I thought I would share what I do to help develop effective pedagogy from the off in Year 7. Baselining students is important, as is gathering information on reading ages, verbal/non-verbal reasoning and so forth through the Cognitive Ability tests but what can really help contextualise the planning for your IT curriculum is where the students are coming from, how their socio-economic background may affect access provision at home, what IT tools (hardware and software they have at home) and generally how they feel about themselves and the way they learn and engage with learning. The latter is very useful at carefully planning group dynamics withint the classroom.
One of the very first things that I have done with my Y7 students is to get them to complete an online survey via GoogleDocs. The survey pulls together some key data. As a result I have the following information about my students to aid effective planning (especially challenge in home learning) and delivery of the IT curriculum.
- 54% Have their own computer at home, not shared with another family member
- Everyone has access to a computer – big tick!
- All except one student has broadband at home – this student will have a letter, encouraging attendance to homework club to complete all IT homelearning
- A full breakdown as to who has access to which peripherals – scanners, digital cameras, video cameras, graphcis tablets etc
- A full breakdown of hardware platforms and generic software types
- Proportion of students that have a smartphone (50% of class)
- What online services they have accounts to. 74% have a google account at age 11 before they have started the curriculum at secondary school. More worrying is the proportion of stundets at age 11 that have Facebook account (56%). We mail all Y7 parents expressing concerns over social media in the first half term
- Lots of information on how they learn, whether they like IT, think they are good at IT, like showing other people whow to use IT, good at listening/following instructions, remembering how to do things etc…
Now I have a set of questions that I know work and get the data I want it is very easy to deploy the survey to different groups at the start of the academic year in Y7.
