NC Framework for Computing

Click here for the National Curriculum Framework for Computing

Wildern Oscars 2013

Just in case you missed it, here is the link for the ITV Meridian broadcast...

http://vimeo.com/70421647

Heatwave Bananagrams

YouTube Copyright Basics

Colleague of mine just heard from a parent of one of our  year 7 pupils that they are being threatened with being sued because of something they uploaded to their YouTube account

You might want to show this YouTube guide to copyright with your classes

Transformational power of coding

The life of Pi: how Britain's biggest hardware hit for a generation came to be

This article was taken from the July 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.

Moments before Amy Mather is due to give the closing presentation at the Raspberry Jamboree being held in Manchester, the creator of the computer which inspired her talk faces a fresh challenge.

Pete Lomas has created a credit-card-sized micro-controller that sells for £16, but his current problem can't be solved with a soldering iron: he needs to figure out where Mather should stand so she can use her computer while still visible to the audience. Mather -- who goes by the Twitter handle@MiniGirlGeek -- is just 13 and not tall enough to be seen when standing behind the podium.

Read more here

Welcome to computing - Get into Teaching

Buzzer training for Python

# Receive and Return
# Demonstrates parameters and return values

def display(message):
    print(message)

def give_me_five():
    five = 5
    return five

def ask_yes_no(question):
    """Ask a yes or no question."""
    response = None
    while response not in ("y", "n"):
        response = input(question).lower()
    return response

# main
display("Here's a message for you.\n")

number = give_me_five()
print("Here's what I got from give_me_five():", number)

answer = ask_yes_no("\nPlease enter 'y' or 'n': ")
print("Thanks for entering:", answer)

input("\n\nPress the enter key to exit.")

Computer mouse inventor Doug Engelbart dies at 88

The inventor of the computer mouse, Doug Engelbart, has died aged 88.

Engelbart developed the tool in the 1960s as a wooden shell covering two metal wheels, patenting it long before the mouse's widespread use.

He also worked on early incarnations of email, word processing and video teleconferences at a California research institute.

The state's Computer History Museum was notified of his death by his daughter, Christina, in an email.

Her father had been in poor health and died peacefully on Tuesday night in his sleep, she said.

Doug Engelbart was born on 30 January 1925 in Portland, Oregon, to a radio repairman father and a housewife mother.

'Mother of all demos'

He studied electrical engineering at Oregon State University and served as a radar technician during World War II.

He then worked at Nasa's predecessor, Naca, as an electrical engineer, but soon left to pursue a doctorate at University of California, Berkeley.

His interest in how computers could be used to aid human cognition eventually led him to Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and then his own laboratory, the Augmentation Research Center.

His laboratory helped develop ARPANet, the government research network that led to the internet.

Engelbart's ideas were way ahead of their time in an era when computers took up entire rooms and data was fed into the hulking machines on punch cards.

At a now legendary presentation that became known as the "mother of all demos" in San Francisco in 1968, he made the first public demonstration of the mouse.

At the same event, he held the first video teleconference and explained his theory of text-based links, which would form the architecture of the internet.

He did not make much money from the mouse because its patent ran out in 1987, before the device became widely used.

SRI licensed the technology in 1983 for $40,000 (£26,000) to Apple.

At least one billion computer mouses have been sold.

Engelbart had considered other designs for his most famous invention, including a device that could be fixed underneath a table and operated by the knee.

He was said to have been driven by the belief that computers could be used to augment human intellect.

Engelbart was awarded the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT prize in 1997 and the National Medal of Technology for "creating the foundations of personal computing" in 2000.

Since 2005, he had been a fellow at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

He is survived by his second wife, Karen O'Leary Engelbart, and four children.

Continue reading the main story

Stop Frame Fish Tank

Here is the fish tank some of my Year 8's made today for their stop frame project.  Rather cool isn't it?

Snap!

Snap! is a site that is ideal for MS/HS learning how to program.  The site is a spin-off of Scratch and works very similarly w/ a drag-n-drop interface of "snapping" pieces of blocks together.  These blocks are commands and a user can see on the right side of the screen what is happening as they put these blocks together.

I recommend checking out Snap! by clicking here!!!

Flipping with Doddle

The idea of the flipped classroom, and how Doddle can make it a reality

30/01/2013

If there's one buzz phrase that buzzed a little louder than all others in 2012, it was “flipping the classroom.” It’s a term I first heard in the US, but the idea is old – indeed many of us have used it in our own teaching to a greater or lesser extent. 

 

Inverting the traditional idea of setting tasks for homework, in the flipped classroom model, teachers assign introductory material like videos or presentations as homework. This means that the teacher can spend more time in lessons overseeing group work and working with specific examples.

 

If put into practice effectively, it seems to me that the advantages of the model are clear: teachers spend less time presenting ideas and more time giving targeted feedback, while students spend more time actively learning and putting ideas into practice. If done successfully, it leads to greater ownership, engagement and motivation – in short, it’s just better.

 

But it also clearly has limitations. When you set homework introducing a concept to students and are greeted by half-a-class of blank faces, it can feel as though you’ve made a rod for your own back. Without proper materials, students can struggle to grasp ideas, meaning lessons can be held back and differences in student understanding can grow wider. And without the right monitoring tools, you can’t tell which student is familiar with a new idea, and who is totally new to it.

 

So while I very much believed in the concept, I found that the extent to which it was practical was held back by the resources and tools that I had. And this is where Doddle comes in. You can use Doddle to assign presentations and let your students discover ideas independently:

 

  -  Presentations set out all the key concepts in a clear, reliable and intuitive way;

  -  Assigning a mini quiz along with a presentation gives students a quick recap of what they've just seen, provides instant feedback and allows the teacher to see who’s understood it; 

  -  Students can rate their confidence after completing revision, so you know who needs extra help; 

  -  In the markbook, you can see who's read the presentations you assigned (including when they read it), and the breakdown of results by question lets you see which ideas need to be reviewed in class. 

 

Or, (with apologies to the pun-phobic), as one of our Educational Consultants put it, “we make it a flippin’ Doddle”. 

Flip the Classroom

Two nations divided by a common language

08/03/2013

This year at BETT, one of the most interesting talks I attended was given by Aaron Sams and Jonathan Bergmann, pioneers of the flipped classroom movement.

 

Enthusiastic and passionate educators, I was struck by Sams and Bergmann’s focus on the educational theory that led them to develop the technique of flipping the classroom. 

 

As I sat listening to them dropping in casual references to Bloom’s taxonomy and the Universal Design for Learning, I was struck, not for the first time, by the difference in the way UK and US educators talk about the ideas behind their methods. In the US, everything has a formalised, theoretical grounding; in the UK we talk in slightly more prosaic terms about what we do.

 

Recognising this, here’s my guide to the educational theories that lie at the heart of the flipped classroom movement.

 

Bloom’s taxonomy

 

Starting with a classic, this educational model defines the stages a student needs to progress through before you can assess whether they’ve mastered a topic or not. 

 

In the flipped classroom, the stages of ‘remembering’ and ‘understanding’ are moved outside of the classroom. At home, students access instructional materials (videos, presentations, etc.) that introduce new topics; in class, students should be able to recall and demonstrate understanding.

 

Taking these first two stages out of the classroom allows you to spend less time instructing and more time working on the higher-level skills of application, analysis, evaluation and creation. 

 

Mastery learning

 

Belying the jargon, this is a pretty straightforward concept: students begin a unit together, a formative assessment is taken, students who’ve achieved the necessary understanding move on to enrichment activities, students who haven’t are given greater support to get them to the mastery level. 

 

The flipped classroom is an effective supporter of the mastery learning model because it makes differentiation possible, earlier in the learning process. 

 

In the traditional classroom, one way students differentiate themselves is by their level of engagement. Delivering the same information in the same way to students of different abilities, you run the risk of boring higher-ability students, confusing lower-ability students, and only really engaging those at the mid-level.

 

In the flipped model, such issues are removed because every student learns at their own pace, outside of the classroom. Higher-ability students can steam through material, whilst lower-abilities can work through things more slowly, aided by support materials. 

 

Then, when students come into the classroom, you can assess their level of understanding and address it accordingly; differentiated groups can be doing different things, or you can employ greater intervention to get all students to the mastery level.

 

Universal Design for Learning (UDL)

 

The new kid on the block, this concept is steadily gaining ground in the States. 

 

Essentially, the UDL is based on the idea that each learner is unique and therefore must have access to: different ways of acquiring information, different opportunities to demonstrate their understanding, different forms of stimulation to maintain engagement.

 

Implementing the UDL means taking the idea of flipped learning to another level. Having tasked students with taking responsibility for the instructive phase, the UDL gives students further freedom; encouraging them to figure out what helps them to learn and finding the resources they need to do this.

 

Practicalities 

 

With the theory dealt with, let’s look at the practicalities of flipping the classroom. Key points to remember are:

 

- Availability – make sure the material you want students to access is available to them all; locating it in a central place online is a good way of doing this.

- Visibility – come up with a way of checking that students have done the work. Using an online automatic markbook is a really effective way of doing this.

- Variety – make sure your students have access to a wide range of different resources.

 

Ultimately, the benefits of flipping the classroom are clear: it helps you make the most of your face-to-face teaching time, which in turn helps students remain motivated and engaged by what they’re learning.

 

Happy flipping!

 

Julie

Doddle

WOW Of THE WEEK - TEENAGE CANCER TRUST.

Following on from last weeks assemblies and in preparation for NON UNIFORM DAY this coming Friday ( July 5th) please take a look at the following you tube videos and select whichever you believe to be appropriate for your tutor group. 

Please use these as a starting point for discussion about the value of a unit in a hospital specifically for teenagers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8gW7Nj8a10

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCEZxpYJZbI

Information about the progress of the Southampton Teenage Cancer Trust Unit can be found at: 

http://www.teenagecancertrust.org/get-involved/as-a-fundraiser/unit-appeals/southampton

The lad in the blue and white striped shirt is one of our ex pupils,Nick Illston, who is recovering from a brain tumour. Nick has been a tremendous ambassador for the Teenage Cancer Trust since his diagnosis. 

The community focus group will be selling TCT merchandise from the d.@rt at break and lunchtimes and on Friday 5th July the day has been designated as a non uniform day by SLT. 

There will be a concert in the outdoor performance space ( weather permitting) on Friday when we will be doing a bucket shake. Please bring in a few extra pennies for this amazing charity.