#ComputingHour

Twitter is an amazing vehicle for sharing opinions, ideas and resources. Trouble is, I can only access Twitter for an hour-or-so a day. This means that I constantly feel that I've missed out on lots of great tweets because they have dropped too far down my timeline. And so I started #ComputingHour as a way of overcoming this problem.

#ComputingHour is an opportunity to network with like-minded people interested Computing and ICT in schools. Sessions take place on Twitter every Thursday evening between 9pm-10pm. The first session takes place on Thursday 4th July 2013.

Take a look at the #ComputingHour website for more information.

Badge, Stickers and Achievement Points 5

Things have been progressing nicely with our reboot of rewards and praise within the ICT/Computing department. The stickers are now in school and I’m super-pleased with them! Well done @SchoolStickers who have supplied a high quality product.

Everything is now in place to get this exciting initiative off the ground with Year 7 in September. When a coded sticker has been earned it will be placed into the student's planner, and a non-coded badge (a virtual duplicate of the sticker) will be placed into the student's Google Apps blog when their work is marked. The student uses the code on the sticker to log their achievement on the SchoolStickers website.

Achievement Points
Issued on a lesson-by-lesson basis

Home Learning Stickers

Issued half-termly upon successful completion of the homework task 

Google Apps Blogging Sticker

Gold, silver and bronze awarded according to the quality of eportfolio

All that remains now is to give this initiative a big launch. I'll report back in October or November to let you you how things have gone.

Badges, Stickers Part 4

Badges, Stickers and Achievement Points 4

The curriculum and the home learning tasks for term 1 (Sept-Dec 2013) of year 7 are now in place!

We will be starting with a unit on Scratch and E-Safety where students work towards designing a game in which they have to shoot down the E-Safety threats whilst avoiding the "friendlies". The bronze, silver and gold Games Programmer and E-Safety Expert stickers and badges will be awarded for the best work, as will the bronze, silver and gold Blogger badge for the best Google Apps eportfolio. A badge will also be awarded for the completed home learning tasks on the topic of History of Computers.

Bronze, Silver and Gold Badges

Year 7 Term 1

During the second half of the term we will work on a topic based around the Smart ICT scheme of work in which students create a Bizarre Facts website. Whilst this will be created using Dreamweaver, we will be looking in detail at html coding. The bronze, silver and gold Website Designer and HTML Hotshot stickers and badges will be awarded for the best work, as again will the bronze, silver and gold Blogger badge for the best eportfolio. A badge will also be awarded for the completed home learning tasks on the topic of Story of a Dot COM.

List of Stickers and Badges for Term 1:

Half Term	Sticker Name	Points Value	Notes
1	Games Programmer (Bronze)	2	Design a game in Scratch - task completed
1	Games Programmer (Silver)	3	As above but to a good standard
1	Games Programmer (Gold)	4	As above but to an excellent standard
1	E-Safety Expert (Bronze)	2	Give Scratch game an e-safety emphasis - i.e. shoot down the e-safety threats
1	E-Safety Expert (Silver)	3	As above but to a good standard
1	E-Safety Expert (Gold)	4	As above but to an excellent standard
1	History of Computers	2	Home learning task
2	Website Designer (Bronze)	2	Create a Bizarre Facts website
2	Website Designer (Silver)	3	As above but to a good standard
2	Website Designer (Gold)	4	As above but to a good standard
2	HTML Hotshot (Bronze)	2	Understand basic html coding
2	HTML Hotshot (Silver)	3	As above but to a good standard
2	HTML Hotshot (Gold)	4	As above but to an excellent standard
2	Story of a dot COM	2	Home learning task
1-6	Blogger (Bronze)	2	Awarded for completed eportfolios
1-6	Blogger (Silver)	3	Awarded for good eportfolios
1-6	Blogger (Gold)	4	Awarded for excellent eportfolios
1-6	Effort	1	Lesson-by-lesson achievement point
1-6	Progress	1	Lesson-by-lesson achievement point
1-6	Growth Mindset	1	Lesson-by-lesson achievement point

Stickers and Badges part 3

Badges, Stickers Part 5

Stickers, Badges 3 . . . and Home Learning

Work has been continuing on Badges and Stickers for next academic year. @GeekyNicki has been a good source of inspiration for ideas - check out her website which has lots of amazing resources. I've been looking at linking the Badges and Stickers to the Home Learning Tasks that I've been working on.

Half Term	Sticker Name	Points Value	Notes
1	History of Computers	2	Home learning task
2	Famous Dot COM	2	Home learning task

Here are the stickers that Carrot Rewards (who I have no affiliation to) created for me. I'll be using these with the new Year 7 between September and December 2013.

Badges, Stickers Part 2

Badges, Stickers Part 4

Your thoughts on these Home Learning Tasks?

From September 2013, the ICT/Computing department at my school has decided to stop setting homework on a week-by-week basis! By its very nature, weekly homework can be fragmented for the students and difficult to manage for the teachers. Instead, we will be setting one large homework task every half-term. We are referring to these tasks as Home Learning Tasks and we hope that they will allow students to explore aspects of ICT/Computing to a greater depth than would be possible with traditional homework.

The tables below list the tasks that we are planning to set. To be honest, although I'm reasonably happy with the list, I was looking for some kind of big idea. I don't know quite what that big idea should look like, but I feel as if I didn't quite find it. For that reason, this is still a work in progress. Let me know what you think of the tasks. Do you have any suggestions of tasks that could be added? Is there a better way of doing something like this?

Update 16 June '13: Thanks to @ReaDavis, @DCallanIT, @TessBoag, @paulwill and @Stephen_Berne for your retweets, comments and favorites. Here are a few tasks that I can consider adding to the list:

• Programming languages
• History of software
• Off-the-shelf mobile apps
• Custom mobile apps
• Game creation

Year 7
Half-Term	Topic	Task
1	History of Computers	Create  a timeline illustrating the history of computers
2	Famous Dot COM	Describe the history of a well-known internet based company
3	A Computer System	Illustrate the different parts of a typical home computer system
4	Computer Acronyms	Explains a range of well-known computer acronyms ( i.e. WWW)
5	How we Communicate	Illustrate the different ways we can communicate using computers
6	Computer Humour	Make people laugh by telling computer-related jokes

Year 8
Half-Term	Topic	Task
1	Famous in Computing	Tell the story of a famous computer scientist
2	Data Measurement	Illustrate the units of data measurement
3	My Home Network	Illustrate the parts that make up your own home network
4	Computer Jargon	Explain examples of computer jargon (i.e. applet, buffer, cache)
5	Internet Advantages	Illustrate the advantages of using the internet
6	Internet Disadvantages	Illustrate the disadvantages of using the internet

Year 9
Half-Term	Topic	Task
1	Careers in Computing	Illustrate the careers that are possible with ICT or Computer Science qualifications
2	Data Storage	Show the different methods of data storage used today
3	Social Networking	Create a timeline that illustrates the history of social networking
4	Inside a Computer	Describe the parts of a motherboard and what those parts connect to
5	Internet Uses	Illustrate the different ways in which we use the internet (watch videos, send emails etc)
6	History of Mobiles	Show a timeline that illustrates the history of mobile phones

Badges, Stickers . . . Part 2

Continuing on from my earlier post, things have been moving forward with a reboot of rewards and praise within the ICT/Computing department. I've started to develop an Achievement Policy and have come up with these 4 aims:

• Encourage students to engage with the ICT/Computing curriculum
• Motivate students to work independently
• Promote a positive ethos within the department
• Praise students through effective recognition of their ICT/Computing achievements

Kathryn at Carrot Rewards has been working on the sticker designs for me and I really like what we have so far. 

First of all there are the lesson-by-lesson Achievement Points for Effort, Progress and Growth Mindset. These follow along the same lines as points that can be awarded using SIMS. Students collect the stickers in their planners and can "cash them in" on the School Stickers website. In addition, we will allocate them as badges on students' Google Apps eportfolios. @MissPhilbin has a useful YouTube Video describing how you can use badges within Google Apps. In terms of cash-in value, each achievement sticker is worth 1 point and teachers should aim to award at least 3 of them each lesson.

Half Term	Sticker Name	Points Value	Notes
1-6	Effort	1	Lesson-by-lesson achievement point
1-6	Progress	1	Lesson-by-lesson achievement point
1-6	Growth Mindset	1	Lesson-by-lesson achievement point

@MrAColley gave me the idea for a Blogging sticker - he has some great designs and also gives a really good example of student blogging in action. I've come up with the idea of having gold, silver and bronze stickers, which carry cash-in values of 4, 3 and 2 points respectively. The intention here is not only to reward excellence but also (perhaps over ambitious?) to provide a mechanism for using the stickers when the students are still in Year 9. Here are the designs I'm going to run with in September 2013.

Half Term	Sticker Name	Points Value	Notes
1-6	Blogger (Bronze)	2	Awarded for completed eportfolios
1-6	Blogger (Silver)	3	Awarded for good eportfolios
1-6	Blogger (Gold)	4	Awarded for excellent eportfolios

I am also working on a series of stickers and badges to use as rewards for the work students do in lessons. I'll tell you all about these in my next update.

Badges, Stickers Part 1

Badges, Stickers Part 3