Primary children - what would you like to see them doing (IT wise)

This may ramble a bit :fear:

I have been asked by the HT and by the ICT co-ordinator what "should" our children be doing/using IT wise and what to develop with them next.

Now we have individual email accounts for years 3 and above - I will be supporting new staff in using this more effectively with the children.
Each class has a digital camera and flip cam - again I will be showing how to edit pics and vids
We have no space for anymore pc's in and around the school!!
The HT has her heart set on handheld devices - ipads/ipods etc, is anyone using these effectively in a Primary school environment?
I am considering starting up a computer club, does anyone do this for Primary, and what years? My thinking is to target Year 3/4 initially and get their skills moving on, but I'm not sure what the club should/could be about?
I am at the stage now where I have a little bit of free time (shhhh) so I am able to support classes/teachers/children more directly, but I do not want to be helping teach "death-by-Powerpoint" etc.

So what do you think?

Si

I was sent this last week.

SPM. IOE ICT DRAFT 1 on Vimeo

not what is in that video, we dont even trust most of our teachers with any type of cameras let alone children, :)

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Originally Posted by jamesrobinson

not what is in that video, we dont even trust most of our teachers with any type of cameras let alone children, :)

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I bought my 3 year old granddaughter a Digital Camera for her birthday. She understands it should be treated well and carefully. 10 months later it is still working.

I handed out my digital camera to a group of primary school kids in S Africa for 3 weeks, they had free reign of it (except when they wanted to get out of the car to snap some Baboons), it's still working. I got some good shots out of it.

My 19 month old has free reign with our Flip (and she can work it just fine). She has supervised access to the S5600 (Missus' Digicam), and can sort of work that.

When I fetch her from nursery in the night time she has my phone and some headphones to listen to the music on there...last night she was headbanging and arm waving all the way home, so much so I had to pull over and have a not so quiet chuckle. I give her supervised access to my AA1 netbook too.

As long as they know how to treat things, I wouldn't worry. The only casualties have been a remote control that went for a swim in the bath, and my router which got wee'd on, on Sunday. That'll teach me to put it out of the way during nappy off time..heh.

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Originally Posted by Sirbendy

As long as they know how to treat things, I wouldn't worry. The only casualties have been a remote control that went for a swim in the bath, and my router which got wee'd on, on Sunday. That'll teach me to put it out of the way during nappy off time..heh.

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Which of us 'adults' hasn't dropped something down the pan or in the bath?? :)

Thanks, we have camera's down as far as nursery so we fine on that side of things.

I had a Y5 class today because they were using Publisher and it's new to them. I am going to advocate we turn the colour off so that they spend more time on the content rather than using every colour available on the background! A lot of them just wasted the lesson.

We just had a maths day and had loads of parents in to talk about maths in the real world so the architect demo'd some CAD and then the kids had a go with Spex+ and an accountant spoke and showed the kids some Excel. We had a soldier talking about navigation/map reading and that followed up with some google maps stuff - it was great and went accross the school from Yr1 to 6 and the kids went home saying they had just played all day!

You could put in some visual programming in Year 5/6 using - Scratch or RoboMind are good ones to use.

Year 6 could have some fun with Microsoft Kodu.

Gareth

our year 5 and 6 use lego robots to learn control and the like. They use free programs like stickfigure animator to do some art and also do comic strips and things like that.
The big thing is doing projects that go across the curruculum - eg they are doing a school disco which involves designing posters, writing letters to parents, doing spreadsheets about what to sell and at what cost, deciding what to book, that sort of thing.

I like the look of Microsoft Kodu, as @garethedmondson says it should be good for Year 5/6. Anything for years 3/4 ? They always seem to miss out.

What about turtles, or whatever the heck they're known as these days..they were "Roamers" in the last Primary/Infants I was at. Those are good. One of the main reasons I bought myself..I mean Isabel..a Big Trak..:D

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Originally Posted by pooley

The HT has her heart set on handheld devices - ipads/ipods etc, is anyone using these effectively in a Primary school environment?

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How about Kindles?

Best bet as far as I'm concerned has been the Sherston Megadeal best £1000 odd the PTA of my Primary (where I was Treasurer for 11 years and IT Tech for 7) ever spent alongside Friv4school The megadeal covers a wide range of topics and skills and the games site allows added fun. Both together provide great tools for building computer skills (including proper keyboard skills) which should stand them in good stead as they advance into mainstream products such as MS Office into later years.