote with some excitement the day after, actually praising Mr Gove for once in my life! Excited with the potential freedom and with an idea to leave National Curriculum levels behind and look towards a potentially badge based system based on mastery and application of specific skills. Since then there has been much discussion, particularly revolving around the move towards Computer Science, including suggested curricula from the likes of Naace and reports from the likes of BCS. Meanwhile ICT teachers and leaders across the country have been formulating their own plans. From excellent sounding meetings like #RethinkingICT to the work on #DigitalStudies from Brian Sharland and co. Opportunities and dangers lie ahead. There will be schools around the country who are not ‘connected’ to the works mentioned above, and there will be companies knocking out curriculum packs of crap to dump onto outmoded VLEs. For those schools and students I do worry. But there is also a chance to create customised, localised, exciting learning opportunities in our schools. We’re just starting to get our heads around this at our school. So what next? We currently run successful Key Stage 4 courses in Creative iMedia and Computing GCSE. Our curriculum offer in KS3 needs to work towards preparing our students for these whilst preparing those who don’t take it on to KS4 level with the digital skills they will need for their future. We don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, we deliver some great ICT units at our school at the moment, but this is an opportunity to go right back to the basics of a school curriculum, look at our values and beliefs and tailor something specifically towards our students. We are in the process of taking the National Curriculum that is being disapplied, the Naace curriculum, the ideas from the team at #DigitalStudies and elsewhere to create our own core curriculum. Online identities are in, databases are out, more visual programming is in, but not everyone needs to code in C, etc etc.. It’s liberating to have the opportunity to do this. I’ve had many discussions with the team creating #DigitalStudies and have much praise for the work they’ve done so far. But my biggest criticism, for want of a better word, is the lack of a curriculum. A core curriculum consisting of a list of topics, skills and knowledge that a subject will deliver is still crucial in my humble opinion. Whether this is then delivered through project based learning, independent inquiry, traditional teaching, or better still a combination of all three - this should still all be built around a curriculum. We’ll probably end up with a little more than we can cover in little over an hour a week, but there’s a plan for that… Assessment is broken. Broken in subjects such as ours with so little contact time on the timetable. Levelling students with National Curriculum sub-levels just about works in my native subject of Maths. We see the children frequently, there is a detailed curriculum and we all know what level each skill is. It’s still not perfect, knowing your level is one thing, knowing what to do to make the next step of progression is another altogether. As chief in charge of data and assessment in our school, several years of teaching ICT has made me realise how futile my request that every subject submits an NC level each half term is. If we’re being honest, do I know what a level 5c is in ICT? Does the learner? Does the parent? No? Thought not. Gove has recently suggested that Primary schools will no longer have to use National Curriculum levels in their assessments or reporting, I suspect the same will become true of the whole of KS3 over the course of the next few years. With all this in mind it’s time for a fresh idea. Badges have been talked about probably as much as ICT over the past 6 months. Mozilla’s Open Badges project looks like a great idea and has captured the imagination of many educators, myself included. I fully support the idea of accrediting much of the informal learning that people do outside of formal educational institutions. But I also feel that there is an opportunity to use a badge system to accredit learner progress within schools. We are planning to develop a range of badges for the key skills and competencies within our new curriculum. These will probably take the form of Gold, Silver & Bronze levels for each area. For example, awards/badges in: using visual programming languages online identities research presentation etc etc Learners will be expected to collate a range of evidence to support the award of each badge. We’re currently working towards fairly generic sounding badges, trying to avoid referring to specific tools (which frequently become out of date before learners have even finished school). I hope that learners will use a range of evidence not just from within our subject but from across their work inside and outside of school. I also hope that if we can get these right it will really help support other teachers and departments - pushing the dream of ICT becoming more integrated across the curriculum. I believe that these will be a hit with learners and their parents. Finding out that your daughter has gained her Silver Presentation badge and her Bronze award in Publishing Online over the past term should be far more informative than being told they are working at Level 5a. I hope learners will have something valuable to take with them into later life, a set of badges they’ll be proud to display on their own professional blogs one day - this is after all effectively my online CV these days. I’ve really enjoyed working with the team to thrash out our curriculum and plans for the coming years, it’s great to rip apart what you do and build it back up from core values and principles. It’s also been refreshing to see just how much of what we believe to be important we have been teaching already over recent years - we won’t have to re-write all the actual lesson content from scratch. We’ve also naturally headed into some interesting discussions about the purpose of ICT as a subject. One thing we’re not quite set on… what to call the subject? Does ICT have a 'bad name’ now that needs changing? Digital Studies is a great name - but somebody has got there first! We’re not teaching Computer Science so that won’t do (not that we don’t have elements of it, but the BCS curriculum suggests we should teach all 13 year olds what packet switching is - and that’s clearly nonsense!!). Perhaps ICT2.0 or something equally naff?! Once we’ve tidied up our draft curriculum and worked on the badges a little more I’ll share it all here. We’re very interested in feedback from the ICT community and would be delighted to work with other schools who are heading in a similar direction.

The Future Of ICT: http://tmblr.co/Zm_sKxOdvZgu Look forward to some community feedback :) #ictcurric #digitalstudies #openbadges #rethinkingict

pleased with interest in GCSE Computing in our option choices :) #computing #CSin2012 #ictcurric

Page not found – Daniel Stucke's Witterings

Just blogged: BBC Micro 2.0 #ictcurric http://bit.ly/w1hTk7

BBC Micro 2.0 #ictcurric I attended Alan O'Donohoe’s excellent Hack To The Future event at Our Lady’s High School in Preston on Saturday with 13 of our students, many of whom are on our GCSE Computing course. There were many highlights, in particular I should mention Freaky Clown and his tales of a hacker turned good. I won’t repeat his story of hacking a whole country in 7 seconds as that would be bad form, but safe to say it was engrossing stuff and our pupils were intrigued by his story. I spent a good portion of the day talking with the team from the BBC who were there with their pre-alpha software that was the much rumoured and discussed BBC Micro 2.0. I’ve written about this previously when Keri Facer put out her call for a response on the topic. I felt a tad smug as my guess that a 2012 BBC Micro project should take the form of a software only programming environment, hopefully outputing HTML5 results, turned out to be pretty close to the mark. Parmy Brar has been the lead developer on the project and kindly talked me through some of his work so far. They have taken Eclipse (something I’d not come across before) and forked it to begin creating a simplified programming environment for children. Programming could be done in HTML or Javascript and the package was being developed to be as forgiving as possible for the amateur coder. In it’s basic mode there are 3 panels, one for coding, a browser to output the code and the final one a project file explorer. As well as outputting complete HTML5 websites, the team have an Android App output that was in semi-working form, and eventually will be looking at iOS output. Integral to the project are built in lessons that talk you through the basics of programming different projects (akin to taking a course on CodeCademy). Parmy talked me through the back end to this area where he is creating a tool that will allow anybody to create their own help file / course for others to use. If this project is really going to take off this will be crucial as they look to build a large community around the environment. Michael Sparks had put together some exercises for the young learners to have a go at for the day and I saw kids ranging from about 8 to 16 all enjoying their first stabs at programming. Response from teachers seemed a little mixed, I saw many who were as excited as me but I also heard some discussing what was one show as scary looking (these were Heads of ICT!). I think this shows what a long way we’ve got to go on the rebirth of computing in schools and in particular the huge skills gap that we have to overcome. Projects such as this are going to be crucial in skilling up the teachers as much as the learners. My coding experience starts with BASIC on ZX Spectrums & BBC Micros, takes in a tiny bit of Visual Basic and then stops. My experience of the past month or two with CodeYear do suggest to me that Javascript seems like a great choice of language for us to teach in schools. I discussed this with a few of the BBC team and they were all big proponents of the language, pointing out that it is now ubiquitous across the world and that almost everyone has a device that can and does read it on a daily basis. More details about the extended BBC Hello World Project should be up at http://www.bbchelloworld.co.uk/ soon (it was online this morning but has disappeared again at the time of writing). I’m excited to see how this one develops.

BBC Micro 2.0 #ictcurric - I attended Alan O’Donohoe’s excellent Hack To The Future event at Our Lady’s High... http://tmblr.co/Zm_sKxGSEJYn

Page not found – Daniel Stucke's Witterings

“@mrstucke: Just blogged: Bravo Mr Gove #schoolstech #ictcurric http://bit.ly/y7iE5y”

Page not found – Daniel Stucke's Witterings

Just Blogged: "Bravo Mr Gove #schoolstech #ictcurric" danielstucke.com/post/15685474628/bravo-m...

Page not found – Daniel Stucke's Witterings

Just blogged: Bravo Mr Gove #schoolstech #ictcurric http://bit.ly/y7iE5y

Return to Granny’s Garden? The BBC along with Keri Facer at Manchester Metropolitan University are investigating the idea of a BBC Micro Mk2.0.  For those of you who didn’t grow up in 80’s Britain, the BBC Micro was an Acorn computer, build for the BBC Computer Literacy Project and became the mainstay of early IT in almost every British school. An army of young learners were either taught, or taught themselves the basics of programming using the BBC BASIC language on these machines. The BBC Micro became a household fixture as well as a school one, featuring educational games such as Granny’s Garden (amazingly still available for sale - yours for £35!), and also the classic Elite, written by David Braben (more of him later). We live in a World of cycles, and once again, computer literacy and the teaching of ICT is back in focus. Here’s some of the preface to the cal for responses on the proposed new project: Today, there is criticism of the ICT curriculum and the teaching of programming (or computational thinking) in schools. The Royal Society, amongst others, believe that design and delivery of ICT and computer science curricula in schools is so poor that students’ understanding and enjoyment of the subject is severely limited. In response to this the BBC is exploring the possibility of developing a project with the specific purpose of encouraging an interest in computers, computer science and computer programming amongst young people. We would like to know your views on what the BBC could do in this area. In particular, what you would see as the desirable equivalent of the BBC Micro and The Computer Programme today? What technologies and processes, what tools and skills would such a project need to develop? I’m keen to see anything that can help with the modernisation of the ICT curriculum, and anything that can help support our move into teaching Computing as a discrete subject. Here’s my response to the questions: What aspects of computational thinking (e.g. understanding how ‘computers think/work’, using programming languages, understanding systems thinking  or other issues) should a BBC Micro 2.0 project focus on? What do you think people should be able to learn to do with computers today? Why?  Key areas that the current curriculum lacks focus upon are understanding the procedural nature of how a computer program works - hardware control, and an opportunity to learn to program. It would seem logical that a BBC Micro 2.0 project would be purely software based. If programming is to be at it’s core then a decision on whether to use an existing language, a modification of one, or a completely new language will have to be made. Two possible avenues would be a programming language that outputs HTML5 ‘programs’ - this would allow the widest possible distribution of programs, including on mobile devices. Another would be a programming language sitting on a Rasberry Pi device. This would have the bonus of being a complete hardware/software package at a very low price. What are the best ways to support and encourage those young people (aged 9-14) with an interest in this area, to develop their interest and skills in computational thinking ? Can you suggest any examples of resources or activities that you know of? Games design is the top way to engage with young people interested in computational thinking. Software packages such as Scratch & Kodu offer an excellent way in to early programming concepts. Games such as Lightbot offer a very early and accessible introduction. Code Academy is an interesting new development and a great way for young learners to get an introduction to programming without teacher support. What are the best ways to support and encourage young people (aged 9-14) with other interests to develop an interest in and understanding of computational thinking? Can you suggest any examples of resources or activities that you know of? See above, again, games offer the biggest ‘hook’ for young learners. Kodu would be the best example of a way of enticing otherwise uninterested young learners into computational thinking. What are the key obstacles to learning computational thinking and how might these best be overcome?  Curriculum time, curriculum, qualifications and assessment. Until computational thinking is written deeply into the National Curriculum, or the NC is itself massively reduced, it will not be a priority in schools and will not get the class time that it needs to be developed.  Hopefully the NC review will lower the total prescribed content, reduce the emphasis on software use such as MS Office and increase the emphasis on computational thinking. It would also be nice to see if brought to the fore in the Maths curriculum, at the expense of some of the less useful skills that currently exist there. If you were to make hardware available to schools in the same way as the BBC Micro in 1981, what sorts of hardware would you think was essential to develop the skills and understanding needed?  Rasberry Pi looks like the perfect idea for a new generation of BBC Micro-esque hardware. It seems to be building a positive head of steam in the run up to it’s launch. BBC support of this project would surely help it succeed and the link with David Braben is almost poetic. Hardware needs to be mobile. A software only solution that works on a wide variety of platforms would make most sense. As discussed above, something that output HTML5 would make most sense. If you were designing a tv programme today that sought to have the same effect as The Computer Programme in stimulating interest in the most important new area of technological development, what area would you expect it to address and what topics would you expect it to cover? Would it still be in the field of computer science? What areas?  A show that involved learners, with a strong online presence and with inspirational guests and challenges. You could run online challenges to write programs to solve a certain problem, or along a certain theme. The best of these could be invited to some kind of studio show where they compete to be a winner, maybe with judges from the relevant industry. Do you know of any projects, resources and activities that would be examples that this project could learn from?  See above. Kodu, Scratch, Code Academy (& Khan Academy as a model), Rasberry Pi, Lightbot. Do you have any other comments on the idea of a new BBC Micro project?  BBC support of computational thinking would be hugely positive, this has to be a priority area in UK education (see Nesta report & our journey). A software solution that offers young learners something close to the instant gratification of Scratch or Kodu whilst giving transferable skills to more formal languages would be hugely positive. As would support of the Rasberry Pi project. Photo Credit to psd on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/psd/5435967638/

RT @mrstucke: Return to Granny's Garden? - my take on a BBC Micro 2.0 http://tmblr.co/Zm_sKxCUpVDK #ictcurric

Blog Post: An ICT Curriculum Fit For 2011 #ictcurric http://bit.ly/gWf9Eh

Qualifications, subjects and study programmes - OCR

RT @mrstucke: Any1 got experience offering OCR Creative iMedia course? Or know how accepted it is @ FE & HE? http://bit.ly/gl1GYz #ictcurric