By teaching programming in schools, children become creators of technology instead of consumers of technology.

It is the best way for primary pupils to learn about computer science and from today’s session I believe this to be true.

In today’s session we had the chance to play around with the equipment and software for coding and I feel it would be an easy concept to teach in school.

Scratch: I have seen scratch being used in school when I was a teaching assistant. Children love the interdependence of exploring the software and making their own creations. The children seem to be more advance than the teachers do.

Bee Bots: I feel these would be good to use in Key Stage 1 and we fun for the children to use. 

The internet has changed and developed through the years;

1969                                            1973                                                     2003                                                           2015

When teaching this to children you can get them to draw the internet, helps them explore their imagination.

Differences between the internet and the world wide web. The internet is not the web – this was interesting to know.

The Internet: Links your computer to other computers around the world, it is a way of transporting content.

The Web: Is a software that lets you use the content, it is what you see and click on in your computer’s browser.

Data handling activities help children to understand how data can be displayed in various ways – pictograms, bar charts, pie charts and tally charts. These provide opportunities for data analysis and for children to create their own data.

In school data loggers can be used to measure temperature, sound and light. Using data loggers is an easy way to input data onto the computer and create tables and graphs. You can used these in other areas of the curriculum to conduct experiences – science, maths and PSHE. Not all schools have data loggers or enough for the whole class to use but children can use google docs to input their data and the whole class can see and form a whole class graph of results.

In today’s lecture we used google form to create questionnaires. This would be a great investigate for the children to carry out in class as they can compose their own questions and collect their own data.

Children need to be safe, respectfully and responsibly when using the internet and it is important to teach children how to be safe online.

The image above is one way to teach children on how to be safe and keeping their personal information private. Children need to be taught that every time they go online they leave a trail – this is known as their digital footprint.

As well as teaching children online safety,  as teachers we also have to promote and prepare them for leaving primary school and hopefully the children we teach will take away theses values:

• Enthusiastic
• Ambition
• Diligence
• Independent
• An enquiring mind
• Be open minded
• Resilient
• A positive attitude
• Confident
• Respectful
• Responsible
• Self-regulating
• Polite
• Courage
• Good Critizen

Children learn about the world through learning how to program a computer. What if we take the computer away and children learnt how to programming work with out sitting in front of a computer.

In today’s lesson we learn some activities that could be an effective way of teaching computing without the use of a computer.

• Drawing a Crazy Character
• Writing a recipe for pizza
• Instruction on how to make a jam sandwich
• Thinking of a number game

All these activities can start off without using the computer and then the activity can lead to the use of the computer.

Today we learnt about how an interactive whiteboard works……

IWB can help make your lesson engaging for the children and a way for them to become involved in their learning and getting them interacting with each other. There is a lot of great activities you can make for your lessons and tools that can help make the lesson more interactive.

Here’s one I made – when we had the chance to play around with the SMART notebook software.

From my experience they never seem to work. They have a mind of their own and love to play up when you’re being observed. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen when we start teaching – what a nightmare that would be.