Towards a new ICT Programme of study for the National Curriculum in England: update and primer for discussion
BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, and Royal Academy of Engineering, Sept 2012
Background
The Department for Education (DfE) has asked the BCS and Royal Academy of Engineering to coordinate the drafting of a new Programme of Study for ICT. We are coordinators in this, not writers, and are grateful to a small group of volunteer teachers, subject leads, academics and industrialists who are preparing a draft for submission to DfE in late October.
Themes that have emerged:
Looking back over the last 12 months, there have been extraordinary contributions to the field of computing in schools made by Livingstone & Hope (Next Gen), Computing at School (CAS), Behind the Screen, Royal Society (Shut down or restart) and many others. We have been keen to build on areas of consensus from that work, whilst focusing down to a very short Programme of Study. So far, our view is that:
-The overall programme of study must be called “ICT”. There is no wiggle room here; changing it requires primary legislation.
-The programme of study must match the structure of those for other subjects and so must be
-Very short: one A4 page to express the purpose of the subject and aims of the programme of study, and one page to give a programme for each of Key Stages 1-4.
-It must express ambition and excitement.
-It must state clearly that pupils should be taught both the fundamental principles of how computation works, and how to use digital systems.
-We propose to use the terms “Computer Science¨, “Information Technology¨ and “Digital Literacy¨ as recommended by the Royal Society report “Shut down or restart¨, and say that all three should be visible from KS1 onwards. However, we feel the need and freedom to broaden the definitions of the latter two somewhat.
-We are not so clear about what to do at KS4. The Secretary of State has said that ICT will be statutory at KS4. But suppose a student is doing a GCSE in Computer Science, say, or Information Technology. Does that somewhat-specialised GCSE fulfil the
http://www.raeng.org.uk/news/releases/shownews.htm?NewsID=792
statutory requirement? We strongly believe that it should. But it leaves us with the difficulty of how to express the POS for KS4.
And what if a student does not take an ICT-related KS4 qualification at all? Should he or she be forced to take a token course just to fulfil the letter of the law? This is the situation at present at KS4, and it has directly contributed to pass criticisms of ICT.
How you can help
Below we give a one-page overview of the subject and the aims of the programme of study, to give you a sense of our thinking so far. It would be helpful if you could give us, in writing, your thoughts on:
-Your thoughts on the Key Stage 4 issue above
-Any other strategic issues you think are important.
-Your personal vision of what success looks like ¡V if you were to step into an ICT lesson in 2016, what would you hope to see? How would that vary from Key Stage 1 (5-7 year olds) to Key Stages 2 (8-11), 3 (11-13) and 4 (14-16)?
-Any thoughts you have on the text below. The more specific your comment, the more helpful it would be phrase it in concrete terms (eg: ” suggest you replace …..with ….”)

 
The purpose of ICT
A high-quality ICT education teaches students how to understand the world through computational thinking, and provides a sense of empowerment and excitement in using and developing digital technology. ICT includes:
-Computer Science (CS) is the subject discipline that studies how computer systems work, how they are constructed and programmed, and the fundamental principles of information and computation, in both artificial and natural information processing systems.
-Information Technology (IT) covers the use and application of computer systems including the Internet, to develop technological solutions purposefully and creatively.
-Digital Literacy (DL) provides a critical understanding of technology’s impact on society and the individual, including privacy, responsible use, legal and ethical issues
ICT is important educationally. It equips young people to understand and play an active role in the digital world, rather than being mere passive consumers of an opaque and mysterious technology. More broadly, it provides a new “lens” through which to understand, model, and predict both natural and artificial systems.
ICT is has great economic and societal value, both to the individual pupil, and to the nation. ICT has enormous power to make the world a better place, and knowledge of ICT is the key to exercising and controlling that power.
ICT has wider benefits. It teaches thinking skills and precision. It encourages innovation, creativity, collaboration, and resourcefulness: pupils apply underlying principles to understand real-world systems, and to create purposeful artefacts. This combination of principles, practice, and invention makes ICT an intensely creative subject, suffused with excitement, both visceral (¡§it works!¡¨) and intellectual (¡§that is so beautiful¡¨).
Aims and Principles
Aims. The National Curriculum for ICT should ensure that all pupils
-Can learn, critically evaluate and apply information technologies (including new or unfamiliar ones) confidently, responsibly, collaboratively and effectively to solve problems and work creatively.
- Understand the fundamental principles of Computer Science, including algorithms, data representation, and communication protocols.
- Learn to see problems in computational terms, and have repeated practical experience of using programming to solve them.
-Are aware of the societal changes opportunities, challenges and risks caused by digital technology.
Opportunity and progression. From KS1 to KS3 the school curriculum should include all three strands (CS, IT, and DL), though these may be taught together especially in the earlier years. From KS4 onwards students should have the opportunity specialise in CS, IT, or some combination, depending on their preferences, leading to distinct KS4 qualifications, some leading to an A level.
Ambition. ICT in the classroom should be suffused with a sense of excitement, creativity, and ambition. If not, something is wrong.
The use of technology in other subjects is very important, but does not form part of this Programme of Study. It should properly figure in the programmes for those subjects.

I can see it having real potential:

• Allowing students to develop their own learning pathways constructing and sharing their own playlists and working collaboratively with other students
• To help teachers developed flipped classroom activities (this is where I am using it currently)
• Using different playlists to personalise learning pathways through differentiation (Support/extension)
• An innovative way to start developing tailored professional development resources for teachers.
• Creating banks of support resources for assignments

One of the very first things that I have done with my Y7 students is to get them to complete an online survey via GoogleDocs. The survey pulls together some key data. As  a result I have the following information about my students to aid effective planning (especially challenge in home learning) and delivery of the IT curriculum.

• 54% Have their own computer at home, not shared with another family member
• Everyone has access to a computer – big tick!
• All except one student has broadband at home – this student will have a letter, encouraging attendance to homework club to complete all IT homelearning
• A full breakdown as to who has access to which peripherals – scanners, digital cameras, video cameras, graphcis tablets etc
• A full breakdown of hardware platforms and generic software types
• Proportion of students that have a smartphone (50% of class)
• What online services they have accounts to. 74% have a google account at age 11 before they have started the curriculum at secondary school. More worrying is the proportion of stundets at age 11 that have Facebook account (56%). We mail all Y7 parents expressing concerns over social media in the first half term
• Lots of information on how they learn, whether they like IT, think they are good at IT, like showing other people whow to use IT, good at listening/following instructions, remembering how to do things etc…

Now I have a set of questions that I know work and get the data I want it is very easy to deploy the survey to different groups at the start of the academic year in Y7.

So, over the past couple of weeks I have thought about some strategies that I wanted to try with my new Y10 Computing class. It’s a class of 24 students, predominantly boys (21 in total) who are all keen and eager to learn but not all organised. All of them have a Smartphone (Android being more commonplace than iOS), in their very first lesson we talked about being effective learners and how we could all benefit from harnessing the technology they bring to school on a daily basis. I went through a list of apps that I thought they should get. The list included Evernote, Google drive (setting up a google account if they didn’t already have one), Dropbox, Springpad and a QRCode reader. Many used the public WiFi cloud at school to download the Apps there and then, some decided to leave it until they got home. All were instructed to have the Apps installed and ready to go in the next lesson. We discussed time management and how important it was for them to deliver an effective work routine, scheduling evenings for home learning and not leaving work to the last minute. Many of the boys said they struggled organising their time and didn’t like writing things in their homework diaries. They said that often there was not enough space to write the tasks in and they preferred to have everything in one place to refer to. That one place being their own mobile device. I decided that a good starting point would be to encourage the group to start using the calendar on their phone to store events, namely homework deadlines, coursework submission dates and so on. If I could get good practice embedded within their Computing lessons there was a good chance that this would be modelled into other subjects.

I wanted a way of delivery event information quickly so looked to QRCodes for the answer. Not all QRCode generators can generate ical style events but I’ve used QRafter Pro on my iPad for quite a long time now and knew it would be up to the job – I love its ability to create all manner of QRCodes and it now links to Dropbox making it an even better tool for educators. So here is an example of the QRCode I generated for the homework task. I tend to generate the tasks on the deadline for the homework, but may look at changing this to a couple of days before the deadline to further manage students with their time management.

I’ve been using a couple of ways to deliver the QRCodes to the students – quite often I’ll use PowerPoint to scaffold lesson delivery so when it comes to setting of homelearning (I often to this at the beginning of the lesson as it supports much better Assessment for Learning) I will simply insert the QRCode on a slide. Make sure the QRCode is large so that students at the back of the room will have the same success scanning it as those at the front. If I am working in a more dynamic way int he classroom I will simply generator the QRCode on the fly and display it on my ipad on mydesk, during the lesson the students just come and scan it onto their phone.

When students scan the QRCode the resulting information was added to an event in their calendar (see below). All they had to do is click on add.

Using QRCodes like this has great potential I’ve already thought about adding qrcodes to our newsletter so that parents can add important school events to their calendar with relative ease. The list of opportunities is endless!

Some great ideas on how you can use Thinglink in the classroom can be found in this GoogleDoc and a few curriculum uses of it in action here.

From: OnlineColleges.net

The iPad can be a great information producer too, pulling together text, video and sound in some very creative ways with the apps that are out there and allowing the final content to be pushed out into the cloud, ready for consumption by the masses.

Thanks to Edudemic for putting this image into the public domain.

The survey is very easy to administer, it is written as a threaded survey using a form within GoogleDocs, with the link being emailed out to all students. A focus fortnight is allocated within the school for the completion of the survey which sees all students being giving time to complete it during one of their IT lessons. This year 621 students completed the survey, representing a good spread of students across all year groups and both genders. This 60% sample is useful at making some general comments and helps to plan strategic developments at the school.

Compared to last year laptop ownership has once again increased with 52% of students owning their own laptop. Only 2% of students do not have access to a computer at home and the survey allows us to identify these students and make specific provision for them. 12% have access to a shared laptop and 22% use the family computer when they need to. Rising laptop ownership does highlight the need for digital parenting sessions as many students have free access to the Internet in their bedrooms with little understanding about the possible implications by some parents.

Software owned and accessed by students is interesting and it is clear that the continued promotion of open source alternatives in school is important to ensure that students have access to software that is used within the curriculum. 92% own WP software, spreadsheet – 74%, 80% presentation. When looking at more specialist software titles, including graphics, video and music software, about a third of students own each type. 22% of students have programming software, a statistic that surprised me as I thought it would be somewhat low than this. It will be interesting to see how this is affected by the introduction of GCSE Computing at the school in September 2012.

3% of our students do not have access to broadband, often this is accountable to the geographical location, residing in an outlying village. 46% of students were unsure of the speed of their broadband connection, reflecting their stance as an end consumer, but when speed was known 64% of the students claimed speeds in excess of 20 mbit. It is clear that teachers should be planning media rich, high quality resources for students to access from home, including video as they have the capacity to access it. This does suggest a need for some further CPD for staff to ensure that students are engaging in high quality resources over the Internet.

We continue to see an upward trend in the sheer volume of technology found in the home. 31% of students have some sort of tablet, Apple Macs still only account for 12% of desktop devices but 53% own an iTouch and 30% a iPod Nano. 72% own a digital camera, 46% own a scanner, 53% a video camera. The level of consumer technology owned by students really needs to be more closely understood by teachers as much more engaging home learning tasks can be set utilising the myriad of technology that is commonplace in the home. Digital video, podcasting are all mediums that need to be explored.

The proportion of students who own a mobile phone remains fairly consistent to last year at 97%, 56% of which are on contract and therefore have data allowances built in, indeed many students who were on Pay As You Go tariff’s also commented on the fact they had data allowances. Schools really do need to rethink their stance on access to social media from school devices when the majority of students can already access them through their own device and data channel. Is there now more of a case for schools embracing more open access to Facebook? Smartphones account for 67% of all phones with Blackberry handsets being the most popular (28%) – probably due to the popularity of blackberry messenger, Android handsets – 25% and iPhones – 12%. Texting is as popular as ever, with 39% of students sending 100-500 texts a month, 27% send more than 500 texts a month. 66% of students who have a wifi capable phone have used it to connect to the school pubic wifi. 70% of students were willing to give the school their mobile number so they could be informed of examination information and other school info. Phones and other handheld mobile devices are being used to good effect across the school to support learning, 62% of students have used them to access the web for further research to aid class work and 67% have used them to take photos, 38% to record video but only 12% to record audio and create podcasts. This will become a specific development point in 2012-13. Students are big fans of using their mobile device to access social media – Facebook 72%, Twitter 40%, YouTube 71%.

81% of the students use YouTube and Facebook, in real terms Facebook penetration is higher as Y7/8 should not be on Facebook (although many are – again further evidence for digital parenting sessions). This year Twitter use is much higher, with 40% of students using the service. Very few (3%) use other services such as Flickr or Slideshare. 49% of students use social networking sites everyday with 25% using them a few times a week. 5% of students stated that they did not necessarily feel safe when using social networking sites. As the survey is not anonymous personalised intervention for these students will be in place in September.

Students gave us some very good ideas and feedback on how to enhance our official Facebook presence for the school. It is clear that they want more time investment into this from the school as they want as much info to be aggregated into Facebook as possible so it becomes their social hub. Ideas included – daily status updates with everything that is going on, examination reminders, signposting revision and support services, even more use to showcase student successes.

Technology continues to dominate the social scene for many students with 33% spending more than 16 hours a week online using technology, a further 35% spending 12-16 hours. 94% of students enjoy using technology and see it playing an important part in society. 63% of students could make clear links between how technology could make them a more effective learner and 78% of students said they picked up on new technology/web apps very quickly giving a very clear indicator to teachers that they really need to push the envelope and develop much higher expectations of what students can do using technology. Technology is more of a barrier to many teachers now than students and this is something that effective CPD must address. Teachers do not have to be, or should not be worried about having to know how to use the latest apps and software. First and foremost they should be interested in the learning outcome, not the route by which the student has taken to get to the outcome.

A lot of careful thought and consideration has gone into the strategic planning of infrastructure and training at Costello. Staff are acutely aware of the changing societal dynamic and the role that technology plays and work hard to develop their skills accordingly. 56% of students said that we have excellent IT facilities and infrastructure at the school, backed up with effective IT Support when any issues arise. Students feel that we have more than enough desktops across the site, but may benefit from having a few more areas that have access to net books. Students would like to see more macs in place and teachers knowing more about technology to really push how they use it in the classroom. 75% of students felt that they had benefitted from using subscriptions services like GCSEPOD and IAMLearning and are keen to see the new mobile App for GCSEPOD in September. Every year we put in a question relating to a major IT project in the next year that impacts on the curriculum. Top slot this year was a digital video studio with full chroma keying facilities – 39% of students voted for this, followed by a bank or iTouch’s to go into the Learning Resource centre, preloaded with apps and revision content. In third position were graphics tablets to go on the macs in the learning resource centre to support Art. 57% of students would also like to see a more focused IT club being set up, that develops IT skills through fun and engaging projects.

So, all in all a very interesting survey again this year that has certainly given us some important key messages to hang our strategic thinking on this year.