An amazing Whistle stop tour of programming which was so informative and full of good suggestions!

It was great to have an opportunity to play with Scratch as I had just recently seen it used in school during the Reviewing Pedagogy week and so had had a brief introduction to the program.  I was able to move my character around the screen successfully after a short while, but the most important thing that was highlighted was how debugging is an important part of the exploration process for me as well as the children.

I will definitely be taking this experience into school and moving forward with it.

Really interesting to realize how little I really knew about the internet even though I use it every day.

This lesson stressed the idea of teaching about the internet itself not just focusing on e-safety.  Obvious cross curricular links in terms of history, geography, creative writing.

Also introduced the idea of text-based coding using HTML.

Lots of elements for building an ICT lesson.  But remember to check external sites before showing them to the children!

This week we had an introductory session to Interactive Whiteboards.  Although I had seen them used in the classroom I had no idea of the full range of tools available to us, and indeed how many tools are “pre-prepared” as it were.  So there are many functions that can help us prepare eye-catching resources fairly quickly.  I particularly liked the function that produces quick clipart images and also the function that transforms handwriting on the board to text boxes.  However, I also realized that as with many things, it is a case of practice, practice, practice in order to ensure that the use of the board is productive and time efficient, and that we don’t become reliant on the bells and whistles to make the lesson interesting.

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