Computing
At our school we want pupils to be MASTERS of technology and not slaves to it. Technology is everywhere and will play a pivotal part in students' lives,. Therefore, 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 want our pupils to understand that there is always a choice with using technology and as a school we utilise technology (especially social media) to model positive use. We recognise that the best prevention for a lot of issues we currently see with technology/social media is through education. Building our knowledge in this subject will allow pupils to effectively demonstrate their learning through creative use of technology
At Water Primary School we use Purple Mash as a basic platform to build our computing curriculum on. Purple Mash is a cloud-based platform for primary-aged children. It contains a wide range of age-appropriate, creative software tools for writing, drawing, coding, animating, blogging and much more. In addition to these programs, the platform provides resources and themed lesson activities, which can be set for pupils to do at home. Feedback on their work can then be provided to the pupil, including recorded audio feedback, and all the work is stored online, within Purple Mash.
Included within Purple Mash is the EYFS platform, Mini Mash, which we use at Water Primary School with our youngest children. The skills used in computing for our Early Years children can be found below - 'SOW Skills Checker EYFS Purple Mash.' These skills are worked on by our youngest children throughout the academic year.
Our computing curriculum includes the 3 predominant areas of computing - computer science, information technology and digital literacy. Knowledge and skills gained from these areas of the computing curriculum are used in appropriate areas in other curriculum subject areas.