I Should Be Marking

As the school is getting a site licence for Quark Xpress I decided to teach myself how to use it. The end result? 15 posters giving a brief rundown of the tasks. skill and qualifications needed for 15 different IT based careers. Details are taken from Learndirect and the images from Stock Xchange (royalty free).

I actually did them a good while ago but have been posting them to Senduit (or is it USendIt?) and putting the link on the TES forums. Hopefully this will stop me having to update the thread every couple of weeks.

I’ve been teaching the Edexcel specification GCSE in ICT for almost 2 years now (erk!) and created a spreadsheet to help me mark it. I’ve been meaning to share it with a couple of colleagues at least and I thought that this might be a suitable platform.

It’s a bit ‘alpha’, but click onto the ‘Main Menu’ tab and change the names (you’ll have to start one cell above and use the cursor key to go down as the names are hyperlinks).

Anyone familiar with the spec should then find it straightforward to use - just traffic light the individual criteria and assign a mark for each section. The Overview page is a handy way of examing the class’ progress as a whole.

It’s currently limited to 15 pupils (simply because that’s my largest GCSE class size) but anyone competent enough to be teaching the course ought to be able to modify it sufficiently

Edexcel GCSE ICT Marking Spreadsheet

OK, so I made a post a week or so ago suggesting that I had cracked how to deal with my form group. Well, perhaps not so much after all. Waiting silently for them to be quiet is still a technique I’m using heavily but it’s not doing the job as well any more on its own.

Once a week (or sometimes twice) I have a full 20 minute registration with nothing to do - no assemblies, no planner signing, just the register and any notices to read out. So we played a counting game I read about on the TES forums and it seemed to go down fairly well. It was noisy, but fun and I think we need more of the latter (and I’d be happy for a better balance of the former - quiet for the register and notices, noisy when th activity allows it).

What I really need to do is find a strategy and stick to it in order to allow the kids time to get used to the routine. I’m getting better at doing that but there’s still a way to go - too many of my (good?) ideas fall by the wayside after a week or two and I’ve watched enough reality TV to know that isn’t the best way to deal with kids!

I think I’m going to have to add a new category for this blog, ‘Inspired by the TES forums, or something similar. I think fully half of these posts must have started out there and here we go with another…

There was a post late last night from a teacher who was finding it difficult to teach ICT. Pupils assuming they can come into a lesson and play Flash games, check email, etc. I’m sure all ICT teachers have seen that, but I think that for most it isn’t a huge problem (or it hasn’t been allowed to be a huge problem, I should say). Problems holding their attention was another difficulty cited and the first couple of posts (apparently not everyone is up as early as me this morning) talked about the boring nature of the National Strategy. Me, I’ve been up half the night (kids, blech!) and so my response turned into a bit of a rant.

I talked about a lot of the simple ideas I’ve used to make ICT more interesting. Instead of competing with Miniclip and MSN, why not use what the kids are interested in to hold their attention? I don’t mean bribe them with games, not by a long way. I know far too many ICT teachers that do this and it drives up the wall. What I mean is do things that are interesting.

Kids really don’t care about how much it costs to put on a school disco (7.4). I’m hoping they’ll have more fun next term when I have them pricing up sofas, pool tables and PS2s (should that be PS3s?) for a youth club. Still a bit dull on the face of it, but show me a kid who can resist flicking through the Argos catalogue and I’ll show you a kid in need of a big hug.

Instead of making a website about the school (8.2) or a PowerPoint about themselves (7.1), why not get them to make a PowerPoint about wild animals for their Y5 bretheren back at the Primary Schools? Why not get them to make a website for one of their clubs, groups, bands, etc? Why not get them to make a showcase for their Art work - take some still and video cameras up there and get some multimedia content.

Instead of filling in worksheets about communication methods (GNVQ), why not get them to make an advert for a mobile phone company, an office training video or a stop-motion animation?

The list goes on and on, A colleague of mine was desperate to get her Y9 pupils to really understand how attachments work on email in preparation for the QCA tests so they spent an hour drawing silly pictures and emailing them to each other. They had a great time and actually got the idea for how to attach and access files sent along with emails. Something obvious to us but actually quite difficult for a lot of kids.

My point is (and I’m aware I’m preaching to the converted) that we have so many tools at our disposal that it is criminal to allow them to learn Office for 5-7 years and call it ICT. No wonder pupils get bored and fed up with that. Using the Internet to teach yourself sign language is much more fun and probably more educational than making yet another poster in Publisher [spit].