ICT Lesson software

[jammers]

We have a new ICT Head of department. Our existing software is quite dated. Acid music 7, a really old version of game maker. After speaking to her today we need to look at alternatives. Just wondering what other schools use to teach lower school ICT?

[ColonelPanic]

Defold is a great alternative to Game Maker - although Game Maker Studio is now free to use as well

 

Can't help on the music front I'm afraid though...

[ThatBoringBloke]

It would depend massively on what's being taught.

We no longer have any specific 'ICT Software'. We do however have some 'Computer Science' software.

The vast majority of things used these days are web based for us.

[LukeRowberry]

If I was starting from scratch I'd be massively pushing for SaaS only

[Koldov]

We struggled with this for a few years after our ICT Co-ordinator left and nobody really wanted to take up the challenge...

 

We had previously bought a series of books from Rising Stars called 'Switched on Computing' (formerly Switched on ICT, but changed to reflect the 'computing' curriculum I guess).

 

The trouble with them was the fact that they required quite a lot of random software to be sourced and installed on the machines (with different software/programs for each year group) and by the time we got to using the books, some had stopped being freeware/required license installation, changed version (so now instructions didn't work), or just plain didn't exist anymore. Now, we all know that at the best of times even 'educational' software can cause numerous headaches to get working in an educational environment. So, it was a real pain to deal with for the teachers as none of them were particularly IT literate and although the books had instructions, if you don't know the software dealing with issues becomes a chore.

 

Anyway, I could rant about that for a few more pages but suffice to say we went down the 'all in one' web based learning platform route and subscribed to Purple Mash. The Head knew we didn't really have anyone to take ownership of the subject and really just wanted a 'paint by numbers' experience that everyone could follow to satisfy the computing curriculum with the least amount of hassle.

 

So far, I have only been called to the ICT suite once (as the little darlings had entered a code to play a sound 500 times and it crashed the machine - YMMV), so it's a winner for me!

[hardtailstar]

The only software we have installed for all departments is -

 

2d Design

Audacity

Notepad

Project Libre

Python

Adobe Photoshop CS5

 

Everything else is online.

[pete]

For music composition, our lot are using Noteflight (http://www.noteflight.com) and really like it.

[RLR]

I got a list last week for software that needs to go on computers for next year:

 

Visual Studio Code

GDevelop

IDLE

Modules needed:

-datetime

-json

-pygame

-math

-random

-time

-Tkinter

-guizero

-turtle

 

 

VMWare

Blender

Unity

SQLite

 

For music we use Sibelius but there is another product we're looking at as it is free. It's called Musescore.