Computing

Computing is such an important life skill. Technology is essential to our lives at home and at work.  At St. Lawrence, we learn vital Computing skills and knowledge as well as ensuring technology is embedded throughout the curriculum.

INTENT 

At St Lawrence, we want pupils to be MASTERS of technology and not slaves to it. Technology is everywhere and plays an important part in our children’s lives. We want to model and educate our pupils on how to use technology positively, responsibly and safely. We want our pupils to be creators not consumers and our broad curriculum encompassing computer science, information technology and digital literacy reflects this. We recognise that technology can allow pupils to share their learning in creative ways. Our knowledge rich curriculum has to be balanced with the opportunity for pupils to apply their knowledge creatively which in turn will help our pupils become skilful computer scientists. We encourage staff to try and embed computing across the whole curriculum to make learning creative and accessible.

IMPLEMENTATION

At St Lawrence, we have created our computing scheme, with support from the NCCE teach computing scheme and ilearn2 computing, for staff to follow to best embed and cover every element of the computing curriculum. The knowledge/skills statements build year on year to deepen and challenge our learners. Computing is taught in discreet and cross curricular computing lessons. Having discreet lessons means that the children are able to develop depth in their knowledge and skills over the duration of each of their computing topics. Where appropriate, meaningful links will be made between the computing curriculum and the wider curriculum. In computing lessons, the children will use Chromebooks and some ipads in order to access a range of apps and software, focussing on the curriculum skills of information technology, digital literacy and computer science. We also believe that Online Safety is essential in ensuring children are safe in the digital world: We recognise that the best prevention for a lot of issues we currently see with technology/social media is through education. Online Safety is both embedded within lessons where appropriate and taught discreetly.

IMPACT

We encourage our children to enjoy and value the curriculum we deliver. The way pupil’s showcase, share, celebrate and publish their work will best show the impact of our curriculum. We also look for evidence through reviewing pupil’s knowledge and skills digitally through saved work on the school network, observing learning regularly and talking to the children about their learning. Much of the subject-specific knowledge developed in our computing lessons equip pupils with experiences which will benefit them in secondary school, further education and future workplaces.