My Primary ICT Curriculum

I've had a lot of requests recently from people asking me for copies of my long-term planning for ICT - possibly because the government has just announced that the current ICT National Curriculum for England has been disapplied from September 2012 as it has been deemed to be "not fit for purpose".

My current ICT curriculum consists of three documents that I have written:

• objectives for each year group broken down into 'key ideas' and 'techniques' for seven different strands that I have divided the curriculum up into;
• a table for each year group detailing: each week of the year, the event/topic taking place then, my ICT lesson and the curriculum strand to which it is linked;
• a set of learning objectives and skills from which ICT lessons can be planned to ensure progression and provide for differentiated levels of success.

Since these three documents all relate to each other, they greatly assist me in ensuring that ICT lessons: are pitched appropriately for each year group, allow children to learn a wide variety of skills/tools and are given an interesting context wherever possible.

It is essential to realise though that the focus of ICT lessons needs to be on developing ICT: knowledge, understanding and skills - their context should be secondary and just be there to help foster cross-curricular links. Roughly speaking, about half of my ICT lessons are 'discrete' ICT lessons (e.g. covering things like: e-safety, spreadsheets, word processing tricks etc.) whilst the other half relate to current class/school topics (e.g. Internet research on periods of history, examining digital maps of localities being studied in geography etc.). Finding the right balance between these two types of lessons is very important in my opinion to enable children to be given the chance to learn new things and purposefully apply them to contexts that are familiar to/interest them.

Anyway, for your reading pleasure please find below all my ICT planning documents that you are welcome to use to help inspire you to develop an outstanding, creative approach to teaching ICT at your school! Note that they are working documents (so do contain some of my scribblings) and that I do tweak them as new technologies emerge and become more relevant/widespread in society, thus squeezing out other aspects.

• ICT Objectives:  Download Curriculum Overview  Download Data Handling  Download Digital Research  Download Modelling  Download Sequencing Instructions  Download Text and Graphics  Download Multimedia  Download Digital Art
• Year Group ICT Plans (obviously relating to this academic year):  Download Year 1  Download Year 2  Download Year 3  Download Year 4  Download Year 5  Download Year 6
• ICT Skills Checklist:

You might also find this post about how I display each lesson's: learning intention, steps to success and differentiated sucess criteria usesful too, along with this post about progression in Internet research.

Please do let me know what you think of these documents by leaving me a comment below as I would greatly appreciate any feedback on them!

Comments

[Lori Vines]

What a great way to organize your lessons. I always get such wonderful ideas when I visit your blog. I really like the way you have been incorporating the learning intention slides-would you be willing to share those for other teachers to use or adapt?

[Angela Lee]

What a great set of resources Simon, thank you so much for sharing. I am going to start creating year group plans, using your ideas, for our school. This will be usful especially as our topics are changing from September.