Book now for The Big Computing Leadership Conference. Everything a computing subject leader needs is here. Find out how to improve your computing provision at primary or secondary. Thursday 14th December at Oxford Brookes University.
Brought to you by the NCCE Leadership Specialist Hub, we have four strands, over twenty sessions and an exhibition area full of top-class vendors. There’s something for every computing lead at The Big Computing Leadership Conference.
It gets to this time of year and your eager, or nervous (or both?) about starting term. New class, new displays, new colleagues, new behaviour management strategies, new photocopier (how in the world does that thing work?) and…. possibly you’ve taken on new subject leadership. Have you been given computing because you’re the youngest and therefore ‘know technology’? Or perhaps your an ECT and there for are ‘up to date with the latest training’? Or maybe you’ve been given it because you’re experienced and have done such a great job of leading other subjects. Or… maybe no one else wanted it and you made the mistake of going to the bathroom when they were allocating roles?
Or, you’ve retained computing and you’re in your second, third or tenth year of leading it. How is it going? Are you bossing it? Is everyone on board and smashing out excellent computing lessons, covering and assessing all parts of the computing curriculum?
Whatever your situation with leading primary computing, there always seems to be more to learn. More to get on top of, more to update or upgrade, more to try and squeeze in to an already full timetable, not to mention subject leader time to monitor your subject across the school!
The good news is that we are here to help. We, being the National Centre for Computing in Education. I am the National Specialist in Primary Computing Leadership and I’m here to support you in any way that I can! First and foremost, I want to tell you about The Big Computing Leaders’ Conference on Thursday 14th December, being held in Oxford. Stick it in your diaries now; more information on that coming soon.
Next, I want to show you a few places for you to get ideas from, talk to other subject leaders, share best practice, ask questions, network, that kind of thing:
Please do keep an eye on this website – Run Don’t Walk Primary Computing. It will be full of helpful, interesting and above all, FREE resources and CPD.
Speaking of CPD, I’ve organised some of the courses that I’m leading up until Christmas, below. These are top notch courses that cover exactly what you need to know!
The most comprehensive course you can attend is ‘Leading Primary Computing’ which is split into two parts. The first part is face to face and happens all over the country; it is designed to give you first class CPD whilst helping you connect with your local network of leaders and your computing hub. Here are three that I’m running in my patch, but once you’ve clicked on the link you’ll see alternative dates and locations down the right hand side, in case you can’t make any of these:
Once you have done Module 1, the second module is split into a 3 part remote course, usually occurring on three different days. You have a choice of any of the module 2 courses, be aware that most have three different dates, so make sure you can attend all of them before you book (they appear at the bottom of the booking link page). These are the module 2 courses that I am running; it is always best to try and attend the module 2 course with the same person you completed module 1 with.
If you are interested in taking the leadership pathway to getting your primary computing certificate, then please check out this link, with further courses and resources for you to choose from:
The next thing I want to tell you about, is the NCCE’s Teach Computing Curriculum. It is a research lead, up to date and completely free curriculum for you to download and take straight into your school. If you’ve never seen it before, do take. alook, it may save you time and money! If you are already rolling this out in your school or trying a phased change over from a previous scheme of work, may I recommend attending the Getting Started with the teach Computing Curriculum course, designed for leaders like you, to learn how to best deploy this curriculum and know about all the hardware and software requirements.
If you’ve decided to use the TCC for your school, the next step would be to agree with SLT for all teaching staff to attend year group specific training, which is again free, online, and geared towards giving teachers hands on experience of what their pupils will be learning as well as answering any of their questions. These ‘Getting started in year *x*’ courses are in two parts and usually held after school. Please make sure that you tell teachers there are two dates, and to check the bottom of the course page before booking to make sure they can attend both dates.
To enable a whole school approach, the NCCE Primary Specialists have arranged for all of the getting started year group courses to all happen on the same evenings, so that it can replace a staff meeting and get all staff trained at the same time:
‘Getting Started’ year group remote courses,
Part 1 – Thursday 28th September 15:45 – 16:45,
Part 2 – Thursday 12th October 15:45 – 17:15,
Send the year group links below to the appropriate teachers to sign up and book on:
This month I’m featured in issue 21 of ‘Hello World‘ talking about Algorithms in design and the assessment opportunities that brings up. Shout out to Jane Waite for the inspiration!
If you are using the NCCE’s Teach Computing Curriculum (if you’re not, go take a look, it’s research led, up to date and completely free!), you’ll have noticed that they have added in assessment opportunities either in the form of a Rubric (teacher assessment – emerging, expected, exceeding) or a quiz.
An assessment quiz example from a Year 3 Programming unit
The quizzes are particularly helpful as they give a clear display of pupil understanding. If you conduct these as a pre and a post assessment opportunity, you can track progress really well.
The only issue is the printing, collecting, storing and marking!
I decided to transfer these quizzes into Microsoft Forms, so that children can complete them online and you, the teacher, can download a spreadsheet containing all of their answers. It even does the marking for you!
Before you dive straight in, there are a couple of things you should know…
Firstly, sometimes it is difficult to translate certain questions from paper to an online form, particularly one that asks the children to draw, join up or circle answers. So some artistic licence has been applied; the questions aren’t exactly as they appear on paper!
The second point is – I have included 2 questions at the beginning; the first is ‘What is your name?’ as I’ve set the quizzes up so they can be completed without the pupils needing a log in, so this will make sure their name is against their data on the spreadsheet of results.
The second question is always a digital literacy question, as I believe it’s important to show these in an assessment. These may appear unrelated to the unit, but you can edit them once you’ve set them up for yourself.
Obviously not all of the units have quizzes, but for all of the ones that do (in KS2) there are links below.
I have also included my own quizzes that I’ve made for units that I have created (no planning for these as yet, sorry!) but you are welcome to those quizzes too.
Next, click on the links for the quizzes you want, these are ‘duplicate’ links, so it should ask you if you want to duplicate. Once you accept, it should create a copy of the quiz in your MS forms area on your account. you can then edit the quiz if you wish, or simply go to ‘send’, copy the url and put it somewhere for the pupils to click on (in a doc on shared drive, or shortcut on their browsers etc).
Note: All the official answers to these, with explanations, can be found in the related unit folder in the TC Curriculum (link at top of page)
I’d love to know if this was helpful, so please do get in touch using my contact details at the top of this page. Thanks!
Run Don't Walk - Primary Computing 