Friday, 29 January 2016

7 fun apps to build student thinking skills

BY STEPHEN NOONOO, EDITOR, @STEPHENOONOO

November 20th, 2015

Challenge logic and thinking skills with these apps

Looking to give students — or your colleagues — a way to hone their thinking and problem-solving skills while having fun? These free puzzles and games might do the trick.

The website APPitic.com, an app resource site with more than 6,000 apps in more than 300 subcategories, offers a number of apps to help build student thinking skills.

Here, we’ve gathered a handful of those apps, and you can access more on the APPitic site. All apps were originally curated by Apple Distinguished Educators.

Animal Sudoku
This twist on the classic Sudoku puzzles assigns an animal to each number, ramping up the concentration required to solve each puzzle.

Chess With Friends
Multiplayer chess game lets users play against each other or find random opponents. However, it requires a Facebook or Games With Friends login.

Tangram XL
Simple version of the popular Tangram puzzles designed with kids in mind. It is designed to avoid unnecessary decoration to keep kids’ attention on geometric concepts.

Finger Physics (web and Android)
Fit together different and moving shapes to solve puzzles. The free version features around 100 levels with various objectives and difficulty levels.

Flow Free
Connect matching colors with pipe to create a flow. Pair all colors, and cover the entire board to solve each puzzle. But watch out, pipes will break if they cross or overlap.

Genius Brain
Using clues, players must identify in which column a given icon is located on a large board in this version of Einstein’s puzzle. It is aimed at improving your visual memory, ordering your thinking, helping form cause-effect relations, and more.

Monorail
Draw lines to connect “stations” and create a working monorail system in this game that challenges visual/spacial/geometric skills. According to the developers, Kindergartners can solve the beginner levels. Mathematicians from MIT have struggled to solve the most difficult ones.

Flipped learning is changing the face of special ed

BY DENNIS PIERCE

December 23rd, 2015

Flipped learning and one-to-one are a powerful combo for some populations

Ed. note: This year the editors selected ten stories we believe either highlighted an important issue in 2015 and/or signaled the beginning of an escalating trend or issue for 2016 (look for No. 1 on Dec. 31). No longer a new concept, early flipped learning adoptees are now starting to transform the model to suit their needs and into something that can be useful for instructing a variety of student populations, including those students with special needs.

At E.L. Haynes High School in Washington, D.C., 44 percent of students are English language learners, have special needs, or both. Yet all of the students in this urban charter school’s first graduating class have been accepted into college, said Principal Caroline Hill—and she attributed this success to a personalized, self-paced approach made possible by technology.

E.L. Haynes has a one-to-one laptop program, and students also can bring their own devices to school. Using a flipped learning approach, teachers record their lessons and post them online, so students can watch the content over and over again until they understand—and class time is used to provide more personalized support.

If schools are to meet the learning needs of every student, including those with disabilities, then “we have to think differently about how we provide instruction,” Hill said.

Hill was speaking at a June 17 briefing on Capitol Hill that focused on the intersection of technology and special education. During the event, which was hosted by the National Coalition for Technology in Education and Training, Hill and other educators described how technology is empowering students with disabilities to achieve at high levels.

About 2.5 million children in the U.S. have some kind of learning disability, said Kim Hines, associate director for the National Center for Learning Disabilities. For these children, “technology has been a game changer,” she said, “and for some, it’s been life-changing. … We now know what kids are able to do, and not just what they are unable to do.”

Making learning the constant

At E.L. Haynes, students are able to work at their own pace, Hill said—making learning the constant and time the variable, instead of vice versa. This eliminates the anxiety that students often feel when the teacher moves on to the next topic and they have not learned the previous content.

“For students with disabilities, this anxiety could be the difference between staying engaged in their learning and mastering content,” Hill said, “or disengaging and failing.”

Angela Foreman, a special-education teacher at Jamestown Elementary School in Arlington, Va., said her school has seen “a huge difference” from putting iPads in the hands of students with disabilities.

Like E.L. Haynes, Jamestown has embraced a flipped approach to instruction. This helps with pre-teaching concepts, Foreman said, such as multiplying large numbers. Kids can watch the videos “as many times as they need” the night before a lesson, and Foreman and her colleagues infuse these videos with humor and catchy songs. Then, when students come to class the next day, the teachers start singing those songs—and “the light bulbs come on” for students, she said, stimulating the connective pathways in their brains.

Technology also helps teachers differentiate their lessons for students with disabilities, Foreman said. For instance, teachers can create customized content for students to download and work on independently.

Kate Nagel, a science teacher who works with high-functioning students on the autism spectrum at The Ivy Mount School in Rockville, Md., said her school is using the Science Techbook from Discovery Education. This interactive digital textbook includes features that make the content more accessible for students with disabilities, such as the ability to have the text read aloud to them.

“This gives students a sense of independence and ownership,” Nagel said, because they no longer have to ask for help.

The Techbook content also includes interactive games and video clips explaining key concepts, which students find engaging, Nagel said. When students are interacting with the content in this way, “they really internalize what they’re learning.”

For instance, her students recently played a game in which they had to build cells and keep out invading viruses. “They remembered every single part of the cell,” she said. “That was not going to happen from just looking at diagrams.”

Relevant for all students

Throughout the briefing, participants noted that these same technologies that are helping students with disabilities to succeed also help other students as well.

By talking about technology and special education, “we’re helping the future of all kids across the country, and not just those with disabilities,” said Alexa Posny, a consultant and former assistant secretary for the Education Department’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services.

Posny moderated a question-and-answer session at the end of the event, in which she asked participants: What will it take for more schools to adopt these types of changes in their instruction?

Nagel said getting teachers to change their approach can be difficult, because many teachers already feel overworked and resent having technology “pushed” on them as yet another mandate. She recommended that schools encourage instructional shifts by modeling best practices for their teachers.

“Use it yourself, and invite people into your classroom,” she urged teacher leaders. “Make sure other teachers are seeing that, and also seeing the results—(such as) how students are excited to learn.”

Foreman said school leaders should allow teachers to explore technology use on their own in professional development workshops, letting their creativity emerge instead of telling them what to do.

“Let us see what we can do when we’re given the time and the opportunity to do that,” she recommended.

6 STEAM tinkering tools

6 STEAM tinkering tools for the holidays

BY THOMAS C. MURRAY AND SAMANTHA A. EDWARDS

December 18th, 2015

Engage kids of all ages with these STEM and coding learning toys

The year that was brought with it a renewed, and much welcome, interest in science and technology, as STEAM, makerspaces, 3D printing, and coding all became hot topics. Each year, as parents look to celebrate the various holidays with our kids, many of us rack our brains trying to find gifts that are both fun and educational. This year is no different and fortunately, the latest STEAM push has made many of the learning tools very desirable as holiday gifts.

The following are six ed-tech tools that will undoubtedly spark the creative and innovative side of kids of all ages (parents and teachers included). These tools are dynamic, engaging, and fun for everyone. Best of all, they’ll help students focus on higher-order thinking skills as they make, design, create, and code their way into 2016.

Osmo

Designed for kids ages 5-13, this unique gaming accessory works with an iPad to offer interactive learning experiences through five games — Tangram, Words, Numbers,Newton, and Masterpiece. One of Time Magazine’s “2014 Best Inventions of the Year,” more than 7,500 schools are already teaching with Osmo. From spacial to literacy skills, the learning games that come with Osmo give kids an opportunity to practice social skills while learning critical thinking skills. Aimed at bringing “iPad addicted kids back to life,” as the Wall Street Journal put it, the “Osmo…is meant to break the zombie-like stares and bring more of the real world back into the mix, by providing games that interact with just about any physical object—pen, paper, blocks, even toys your kids already own.”

Makey Makey

Make some magic this holiday season. Inspired by the Maker Movement, this JoyLabzcreated invention kit for all ages combines computer programming and hands-on maker tools limited only by imagination. Whether your plan is to turn a banana into a piano, play Super Mario Bros on a Play-Doh game pad, design a pencil joystick to play Pac-Man, or create floor pads to master Dance Dance Revolution, your child’s creativity will be pushed, pressed, and plugged-in as they think critically and have a blast.

Ozobot Bit

Measuring in at slightly more than an inch, this bite-sized programmable robot is one of the world’s smallest — but great things come in small packages. The Ozobot’s multi-level interactive capabilities make it perfect for a beginning programmer that would like to explore a color-based coding language, as well as the seasoned programmer looking for a bigger challenge (via OzoBlockly-a block-based visual editor). There is something for every type of thinker with this tiny tinker robot. According USA Today, “With…Ozobot Bit, Kids can graduate to “if,then” programming.”

Dash and Dot

Parents will find themselves dashing through the snow to pick up Wonder Workshop’s adorable robotic duo this holiday season — Dash and Dot. Kid-friendly and programmable, the pair come with five free apps to explore a variety of skills including coding, sequencing, measurement, problem solving, and critical thinking. Dash and Dot come fully assembled and ready for their first adventure only minutes after taking them out of the box. Like any well-maketed toy, don’t forget the accessories. Some favoritesinclude Dash’s Xylophone, Building Brick Connectors, and even a launcher! From the 2015 National Parenting Gold Award to the Time To Play Magazine 2015 Holiday Most Wanted List, and a myriad of other awards, Dash and Dot have an award case that makes other robots jealous.

Gizmos and Gadgets Kit

Gizmos and Gadgets is LittleBits’s most popular kit, and embraces true STEAM curricular integration. The well-designed kit comes with 15 electronic building blocks and easy-to-follow guides and instructions that include both text and photos, as well as accessories to fire up the imagination and spark creativity. “With more than 60 color-coded modules, there’s nearly an infinite amount of hacking, programming, and playing that kids can do with this easy-to-use playset,” writes Time.

Sphero SPRK Edition

The clear polycarbonate shell of this transparent ball of robotic fun enables students to feel closer to the robotic action inside by viewing all of the components that make it maneuver. SPRK builds confidence for beginning coders, while providing veteran programmers an opportunity to flourish through a variety of user-friendly apps. This programmable Sphero robot will SPRK the imagination of any student as they navigate their way through rolls, spins, flips, and color changes (build an obstacle course and try and get Sphero through for an added challenge). Its text-based programming language, OVAL, is hidden behind an easy-to-use block-based format. Collaboration is encouraged by free access to the SPRK Lightning Lab, which is a hub of learning and sharing for all Sphero users, both iOS and Android. Also, if your child is a fan of Star Wars — and who isn’t this week? — check out the Sphero’s droid-inspired BB-8.

Whether it’s coding, making, or building, there’s something for every child this holiday season that can help them tap creativity, develop high level thinking skills, while learning through play. These six ed-tech learning tools are sure to be a hit this holiday season, as well as something teachers will appreciate and kids will love.

The 4 essentials of a successful Genius Hour

BY JILL BADALAMENTI

January 26th, 2016

Genius Hour projects may be open ended, but there are still some ground rules

What are you passionate about? What do you want to do more than anything in the world? Well I hope you said what you are doing right now. This is not always the case. Some people hate what they are doing. They may hate it because it pays too little, but being a teacher doesn’t make me very wealthy and I love what I’m doing. More importantly, people may hate their job because they would rather be doing something else. This is where I think we can do better in education.

As educators, we can help our students find and explore their passions. Once they discover what they’re truly passionate about, the learning and engagement will never stop. The best way for students to explore their passions is through Genius Hour.

Genius Hour isn’t new concept. Many teachers and businesses have been doing this for a while. Companies like HP and Google started “20 Time” so their staff could pursue passions projects and make their organizations stronger. Similarly, teachers have allowed students to read any book and present a book report in any format for a while now, giving them a chance to indulge their interests while learning. Of course, the true concept of Genius Hour is more open than a book report. It recognizes the need for students to have the freedom to explore their passions and not be restricted.

However, even with all this freedom, we still need some rules. The way I see it, the four rules to Genius Hour are: propose, research, create, and present. As long as your students are following this basic structure, they should have a successful Genius Hour experience. Here some tips for making those rules work in your classroom.

Let students explore their passions – First things first: make sure kids have enough time to explore what makes them passionate in the first place. After all, they need to know what their interests are in order to be able to explore them in depth. I use Thrively as a starter. The kids use the site to take an assessment that will show them their strengths. They can then use this strength assessment to watch videos, choose a Genius Hour project, or look at events happening around them. Letting students explore their passions is an essential part of Genius Hour. Another way to help students explore themselves is to create a Wonder wall or a Problem-Solvers Wall. This is simply a space for students to put sticky notes with questions or problems the want to solve. These walls aren’t just impactful for the students. The teachers can learn a lot about their students by looking at their “wonders” and “problems”. Once the students have asked those questions and explored themselves they can now decide what they want their focus to be. I also use aworksheet so students can get their ideas out about who they are and what their interests are. The next step is for each student to make a Project Proposal.

Create a project proposal – After being given time to explore their interests and discover their strengths, the students are ready to propose their project to me. This means they have to understand all of the parts from beginning to the end. I use this project proposaldocument, but it can take any form as long as students can tell you the topic, at least three inquiry-based questions, how they want to present, the materials they’ll need, as well as any help they will need from me. Some teachers have the students write in a journal that they keep for the whole project. That way they can reflect on the whole process from beginning to the end. After their project is approved by me they can begin the research phase.

Do research – The research phase is usually where kids start moving at their own pace. Some will research very quickly while others will take longer. I encourage my students to research in as many ways as they can. Here are a few ways they have researched: online (videos, websites, pictures), apps, books, magazines, surveys, and — my favorite — through experts. Indeed, every student should have an expert that they can talk to either in person, phone, Skype, or e-mail. This is one of the most important parts of the program because it lets students see the real world application of what they are researching. I use local community members and scour Twitter to find most of my experts.

Present and create – It’s important for kids to know they can present in any way they want to. They could do a video, poster, 3D model, TED Talk, picture book, painting, and the list goes on an on. To make it easier on the kids and the parents, I try to get all of the supplies they need. After they create, I have a rule that every student must present. This is the one way I can ensure every student learned something. Presentation for kids can be scary, so I let the students choose any method to present. They can choose to talk or just show the videos they made. One last tip with presentations is I always have Presentation Day. I make a big deal out of it and invite parents, staff, community members, and experts. I also set a time expectation so they aren’t too long. Lastly, I make sure I record every presentation. This provides great feedback for everyone involved.

Genius Hour is a great way for kids to start taking ownership of their own education. It’s a time about the kids, for the kids and conducted by the kids. I love being able to facilitate instead of teach. I even learn something new myself from all of the presentations. With these easy tips you should try something new today because, as Angela Maiers says, “You are a genius and the world expects your contribution.”

About the Author:

Jill Badalamenti is technology integration coach at Reed School in Missouri. She has presented on Genius Hour at various conferences and has facilitated the Genius Hour EdcampVoxer chat room.

Monday, 11 January 2016

11 ed-tech buzzwords and phrases to think about

Grit

Popularized by scholar Angela Duckworth, grit is something of a modern day rebrand of the millennia-old heavenly virtue of diligence. Students need to look beyond passing a class and start to invest in long-term learning goals that interest them. Grit is a popular concept these days and it’s been bolstered by books, a section in a recent Carnegie Foundation report, and splashy articles in media outlets like the Atlantic and theWashington Post, but even Duckworth is pulling back, worried that she may be making converts that are too-zealous and warning that the concept cannot truly be measured for accountability purposes.

Rigor

The gist of rigor in an educational context seems to be that kids rise to expectations, and if you set them high, while giving them enough support, they will perform at a higher level. Perhaps owing to the fact that its dictionary definition is different than its educational definition, it’s a term that can lead to confusion. When some educators hear the term they think it means presenting lessons that are “more harder.” But authors Barbara R. Blackburn and Cris Tovani, who have both written about rigor, contend that teachers need to be flexible in their approach and tailor it on a class-by-class or student-by-student basis.

Mindset

Another scholarly concept that got its start as a book, Carol Dweck’s “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success“ has been held up as exemplary practice by schools everywhere. To Dweck, and her legion of fans, you can either have a fixed mindset (the belief that traits, such as intelligence and ability are pre-set and unlikely to change given time and effort) or a growth mindset (the belief that a lack of natural ability can be overcome through hard work). The problem, as schools realize when they move toward adopting growth mindset practices, is that the growth mindset is often at odds with traditional classroom pacing, assessment, and feedback. It can be tough, for example, for a student to shed a fixed mindset when the prospect of an F looms over a course.

The ___ Gap

Equity, learning, achievement, device, vocabulary. “Gap” all but invites educators to fill in the blanks. Most often it comes down to the timeless struggle between haves and have-nots and how education is—or isn’t—compensating appropriately.

Authentic learning

The concept of “authentic” learning is nothing new, but much like suede and tartan the term drifts in and out of fashion. These days it can refer to experiences that encourage students to put down their books and get a taste of the real world (perhaps via a trendy genius hour or 20 percent time). But it can also be one more adjective piled in a string of buzzwords to lend a veneer of change to practices that aren’t much different than what was done before.

Student voice and choice

Increasing student agency has been on educator’s minds for a while now. Letting students decide how to go about tackling a problem or learning a concept ties into a number of education philosophies from UDL to rigor and grit, which all require teachers to give up some control to students and use approaches that students favor, even if they’re out of the teacher’s comfort zone. Plus, it rhymes.

Maker

Every educator queried for this article mentioned some form of maker or makerspace as a must-include. And why not? Making and hands-on learning are certainly buzzworthy enough, garnering a White House-approved week of celebration and rocketing out of nowhere into the Horizon Report’s list of almost-mainstream trends. But it can be a fuzzy, overly-broad term to describe basically anything that students create, from coding simple apps to building robots out of cardboard or custom Lego creations. Like with any educational concept, thoughtfulness is key. Are schools making simply for the sake of making?

Personalized/adaptive

For some it can be hard to tell these terms apart. Personalized learning, which is kind of the umbrella term, means an instruction approach that takes individual student needs, interests, and potential learning difficulties to customize the course for that particular student. Adaptive learning primarily uses technology such as software to benchmark where a student is, and then adjust the material, pace, or presentation to suit the learner. True adaptive learning, however, is more than just making quiz questions easier if a student starts to pick wrong answers. It looks at why the student got the answer wrong and puts them on a path to figuring out how to correct those mistakes.

–preneur

A suffix that can be portmanteau’d with virtually any education-related noun from teacher to student to passion, it’s essentially a buzzword defined entirely by other buzzwords. The term has come to mean less about getting people to make money or start businesses (the traditional meaning of entrepreneur), and more about innovation, risk-taking, leadership, and planning for the long-term (aka, grit).

Future ready

Talk about top-down, this one came straight from the White House itself. And while it’s still used to refer to the Future Ready pledge, more recently educators have begun using (or overusing) it to refer to the ideas espoused in that pledge, namely how to get their schools ready to deal with an onslaught of device, infrastructure, and privacy concerns.

Teach like a Pirate/Rockstar/Ninja…

The cynic might note how many terms on this list have skyrocketed in popularity thanks to the catchy titles of popular books or workshop series. Nowhere is that marketing gimmick more apparent than the “Teach like a …” phenomena, which are basically selling new ways of thinking about technology and the teacher’s role in the classroom. While that in itself isn’t a bad thing and while there’s nothing wrong with a gimmick — you could argue hashtag-friendly “edubabble” is gimmicky itself — devoid of context, words like “rockstar” and “ninja” are empty calories that sound more like a who’s who of fourth-grade Halloween costumes than a strategy to inspire students to take a greater interest in their own learning.

Thursday, 7 January 2016

MAKING COMPUTING MORE INCLUSIVE

by Miles Berry

This September saw the introduction of a new National Curriculum for local authority supported schools. Perhaps one of the most significant changes is the move from the old ‘ICT’, characterised by some as focussing on the development of skills in using ‘office’ productivity and other software, to a new subject, ‘computing’, which seeks to develop an understanding of the fundamental principles which underpin computation. The new programmes of study for computing are ambitious ones. The opening sentence sets the agenda: ‘A high-quality computing education equips pupils to use computational thinking and creativity to understand and change the world.’.

Whist creativity been an important aspect of ICT education in many schools, ‘computational thinking’ is something new for many, but this represents a golden thread running throughout the new programmes of study. Computational thinking is about looking at problems and systems in such a way that computers can help us solve or understand them – it’s the sort of thinking which software developers and computer scientists routinely engage in, but it also has wide applications beyond the realm of computing. It draws on concepts such as logical reasoning, algorithms, decomposition and abstraction, as well as approaches such as tinkering, making, debugging, tenacity and collaboration. Whilst there’s much more to the new curriculum than ‘coding’ (the act of translating the rules or steps of an algorithm into a computer program), I’ve no doubt that programming is the best (but certainly not the only) way to develop computational thinking.

There are economic arguments for including much more computer science on the curriculum, for me the case was much more about the nature of a liberal education for the third millennium. Given the role which digital technology plays in so many aspects of life and society, shouldn’t there be an entitlement for all pupils to learn something about the ideas on which it is based and its implications, as well as being able to make good use of it for getting useful and creative work done.

The notion of an entitlement for all is central to the very idea of a national curriculum, even if this has been somewhat watered down in the move to academisation. The new curriculum applies to pupils with special educational needs and disabilities, as it does their peers: ‘This is for everyone’, as its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee said of the web.

CC by Nick Webb

The framework acknowledges that this means ‘ensuring that the national curriculum is taught in ways that enable all pupils to have an equal opportunity to succeed’. Furthermore, being able to program can be hugely empowering for many with SEN/D. Without wishing to generalise, some with Asperger’s syndrome find the predictability of computing reassuring; the immediate feedback on semantics and syntax in computer code can help some with dyslexia; decomposing problems into their components might help some with ADHD; and simple, text based interfaces can be used effectively by many with sensory or motor difficulties.

I think teachers, working with SENCOs and computing coordinators or heads of department, can quite easily adapt planning and resources for the new computing curriculum to ensure that all pupils are fully included in activities and learning. Let me illustrate this with a few example.

At least some aspects of the new curriculum can be taught without using computers at all: an ‘unplugged’ approach can be great for exploring the idea of an algorithm, binary numbers, logic and computer networks.
There’s nothing in the Key Stage 1 programming expectations which requires pupils to use technology more advanced than accessible programmable toys such as the Bee Bot or Roamer – the ability for a child to put themselves in the place of the floor turtle is a very useful approach to making logical predictions about algorithms or programs.
In Key Stage 2, Scratch is seen by many as the ideal programming environment. Whilst this certainly reduces the cognitive load compared to traditional text based programming languages, it can be made more accessible still. Creating laminated cards for Scratch programming blocks using Widgit or similar is one approach, or teachers can use Scratch 2.0 to create custom blocks to help scaffold a programming challenge. Differentiated support can help too, such as providing semi-completed programs and video walkthroughs for those who would otherwise find tasks beyond them.
Other programming environments are available, and remember the new curriculum is more about developing understanding than a set of skills in using one language or another. Microsoft’sKodu (Windows and XBox) and Scratch Jr (iPad only at present) both provide block-based programming without the text-heaviness for which some criticise Scratch. Kodu can even be programmed using an XBox controller.
Pupils are expected to work with various forms of input: theMaKey MaKey will turn (almost) anything into a keyboard – fruit, a staircase, water buckets etc, and Scratch and its variants allow pupils to use the microphone, webcam or a Kinect as alternatives to the keyboard or mouse for controlling games or other programs they write.
In Key Stage 3, pupils are expected to work with at least one text based programming language – whilst many of the coding enthusiasts advocate Python, there are plenty of other options: Logo and Small Basic are both text based, but have been designed as teaching languages. Small Basic’s ‘IntelliSense’ helps with completing the keywords of the programming language, which can be quite useful.
There are some quite abstract ideas in the Key Stage 3 curriculum, such as binary, Boolean logic and the fetch-execute cycle, but these can be made more concrete through well chosen physical resources. For example, representing images as bitmaps can be done with small cards, black on one side, white on the other, and a little role-play is a great way for pupils to learn about how instructions are stored and executed, or how computers communicate with one another.
Key Stage 4 computing is unique in the national curriculum, as it requires that ‘all pupils must have the opportunity to study’ aspects of IT and computing rather than simply listing what all should be taught. This offers ample scope for a more personalised curriculum, and I don’t think there’s any need to assume that the ‘opportunity to study’ must lead to traditional GCSE qualifications, although no doubt for many it will.

A few appropriate adaptations can make the new curriculum much more accessible to pupils with SEN/D. It’s also well worth getting all pupils to take accessibility and inclusion issues into account when writing software and creating digital artefacts as part of the new curriculum. So, pupils writing their own computer games in Key Stage 2 and 3 ought to think about the extent to which their games could be played by others with limited motor control or with some sensory impairment – use of alternative interfaces such as a Kinect or a MaKey MaKey can really help here. Pupils developing web-based content similarly should bear accessibility requirements in mind: have they included ‘ALT’ text for their images? Would their site be navigable by someone using a screen reader? At Key Stage 3 the new curriculum talks about pupils’ projects meeting the needs of known users and of paying attention to design and usability, which is great, but shouldn’t this also include some recognition for accessible design?

Assessment has also changed in the new curriculum – the old levels have been removed and not replaced. Instead we now have an expectation that all pupils will ‘know, apply and understand the matters, skills and processes specified in the relevant programme of study’. There’s an exception to this for pupils with SEN working below the level of the programme of study for their key stage. For these children, the old P-scales for ICT remain in effect. These haven’t been revised to take account of the move from ICT to computing; however, there’s much here which can provide a framework for teachers seeking to develop the beginnings of their pupils’ computational thinking. For example, P3 ii, ‘They apply potential solutions systematically to problems’, characterises exactly the sort of pattern recognition and generalisation that lies at the heart of efficient software development, and P4, ‘They know that certain actions produce predictable results’, captures something of the deterministic, logical nature of computer programs.

It’s fair to acknowledge that many teachers see the new programmes of study as a daunting prospect for pupils even without SEN/D, in part I’m sure because it draws on subject knowledge they were never taught themselves. The best approach if you feel like this is just to have a go – to explore and experiment with some of these tools yourself. Writing your own simple educational games in Scratch is not nearly as hard as it might sound, and a great way to develop bespoke interactive resources for your pupils. I think there’s much to be said for teachers having a go at learning something difficult: not least because it can go a long way to developing empathy with pupils who themselves might find much at school difficult.