|
This Case Study by St John's Primary School, Darlington, details how the school have developed ICT. The Case Study includes samples of work and some example policies for schools to use.
I CT has been a focus of our development for several years, and all the staff have worked immensely hard to drive up standards and continually develop our practice to keep pace with changes in teaching and learning. Some of our key activities are:
A Review of the ICT Curriculum
Our staff training has developed ICT teaching to such an extent that we discovered that our old skills matrix, which was based on the old curriculum, has now been covered by the end of year three. We are therefore working together as a staff to review the curriculum in relation to our subjects. We are confident that we can develop ICT beyond the core skills to increase imagination and creativity in the subject’s use.
E-Safety Training
 We identified a need in our school for a concerted effort in teaching e-safety. This was in response to a straw poll of children using Facebook and having little understanding of the risks involved. We conducted staff training using the ThinkUKnow website and resources to ensure staff were in a position to help the children, then set up a Cyber-Safety week of ICT lessons throughout the school to make sure that all the children in school were aware of how to deal with the internet safely. We also targeted parents of our Year Six class to provide resources to help them become more aware of the security risks at a drop-in session. Where individual children were identified as having given more access to their information that was safe, or who had posted pictures online, we contacted parents directly and offered support to help them to address this with their children.
Email Links
As part of out ICT teaching of email skills, we set up an email link with our adopted Artillery Regiment in Afghanistan. The children learnt how to compose and send an email, which they sent to a staff email address. We then forwarded them on to our contact in Afghanistan, minus the header information for security. The messages are being shared amongst the soldiers who will then email back to us for staff to pass to the children. We are considering ways to expand this to include video or audio messages in future.
We are also in the early stages of setting up an online link with a school in Northern Ireland. We are trying to find a way of combining out different ICT systems but hope in time to be able to have groups of children working together online to develop understanding of the two contrasting localities.
 Computer Club
Our computer club has a dedicated core of children who have come every week since September 2009. We have worked on a range of skills including graphics, music, photography and video, Powerpoint, games design, and photo editing. Many of the tasks we have looked at were chosen by the children themselves and we planned activities to address these choices. We initially surveyed the children to discover which children in the school had access to computers at home and those without computers were invited directly to attend to help to bridge the Digital Divide.
As part of the computer club, we have invited parents to join us, and have successfully recruited one child’s Dad to join as a helper. He has enjoyed working with us and has used it to help his work on his college ICT course. He has also been able to successfully apply for a Home Access Grant to provide a new computer for him and his children to use. Since gaining the award, we have also been able to recruit two parents who are in the process of designing and building our new school website. We are looking forward to having the children contribute new content to the site, and the Computer Club is learning web design skills alongside the new site as well.
We have implemented a new Assessment Tracking program in school, using a macro-enabled Excel spreadsheet to analyse our childrens’ progress. The system has involved attending training by the software writers, then disseminating that training to the other staff at school to help them to complete the data collection and then produce reports from it.
As ICT continues to develop we will carry on looking for opportunities to adapt and improve our provision still further as we aim to equip our 21st century learners with the skills they need to achieve their full potential.
Documents & Media
|
Labels: Guidance, Documentation, eSafety, ICT, Curriculum, Head Teachers, Case Studies, Case Study - Curriculum Policy & Practice, Social Networking, Awards Case Study
