With one week to go on BSE1, this weekend has been a good time to reflect on the stresses and successes, the frustration and the progress made over the past 6 weeks. Going in I knew it would be hard, and it has been on some days, but I’ve learnt so much in my class and within my school and I am excited at the prospect of going back to university and then out on BSE2 with a fresh set of eyes.

I feel as though I’ve developed skills I never considered I would need, and have enjoyed seeing both my own progress and the progress of the 30 children that sit in front of me every day. This last week will be emotional (mainly because everyone is so exhausted) but it will mark the end of an enjoyable and educational journey!

This week we were looking at online safety and why its important that we teach primary school students (and teachers) about working safely online.

The internet is an amazing tool that provides nearly unlimited information and links millions of people across the globe. A lot of focus within computing is how based on how we need to stay safe and be wary online, but there is little emphasis on just how fantastic a resource it is.

With this in mind, our small group presentation focused on how to stay safe using social media sites, while still making the most of them. For teachers this means staying professional and appropriate online. We looked at information from the BBC about recommended ways to avoid being ‘caught out’, such as setting up privacy settings and being able to review photos before they appear on your feed, as well as never posting about your school, pupils or parents.

These may seem like common sense but its shocking how many people get caught out, and suffer real consequences for their online presence.  Our main focus for the presentation came from the Top 10 tips here from the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/webwise/0/21259413

This week we learned that making a jam sandwich may not be quite as simple as we had all presumed… The algorithms – instructional steps to create the end product –  that we wrote took a bit of editing before producing a successful sandwich and helped to explain how algorithms work in a computational sense.

The sandwich bot task was definitely something to consider for use, probably with a KS2 class, and was entertaining as well as educational.

While computational thinking and algorithms still sound scary, I feel much better about teaching around this subject and know that there is lots left to learn (and that not all of it is confusing and complicated!)