Wellington Academy Visioning Day – it was a real privilege to facilitate an ICT visioning day with colleagues from Wellington Academy, reinventing, or at least repackaging, ICT under an Enterprise banner. Given a ‘blue sky canvas, we framed with day with three simple Sinek styled investigations. Why do we need to change or in this case reinvent the ICT curriculum? How will ICT be redefine, how will the new curriculum be structured, or as one colleague noted, ‘engage, excite and enhance’ learning? What will it look like?
There was little doubt we needed to refresh ICT, whether it be to build learning power, to underpin progress in other subjects, or simple because the availability (and mobility) of learning technology continues to redefine ‘what is possible’ in the vast majority of learning settings. Yes, I certainly agree there needs to be flexibility, there needs to be access and yes, spontaneity, creativity’s good friend.
How will it be structured? With a broad range of business, ICT and technology advocates potentially contributing to the curriculum we recommended 13 units of work. The first to be shared with the feeder schools, and then 12 half termly projects, missions, quests or challenges. The enterprise ideas then flooded onto a wiki, ipad, laptop, IWB, no flip chart. One very pertinent theme underpinned the discussion and that was that each unit could / should marry to a curriculum area, to further embed / associate learning with the wider curriculum.
Now I will need to ask Rob Wood for a copy of the list, because there were some fantastic ideas, many of which had already been explored by the colleagues around the table, Lego Mindstorm, MOSS qualifications, coding (Kodu, Scratch, Alice, Panther), but there were some fantastically innovate ideas, a recording unit that included text, audio and video linked to publishing and responding to feedback skills, Animation. Conferencing skills; skyping as expert and being skyped as an expert. Connecting with local businesses and preparing your own digital brand, including a business card, values, mission statement, tagline. Personally, I had my horizons stretched with contributions that highlighted Wellington Academy’s military context, applying command and teamwork tasks to ICT and enterprise. One area we explored was the value of LAN gaming, the title I recommend, ‘Battle for Newerth‘ a game I first watched students play back in 2009. There were many many more. Perhaps the surprise discussion centred on the whole school learning value of learning to touch type (are you for or against?). The team now have luxury of pick n mixing.
What will it look? It was not my role to define or answer this question. Rather I shared gamification, questing. and badging and together we ran through what that might look like at Wellington Academy. I look forward to hearing how it develops.
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