At Kirk Ella St. Andrew’s, we acknowledge that computers are changing the lives of everyone. Through teaching Computing, we equip children to participate in a rapidly-changing world where work and leisure activities are increasingly transformed by technology. We enable them to find, explore, analyse, exchange and present information. We also focus on developing the skills necessary for children to be able to use information in a discriminating and effective way. Computing skills are a major factor in enabling children to be confident, creative and independent learners.
At Kirk Ella St Andrew’s we value the contribution that technology can make to the teaching and learning for all pupils and staff. We therefore actively promote and utilise computing opportunities within the whole school structure and ethos.
We intend to encourage all pupils to be confident, competent, respectful and independent users of technology. We use computers across the curriculum where appropriate to motivate and inspire learners.
Based upon the National Curriculum and the needs of our children, we have created a computing progression map that sets out the strands of the computing curriculum and the objectives to be taught. We use the purple mash portal as a way of ensuring access to all the strands and the software required to develop pupil’s ICT skills, knowledge, understanding and capability through taught ICT lessons and to provide opportunities for pupils to apply and consolidate their ICT capabilities if they wish to outside of the classroom. Some units are developed beyond the purple mash portal to allow greater innovation of technology and to maximise learning opportunities across the curriculum.
In order to enable the use of computing across the curriculum, we have ensured there are mobile devices in each classroom as well as a computer suite and class sets of ipads. Children have dedicated lessons to teach the skills and this will sometimes be linked to other areas of the curriculum so that the skills are learned with a practical context. Digital literacy is included in the computer progression map and there is also content covered within our PSHE programme in order to safeguard children.
The impact of our computing curriculum is measured by questioning during lesson time, assessing children’s work against the learning objective, observing the ways in which they are able to solve problems (both expected and unexpected) in the lesson, talking to children across the school about their learning, and learning walks. We also use the purple mash ‘to dos’ portal section to help us measure the impact of our curriculum.
We intend our children to be :
Confident users of technology and thrive in an environment where access to ICT resources is natural and commonplace so that they use it to accomplish a wide variety of goals.
Skilled in using technology when finding, selecting and using information; effective and appropriate when using it for communication; confident when monitoring and controlling events both real and imaginary;
Displaying healthy attitudes towards ICT and its value to them and society in general. To be respectful when using it and mindful about issues of security, confidentiality and accuracy.
