Head in the Cloud

Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash This post very much follows on from my previous post, especially with regards to some of the difficulties I've encountered with some of the Descriptions of Learning from the Science & Technology AoLE.  Last week a DCF coordinator from a primary school emailed me. Here's what it said: "I was just wondering if you could point our year 5 and 6 team in the direction of resources to support the AoLe statements: I can identify positive and negative design elements that affect user interactions. I can explain the importance of securing the technology I use and protecting the integrity of my data. I can explain how my data is used by services, which can help me make more informed decisions when using technology. I can explain how data is stored and processed. I thought I'd ask because you're probably already aware of lots of resources." So here's a primary school that is beginning to address the Science & Technology AoLE

For what seems like 'forever', I along with two of my colleagues have been working our way through the new Science and Technology area of learning and experience. Only focusing on the primary school related Progression Steps (PS) 1 to 3. Actually to be more accurate, I've only focused on the last 'What matters' statement related to Computer Science and my colleagues have been looking at their respective areas of expertise in Science and in Design and Technology. For several months we have been pulling together a long term progression document that we hope will help schools in the design of their new curriculum. Basically, we have been looking at the Descriptions of Learning (DoL) for each of the first three PS and then trying to work out what we think would be a suitable progression to address that end of PS statement. As it says in the Science and Technology guidance , the expectations are " framed broadly so that they can sustain learning over a series of yea

Gareth Morgan Consultancy has now been going for nearly 7 years, providing advice, support and training to primary schools across Wales. Where did that time go? Throughout those years, I've always had an ICT skills ladder that I've offered to schools. It's been updated continually throughout those years with quite a change in focus when the Digital Competence Framework (DCF) was introduced and with the ubiquitous use of Hwb and its related cloud based applications and digital resources. Initially this skills ladder was paper based and at one stage I had four versions of it as the example activities were focused around specific applications e.g., Google for Education / Purple Mash or Microsoft 365 / Just2easy. The problem I found was keeping these documents up to date. Applications would change or I would have new ideas or web-links would die or change.  So a couple years ago I moved everything online and created The Digital Den. Schools could buy into the platform for a ye