Primary Computing and Digital Technologies: Knowledge, Understanding and Practice

Keith Turvey, John Potter, Jeremy Burton, Jonathan Allen, Jane Sharp

• Publisher: Learning Matters
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781473995079
• Edition: 7
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Elementary Education

What do you need to know to teachcomputing in primary schools? How do you teach it?

This book offers practical guidance on how to teachthe computing curriculum in primary schools, coupled with the subject knowledge needed to teach it. This Seventh Edition is a guidetoteachingthe computing contentof the new Primary National Curriculum. It includes many more case studies and practical examples to help you see what good practice in teachingcomputing looks like. It also explores the use of ICT in the primary classroom for teaching all curriculum subjects and for supporting learning in every day teaching. New chapters have been added on physical computing and coding and the importance of web literacy, bringing the text up-to-date. Computing is both a subject and a powerful teaching and learning tool throughout the school curriculum and beyond into many areas of children's learning lives. This book highlights the importance of supporting children to become discerning and creative users of digital technologiesas opposed to passive consumers.

1 Organising Digital Technologies in your Classroom

Chapter Objectives

When you have completed work on this chapter, you will have:

• thought about the organisational issues around teaching with digital technologies in your primary classroom;
• considered the practical aspects of locating equipment and how this impacts on planning;
• looked at organising the different levels of resources present in schools/settings;
• examined how best to meet children's needs and to enable them to benefit from and enjoy using digital technologies in their learning.

Introduction

First, to look back at the recent past, new entrants to the teaching profession are fortunate to be joining it at a time following continuing, well-funded change in ICT in schools. Since the late 1990s in England, there has been significant spending on ICT infrastructure, hardware and software in schools. However, change on such a large scale is not without its logistical difficulties and much still depends on how the additional spending on ICT in schools has been managed at school level, local authority (LA) level and in the case of academies, the priorities of the academy trusts to which they belong.

The National Background

The evidence, from inspections by Ofsted and others, has suggested year on year that the use of computers and other digital technologies in schools, such as interactive whiteboards, is, in some cases, becoming more prevalent and better integrated into subject teaching. However, there is concern at the widening gap between schools that are at the cutting edge and using digital technologies widely and pervasively and those that have not yet fully integrated them into their teaching and learning. Even in areas where there is rich provision of resources, it is possible to find evidence that ICT is not always fully or usefully integrated into the broader curriculum.

Part of the issue lies with the variation in the quality of the development plans at local and at school level as well as with the wide variation in support to schools. In turn, some of the variation can be put down to the ‘bid culture’ in which the innovation has taken place. In some initiatives, LAs made bids for funding to central government on the basis of a costed development plan. Schools sometimes had to bid to LAs for a share, and so on. No two neighbouring LAs managed this in exactly the same way, so you will notice variations when you move between your placement schools. The recent move to free schools and academies has only added to this complexity and variation.

Allied to the expansion in hardware provision was the connection of every school to the internet and to subsequent opportunities for collaboration and communication, as well as home–school links. This used to be referred to as connecting schools to the National Grid for Learning (NGFL) and you may still see references to this now-defunct initiative in school documentation. To this end, LAs in many parts of the country aligned themselves with the emergent ‘Regional Broadband Consortia’ (RBCs) which were public-private partnerships providing fast, relatively low-tariff internet access for schools and, in many cases, a virtual learning environment (VLE) of one kind or another through which the learning community interacts. Most also assisted schools in protecting children from unsuitable content through the deployment of firewalls and servers which screen sites and searches.

A further major element of spending early on was an acknowledgement of the need to train teachers in schools. The New Opportunities Fund (NOF) was set up with Heritage (Lottery) money. Again, although NOF funding and training have now ceased, you may well encounter references to it in staffroom documentation or in conversation.

A further intention of government policy under the New Labour Government from 1997 to 2010 was to provide subsidised laptops for teachers. Significant pilot projects, such as the Becta multimedia Portables for Teachers pilots, had found that giving teachers laptops greatly increased their use of digital technologies in the curriculum for teaching and administration. In order to benefit from the scheme teachers had to be part of a school which was registered with the above-mentioned NOF training scheme. Some of the teachers with whom you will be working may well have benefited from this scheme.

Other major initiatives have had differing levels of emphasis in different local authorities. In some LAs, personal ownership of computers was pursued in the form of projects which focus on the use of hand-held equipment such as PDAs (personal digital assistants). In other LAs, the use of laptops was seen as something to be encouraged through bulk purchase schemes alongside trolleys for the storage and charging of the equipment. The aim here was to diversify ICT provision away from the static fixed computer lab and put the technology in the hands of the learners. More recently some schools have moved towards exploring the use of tablet devices such as iPads and other such devices, in order to exploit the mobility and flexibility offered by such devices. Similarly trainees might come across schools which operate what is called a ‘bring your own device’ strategy (BYOD) in which children may be encouraged to bring their own devices to school (e.g. smartphone, iPod touch) which can be linked to the school network and used for researching on the internet and to support learning. This is more common in secondary schools and does of course bring with it issues of equal opportunity for learners.

You may well also encounter local projects and initiatives based in the realm of digital media, recording and presenting video and audio resources, digital movie-making, podcasting and so on. There is a fuller discussion of this in future sections.

The Local Background

There has been a perceived lack of confidence with the integration of ICT on the part of some teachers. Occasionally, this is characterised as ‘reluctance’. It is certainly true that some teachers find it enormously threatening to be delivering a subject or using technological tools which employ skills which they do not feel that they themselves have but which the children may possess.

There may also be no support structure for teachers in their school situation. At school level, there may be no ICT or computing co-ordinator. Good ICT and computing subject leaders who attend training and pass it on to colleagues and who give generously of their time and knowledge are not always readily available. At LA level, it may be that there is no active advisory team encouraging good practice and recommending hardware and software. In both these cases there has been a failure of management to see the necessity of putting money into human resources. Too much time and money can sometimes be spent on hardware and software and not enough on the human resources needed to develop and promote excellence in ICT and computing in the classroom. You may well see evidence of this in your placement school. The recent emphasis on computer science and programming in the National Curriculum has also exacerbated this issue.

One other issue to note is the perceived ‘skills gap’ between teachers and children at home. Year on year, home ownership of computers and digital devices is increasing. It would be wrong to assume that it was all going into the study bedrooms of middle-class students. It is possible to find levels of computer ownership in deprived areas of Inner London, for example, where six-year-old children are experienced users of the latest software. As alluded to above, it would be wrong for teachers to allow the feeling to grow that children know more than they do. What children do not know, and the reason why they need the teacher to be using digital technologies with them, is how to apply it critically in their developing subject knowledge. Marc Prensky (2001) popularised the term ‘digital natives’ to refer to the apparent ease with which children and young people who have grown up in technology-rich contexts relate to digital technologies and appropriate them. However, this term is often used far too loosely and naively in relation to children and young people's use of digital technologies and their safe, critical and effective use of digital technologies cannot be assumed. Bennett et al. (2008) offer a more critical view on the debate about so-called ‘digital natives’ and the implications for education.

Resource Levels in Schools: A Rough Guide

This section attempts to categorise schools according to the resource settings at different levels. Three types of resource setting are described on a continuum from high resource to medium resource to low resource (see Table 1.1). It is useful to characterise resource settings in this way because you will be able to make a judgement about particular organisational strategies if you can learn to observe and sum up the situation in a placement school quickly.

Table 1.1

The school in which you are placed will be somewhere along the line of development and will not necessarily have all elements of the different resource settings represented. Furthermore, schools develop and change year on year.

A further issue – which is partly included below – is the human resource levels in the school. A school with very low levels of ICT equipment may still be doing well in ICT and computing due to excellence in the organisation and involvement of all staff. Similarly a school which looks good with a network room full of computers and trolleys of iPads may in fact be keeping the door locked and doing nothing with them. The situation is complex.

Practical Task

Observing the ICT setting 1: The computers and other hardware

Schools have a degree of choice over how they organise their resources for computing and ICT and this early observation task is designed to raise awareness about the organisation and use of digital technologies in teaching and learning. The sections which follow will take up issues around school organisation and discuss how they may have come to certain pedagogical decisions.

Although in itself computing is a foundation subject, ICT or digital technologies can be integrated into every subject area across the curriculum and you will see it being used in a range of settings, including in areas of learning in the Early Years Foundation Stage. Make notes on what is being used and on where it is being used. Use these questions as prompts for your note-taking. Have a look at all of the places in the school where digital technologies may be in operation.

• What do you ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the Authors
• Introduction
• Section A Digital Technologies in Teaching and Learning
• 1 Organising Digital Technologies in your Classroom
• 2 Planning for Digital Technologies Across the Curriculum
• 3 Planning to use Digital Technologies in the Early Years Foundation Stage
• 4 Digital Display Technologies
• 5 Mobile Technologies
• Section B Primary Computing and the National Curriculum
• 6 Planning for Primary Computing as a Subject
• 7 Assessment in Primary Computing
• 8 Computational Thinking and Programming
• 9 Physical Computing
• 10 Web Literacy (Including Coding for the Web)
• 11 Digital Media/Digital Literacies
• 12 Writing with Digital Technologies
• 13 Social Media – Tools for Communicating, Collaborating and Publishing
• 14 Graphing Programs
• 15 Databases and Spreadsheets
• Section C Digital Technologies and the Professional Teacher
• 16 Professional use of Digital Technologies
• 17 Safety; Online and Off
• 18 Ethical and Legal Issues
• Self-Assessment Questions
• Answers to Self-Assessment Questions
• Index