By Ms. Copin, Deputy Head (Academic)

The advent of computers into education, twenty years ago, created a need for “Information and Communication Technology” courses: in dry (and often air-conditioned) lessons, students learnt how to put together Power Point presentations and format Word Documents.

Times have changed. Today’s students are far more versatile in these many skills than ever before, rendering explicit teaching of content even drier! Many a student in the UK sits, bewildered, as a teacher explains the basics of slide transitions in Power Point…

Indeed, literacy is not taught through a series of spelling challenges, nor is numeracy taught by drilling computations. Instead, both are brought to life by being applied in multiple and varied contexts. Power Point presentation skills are best learnt in the context of making a real presentation on, say, superpowers in Geography. Rudimentary Excel is best learnt during a Mathematics lesson on sequences and series, where the formulae can be meaningfully applied.

So it is with ICT skills. Last year, a wide-ranging study took place throughout the school, identifying not only ICT, but also presentation and research skills, which teachers felt students needed to acquire at different stages of the curriculum. The Assistant Head (Teaching and Learning) then coordinated where these skills would be embedded in the different subject areas. The result of this is that now, without losing precious curriculum time to ICT lessons per-se, students will seamlessly develop the capabilities they need in and amongst their different subject areas… a masterpiece of academic coordination across 25 departments.