Creating an electronic department

• Secondary
• Content
• Involvement

We use Fronter for all lessons in ICT.  There is a home page for the department with buttons to navigate to either KS3 or KS4.  The KS3 pages are organised in a series of year buttons.  Contained within the KS3 pages are all the resources for each unit that the year group will study.  A brief introduction to the content of the unit in both written form and as Flash commentaries show the pupils what they will be doing.  Each lesson within the unit is self contained with materials for both the teacher and the pupil.  Learning objectives, PLT's, starter activity and plenary etc are included with buttons to open any resources needed for the lesson.  This enables the class to start their learning as soon as they have logged on at the start of the lesson.  Pupils who are wanting to can continue their learning independently if required.  All software has videos on how to use it and written documentation that pupils can print if they want, all contained within Fronter.

In KS4 the pupils study OCR Nationals in ICT and the structure of the learning resources follows the same format but the units are written in objectives rather than lessons.  Again pupils can follow the materials independently.  Marking grids allow the pupils to see what they have to do to gain higher marks.

Other departments are following our layout and I have also done work with other schools in the area.  Pupils find all their resources via the department pages and not from the teacher resource folder.  It is very visual.

We have pupil collaboration folders and hand-in folders which cuts down on the amount of printing required.  An addition to the front page is an 'Excellent work' folder which pupils can look at to see examples of tasks completed well.  The site was awarded a prize by the authority last year.

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