Switched on ICT

There is an ever-growing expectation on teachers to develop linked learning within their curriculum planning, whereby they are able to devise, develop and deliver truly cross-curricular units of work. The challenge of this inspirational approach is to find meaningful links which help to further develop learning, especially in subjects which require a degree of specialist subject knowledge, such as ICT.

If you have ever faced a topic web, willing purposeful ICT links or units of work to appear from a muddle of spreadsheets, roamers and desktop publishers then Rising Stars’ Switched on ICT is here to help. Organised by year group, across the primary phase, Switched on ICT has been developed in association with the London Borough of Havering to provide the busy teacher with a highly structured but also highly adaptable planning, teaching and learning resource.

Each year group matched pack offers a comprehensive teacher’s book, high quality pupil task cards and a CD-ROM of associated resources. Within the teacher’s book you will find detailed planning covering a year’s worth of ICT content, which has been broken down into clearly explained and brilliantly resourced units of work. The choice of activities within each unit not only meets the requirements of the National Curriculum but has also been tailored to appeal to the interests of our increasingly tech-savvy children, without alienating the teacher. Units such as ‘Producing a Wiki’ or ‘Fusing geometry with art’ will provide the creative spark for the children, whilst also ensuring the teacher is able to utilise current and engaging technologies in a meaningful way. There is also excellent guidance on assessing progress, which has been cross-referenced with APP, as well as additional ideas of how the same skills could be developed within a different context.

The versatility of the resource is also reflected in the content of the CD-ROM. Not only are you able to access PDF versions of the plans within the teacher’s book, there are also editable resources to use with the children. You are provided with a copy of each task card in electronic format, allowing it to be truly customised to meets the needs of your children and context. In addition, the CD-ROM also holds an Excel based assessment tool which allows the user to easily track the progress of each child and the curriculum coverage of the class overall.

Another benefit for busy teachers is a comprehensive and high quality library of images and sounds, catalogued on the CD-ROM. Each of these resources has been closely matched to the units of work and can either be accessed directly from the disk or downloaded onto a computer. This saves a lot of time, which might otherwise be spent trawling the internet for additional resources and will really help bring the children’s work to life.