This week, I carried out an ICT skills audit with pupils from every class in KS2 at my school. The purpose of the audit was to determine whether the children were working at age appropriate levels in each year group. This in turn will help me to moderate the teacher assessment grades.
Although the final analysis has not been completed (and the skills mapped against where they should have got to in the ICT scheme of work), there were some interesting discoveries.
The children in Year 6 could complete all of the challenges – which included, amongst other things, recording audio and inserting audio and photos, and creating graphs to represent data. In the main, they chose the most appropriate program and the most efficient methods of doing things.
The lack of the facility in Windows 7 to upload individual photos threw the children – with some children finding a work around and others not.
All of the children from Yrs 3-6 were able to manipulate text – changing fonts, size and colour. Surprisingly a fair few were unable to make a copy of the text without retyping it.
We have a fair few different paint programs installed in school – which of course are aimed at children (making them easy to use) and can produce some interesting effects. All of the 24 children in the audit group chose Microsoft Paint as their tool for the paint challenge. The choice was limiting and they struggled to do some basic things like clearing the page because of the limited functions and interface of the program.
The younger children struggled more than I would have expected to save and print their work. Again, possibly because of their choice of tool.
The most surprising attempt at creating a graph was by a year 4 child who had used Excel as his chosen tool, because he’d “seen it used to make graphs before.” His method was creative to say the least… He had no idea how to create a graph by entering data and using the chart tools – so instead he changed the cell colour in vertical stripes to form his bars and then typed in the bar labels into the cells. There was, of course, no scale – and when he went to print his bars did not appear as there was no data within the coloured cells.
The other interesting thing was the way that a few of the younger pupils called the desktop applications “websites” on a number of occasions. They are obviously ready for cloud computing before it is truly realised.
The next step for me is to match the skills noted against the scheme of work and National Curriculum level descriptors to see how ‘on track’ the children are… And then feed back to the staff.
It was an interesting exercise and one that I would both recommend, and will do again.
