I spent the night creating Year 1 maths assessments – an utterly boring and generally thankless task. It’s something that I really need to do and yet never actually want to. Over the coming evenings I shall be doing the same for years 2 to 6. So don’t expect these blogs to be anything but thrilling on these days…
I’m trying to think of anything interesting that has happened today, and I’m struggling.
Work, since it is a Tuesday, involved two maths lessons with Year 6, a literacy lesson and an ICT lesson.
My ICT this term is focussed on the use of spreadsheets. This is a relatively alien concept to children – although they regularly see me using them to help track their progress in spelling tests and mental maths tests, for example. They had some idea of their uses, but were blown away by the amount of information that could potentially be stored in one. An Excel 2007 spreadsheet can contain 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns; a total of 17179869184 cells. That’s over 17 billion pieces of information and also the same number of bits in 2 gigabytes… probably not a coincidence, but I’ve never looked into the reasons for these limits.
Like in a few other subjects, the most recent programmes of study for ICT at Key Stages 1 and 2 have now been disapplied and are no longer statutory. This means that schools are free to develop their own curricula for ICT that best meet the needs of their pupils, or to continue to follow the existing programmes of study if they so choose. ICT remains a compulsory National Curriculum subject at all four key stages. Revised programmes of study for ICT will come into force in September 2014.
Either way, my class really enjoyed their first tentative steps taken with spreadsheets and I’m looking forward to showing them Excel’s capabilities over the next few weeks.
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13th March 2013 @ 11:03 am
Thanks for linking to my blog post. Perhaps you can also show your students some of the newer tools in the domain of data exploration such as SAP Visual Intelligence. You can download free trial from here https://www.sap.com/campaign/ne/free_trial/visual_intelligence/index.epx?kNtBzmUK9zU
A “data challenge” in which you give them a fun dataset to explore is a great way to get them learning how to build and interpret visualizations.
Erica
13th March 2013 @ 10:17 pm
I think a basic introduction is certainly required for now. I may look into that in the future though. Thanks!