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Diary of a computing


lead teacher Dan Ferry – St. Joseph’s Catholic Primary School


I’ve been working as a teacher at St. Joseph’s Catholic Primary School in Highgate, London for the last five years. Our aim is to provide children with a balanced curriculum using technology that will give them the 21st century digital skills needed to keep themselves safe online and to also promote better opportunities for their future working lives.


Since the mandatory introduction of the computing curriculum in 2014, I’ve been the computing subject lead for St. Joseph’s, overseeing the innovative and creative ways to include computing skills across the curriculum. Within the first year, it was sometimes difficult to motivate teachers to discreetly teach the computing curriculum as many had not been provided with adequate training and/or did not have experience of teaching computing.


Every year Islington hosts 500 children from the borough, to bring along their coding projects to the Emirates Stadium and showcase their amazing programming talents.


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I decided to integrate computing skills across different subjects so teachers could see the benefits of teaching computing but not necessarily be burdened with having to deliver a designated computing lesson each week. I introduced the idea of computational thinking, primarily through the website Barefoot Computing. This is a free resource that provides teachers with lesson plans to incorporate into other subject areas or mini activities that can be taught at any time. Through this ideology, teachers learned the basic vocabulary of computational


thinking and were then able to select different elements that aligned with their lessons for children to focus on. For example, at the beginning of maths lessons, children would be asked to choose 2–3 elements of computational thinking that they might use as a success criteria to help them with their learning. Maybe they would need to debug a problem, collaborate with a partner or group, or maybe spot patterns to help them find a solution. The use of this resource allowed teachers to learn and teach computer science in a blended learning style, providing teachers with more confidence and competence to teach the computing curriculum across all subjects.


Alongside the computational thinking approach, I have also introduced many free resources to help teachers implement the computing curriculum. I would highly recommend the following apps or websites for primary school teachers:


EYFS: Bee–bots and code–a–pillars allow children to start developing their own algorithms through a physical device, providing them with instant feedback on the success of the program.


KS1: Scratch Jr. and code.org are excellent free, comprehensive resources that provide children with basic block coding opportunities in a structured and


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