About Us
London Students Award in ICT
What we teach at KS3
The ICT programme of study has been revamped to incorporate the new changes made by the 2008 National Curriculum. The students here at Rokeby are now given the opportunity to learn skills such as E-safety; Spreadsheets; Databases & Desktop publishing.
Alongside this we have introduced a range of new software applications this year. i.e. CamStudio; Audacity; Pivot Animator and various web designing software.
Students in Year 9 are given a taster to the DiDA course (KS4) . The Crazy Football Project incorporates all the skills which the students obtain in Year 7 and Year 8 and helps them to develop planning and development skills. Next academic year they will start on a new course 'Apps for Good'
ICT Drumbeat |
| Skills | Success | Respect |
What we teach at KS4
Every day we are surrounded by information. Apart from face-to-face conversations, most of this information is available to us because of developments in ICT, including television broadcasts, text messages, photographs, news reports, emails, web pages and telephone calls.
There is always more information than we need, so how do we know what to make use of and what to ignore? The aim of this course is to equip our learners with the knowledge and skills they need, to work with information effectively and productively.
They will learn how to choose between sources of information, carry out effective searches, judge the quality and reliability of the information they find and be selective about what they use for their publications.
They will also learn how to gather and analyse data to produce meaningful information and how to store and handle structured data. Once they are able to produce meaningful information, they will need to use these to produce some fit for purpose publications i.e. digital posters; leaflet; banner; logo; e-cards etc. At the end they will demonstrate their ability to upload and link all the files in an e-portfolio (Micro website) using a major project set by Edexcel.
There are four qualifications in the DiDA suite:
- AiDA - Award in Digital Applications (Unit 1 only) - equivalent to 1 GCSE
- CiDA - Certificate in Digital Applications (Unit 1 plus any other unit) - equivalent to 2 GCSEs
- CiDA+ - Extended Certificate in Digital Applications (Unit 1 plus any other two units) - equivalent to 3 GCSEs
- DiDA - Diploma in Digital Applications (Unit 1 plus any other three units) - equivalent to 4 GCSEs.
DiDA qualifications are available at two levels, providing full A* - G equivalence. Learners can combine different units and levels.
| Jargon Buster | Mystified by your student's lingo? Here's a little help to keep you in the know! |
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| Microblogs | Free services with a 140 character limit (same length as a text message) E.g. Twitter |
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| Tweet | A post or status update on Twitter |
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| Twoosh | A Twitter 'Tweet' that uses the exact number of available characters (140) |
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| Rofl | Rolling on the floor laughing |
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| Cwot | Complete waste of time |
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| Swalk | Sent with a loving kiss |
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| Ssewba | Somebody soon everything will be acronyms |
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| Myths | Top six myths about a career in IT |
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| IT is for geeks | Whilst some technology jobs do require a lot of deep technical skills, to work in IT you must have people skills. Companies won't just look at your grades; what you do outside of school is incredibly important too. |
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| Few IT jobs | IT is one of the few industries that is still growing despite the economic downturn. |
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| IT isn't for me | Every year more and more women enter the IT industry. Both boys and girls have fantastic opportunities in IT. |
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| IT is limiting | In almost every type of business - from a micro design agncy to a large retail organisation - there are technology jobs. |
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| IT doesn't offer good salaries | The average starting salary for someone going into a large IT corporation is around £28,500 per year. |
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| IT isn't important to a business | IT is integral to a business. In fact, in many companies, the head of IT is the Managing Director's right hand person. |
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"I am extremely happy to get 3 GCSE in ICT. It helped me to secure my place in Computer Science in the college” Pritom Roy 2008 GCSE student