The opening lessons to DIDA (or AIDA) following the Unit 1 Using ICT book are boring. Its all about “You must listen because you need to know everything about the course”, and “this is how you should learn”. School tend to work in this way, I had to spend 2 whole days telling my new Year 7 tutor group about every rule in the school. They were so overawed by making the move up to secondary school that they listened (just), Year 10 don’t.
The modern, “Just in Time” way, is to get them working from the off. That means a practice SPB (the project brief). Throw it at them and then when they get overcome with complexity give them the tools to understand it. So teach bits from the book when children can actually see the uses for them eg. Setting up a directory structure, Target audience, Purpose.
I don’t like “The Project” that comes with the book, (Healthy eating) its meant to be a practice SPB, but it looks woolly to me and the teachers who used it last year didn’t like it. I’m going to use the Make Space SPB which is last year’s examined SPB. I’ll start looking at the easier Level 1 SPB and then we will see if anyone wants to step up to Level 2 when we do the real thing next year.
7 months later I can’t say that this was a bad idea, but there were so many other things to teach that the kids lost contact with the idea that they were doing Make Space. Plus, they created a directory structure for Make Space (1. Planning, 2. Gathering Info, 3. Survey etc) and then tried to fit in all the other classwork into it, which was confusing.
Interesting to note that the Healthy Eating Project in the Active Book Resource that we use is much closer to the 5 a day SPB which these students will be doing next year.