Planning ICT Lessons for 2012

I've been asked a few times this summer what my ICT plans are for September. A combination of: having no statutory ICT teaching requirements any more, my school now having Apple iPads as well as Windows laptops for children to use and various new topics being introduced into the school curriculum has led me to come up with an ICT scheme that is hopefully more: interesting, flexible and easier to manage than in previous years.

As you can see below, I'm now only going to fully plan about a dozen different applications to use with each year group. This will mean that the ICT skills can be applied and consolidated several times during the year, linking in with different class topics as I feel is appropriate. As long as I cover each year group's list of applications, I can be as creative as I want with how I use them, whilst safe in the knowledge that the children are being given suitably-pitched lessons to develop their ICT capabilities over a range of devices and programs.

I'm still going to create an overview for each year group (see this blog post) and create accompanying LI slides for each application (see this blog post) as these are two things that I feel have worked extremely well in the past.

All my ICT learning intentions (without the 'To...' opener) are shown on the mind map below and each of my ICT lesson will use one of them - the idea being that ICT tasks stay consistent throughout the school. I've grouped them into five areas/strands:

• 'text and graphics' ('static' work that can be printed out);
• 'digital creativity' (work whose quality is possibly subject to personal opinion);
• 'multimedia authoring' (work created for vieweing on a computer);
• 'computing' (mathematical-based tasks);
• 'research and communication' (using the Internet).

To allow for differention betwewen year groups, each LI has a series of ICT skills associated with it that I can select from when writing the 'good'/'great'/'super' criteria for each lesson to provide an age-appropriate level of challenge. These are presented in order of complexity so that progression in ICT capability is clearly visisble. Here is an example of the ICT skills for 'multimedia authoring':

Lastly, to ensure a broad coverage of skills in each year group, I'm aiming to cover at least two learning intentions from each ICT strand in each year group as well as use both a mixture of laptops and iPads. My list of software above takes this into consideration and my year group overviews will record which strand and device each lesson is associated with.

Comments

[Kelvin Stephens]

Thanks for this, I have been debating with myself what to do in September as we have laptops aswell as iPads, I think detailing the software to use is useful as the base and then link it to the topics, we also have Switched on ICT but this also fits with the software detailed!

[David]

Hi Simon, I like your progression grids. Are you going to add grids related to pupils' use of your learning platform Edmodo at different levels?
David

[Mr Haughton]

Hi David - if you look under the skills for 'I can understand how to stay safe when communicating online', this outlines the key Edmodo skills in the first column (I've not mentioned particular websites/software in the skills list but in reality it's Edmodo that they're for).