Teaching and Learning / Subjects

Information and Communication Technology

Learning through ICT

 

The GCS ICT department provides an hour of ICT each week for every student throughout the school.  Students taking GCSE ICT as an option have additional lessons focused on ICT coursework tasks.   

 

 ICT lessons have two primary aims. The first is to enhance students’ ICT capability and allow them to benefit from ICT in other subject areas and at home. The second is to build upon students’ ability to solve problems and think critically. Units of work are designed as projects which concentrate on different aspects of ICT capability. We also run lunchtime clubs each day for students to continue to work on skills developed in the classroom or to pursue their own interests. 

 

ICT project work places an emphasis on assessment for learning (AfL) as part of NECTAR. Project work is usually focused on one of the four key national strands for ICT: Making Things Happen; Finding Things Out; Selecting and Presenting Information; and Control and Monitoring. A fifth strand, Evaluation, is a constant aspect of ICT.  During each year a student will study elements of each strand. In Year 7 the main emphasis is on    Selecting and Presenting Information, while by Year 9 it has shifted towards Control and Monitoring. Creativity is a key aspect of ICT, as students need to be able to produce creative solutions to real world problems.

 

The emphasis on AfL ensures that students are clear about what they have to do, how they can do it, what they need to do to achieve success, and what they are expected to do to improve on their last  assessment. Students are given assessment sheets at the start of a unit and asked to grade examples of work before they begin the task themselves, helping them to gain a clear understanding of what their work should include to obtain a good grade. At the end of each unit students have an opportunity to evaluate their own and their peers’ work, grading not only their level of attainment but also their commitment. After each unit students are given an assessment level and their target level is adjusted.

 

ICT education is not just about learning to use the standard Microsoft packages. In an era where it is easy to see the fast pace of ICT development, it is essential that students not only know how to use software but are able to pick up new skills as they are required. With this in mind, the department has introduced Mind Mapping, presentation, graphics and website design software with the aim of encouraging students to learn by exploration. Students also have the opportunity to improve their typing skills with a touch-typing course, and the school has recently achieved Centre of Excellence status in the use of Matchware’s Mediator software, a programme designed to introduce students to interactive multimedia presentation authoring.

 

Since the introduction of the KS3 ICT tests there has been an increased emphasis on teaching students to select appropriate types of software independently as well as on learning how to use unfamiliar software quickly. The days of memorising methods to carryout simple ICT tasks are gone.

 

 

Business Studies

 

Creativity in Business

 

The Business Education Department at GCS is developing its use of NECTAR in its learning programmes. To show you what we do, here is a look at what the GCSE classes do for their third learning unit – Production.

 

We start with engagement, where the students are asked to look at the issue of product quality from their point of view as a consumer of mobile phone handsets. The task leads to a discussion in which the class tend to divide into those who view the number of functions as most important and those who think reliability is most important, all agreeing that they use brand names to judge whether a handset is likely to be high quality or not.

 

In order to see how the production fits into the big picture, we use ICT to investigate the location factors determining which businesses set up in Guildford.  This activity is extended by creating promotional material to ‘sell’ Guildford to businesses. Students make a business presentation to the class to reinforce this learning

 

Several of the tasks in this unit use a visual stimulus or challenge which can be paper based or ICT based – in one lesson students use an aerial photograph to analyse the layout of the Nissan factory in Sunderland to see how Just-In-Time production works.

 

A major approach in Business is ‘learning by doing’, where tasks include students role-playing and actually creating real business situations. In this unit students create a production line to make Valentines cards. Production managers are able to observe and motivate whilst line workers focus on productivity and quality. At the end students review, analysing and evaluating their performance using key terminology.

 

Other activities completed in the unit include a variety of tasks to demonstrate their learning such as applying the Kaizen philosophy of continual improvement to their own study activities, calculating costs based on real time data from a production line.  The major piece of independent learning is the investigation of Japanese management processes that have revolutionised manufacturing in the UK in the last twenty years,

 

Students are assessed throughout the unit with past paper questions and are given a grade according to the AQA examining board mark scheme. All students have a target grade based upon their achievement in Maths and English at Key Stage 3 and are encouraged to beat it. Students are given the assessment criteria and examples of work achieving each criteria as models.

 

If you have any questions relating to the work of the Business Department, please contact us at school.