Category Archives: Pedagogy

Computational Thinking for Educators

I was asked for our school’s latest INSET day to devise a half-hour session which I would repeat during the day for all teaching staff on the fairly loose topic of sharing good practice / sharing our classroom activities.

Now I was fairly sure that 30 minutes was not going to be long enough for me to introduce much interesting in the way of Computer Science or code for a group of teachers who had never experienced it before, so I began to think about what I could deliver.

My thoughts turned to some of the Computational Thinking lessons we do with our students as they are accessible and don’t require the use of a computer. The fact that I was going to deliver a session on sharing good practice from my teaching and that it would not involve any tech other than a projector (although  it is a good one, you can visit BuyDLP.com to make sure) and presentation, would no doubt come as a shock to some of my colleagues!
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Writing an effective whole school Digital Literacy programme

This post was originally posted on Rachel Jone’s blog and is one in a series of posts which Rachel co-wrote with other teachers from Twitter.

Jon:

Introduction

Firstly there are a number of questions which should be addressed when we look at creating an effective whole school digital literacy programme:

  1. What is Digital Literacy?
  2. Why should we be teaching it?
  3. Who should be teaching it?
  4. How are we going to teach this?

If you start with these questions and ensure that the answers are relevant to your individual school, then I feel that you will be well on your way to creating an effective and personalised Digital Literacy programme.

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Computer Science and Moodle Quizzes

I have been teaching our Year I (NC year 7) girls Computer Science since September now and I am approaching the end of the course, when it will rotate to the other half of the year group. I thought it best to carry out some assessment of their learning of the previous unit before we start the final unit on Web Design.

As all of my resources and grades for the course are set up within Moodle I thought what better to use for the assessment than a Moodle Quiz.

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Transforming Learning in the 21st Century

On Friday 6th June I attended the “Transforming Learning in the 21st Century” event organised by OS Pedagogy at the John Henry Newman Catholic College in Birmingham.

Details of the event were passed to my by a colleague at school quite some time ago, and it had just sat in my calendar for a few months being given little thought. As the event grew closer, I revisited the details of the event to sort out how I would get there and what workshops I wanted to attend. It was going to be an early start if I were to drive from Hull to Birmingham for the 8:30am registration! Deciding upon which workshops I would attend was to be no easy task either, looking at the options!

This post is a collection of my thoughts from the day (arranged in a roughly chronological order) and what I feel the impact has been on my future plans following the event.
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Open Source Schools – National Leadership Conference

On Tuesday 5th April Open Source Schools are hosting a National Leadership Conference to showcase to school leaders the benefits that Open Source Software can have in their schools.

As a member of Open Source Schools and as I already utilise a lot of different Open Source Software (both at a classroom level and in the server rooms) at our school, I am helping to raise the profile of this event. Continue reading Open Source Schools – National Leadership Conference