BESA CORNER
This month, in our ongoing feature highlighting the work of members of the UK education suppliers’ trade body BESA, we hear from MICHAEL WILKINSON, UK managing director of video learning content provider ClickView; and ANDREW TIDSWELL, Director of International Professional Development at Discovery Education.
ClickView and Scotland’s National e-Learning Partnership provides high quality video learning content free to all schools
Comment by MICHAEL WILKINSON, UK managing director of video learning content provider ClickView
On a normal day in the classroom, teachers would be assessing each student’s progress based on their body language, moving around the class noticing those who aren’t engaged, identifying each individual’s needs, planning group projects and carrying out effective assessment. However, the current remote environment has put new demands on teachers to adapt to an entirely different way of teaching. As lockdown continues, it has become increasingly hard for teachers to
motivate their students. Knowing that students’ preferred format of information consumption is video, there remains a growing demand for high quality curriculum aligned video-based learning content which brings together movement and noise to convey an efficient message that is understandable, digestible and captures their attention. With this in mind, the National e-Learning Partnership (comprising
Education Scotland, e-Sgoil, ADES and Scottish Government) stepped in to offer schools an established platform of curated teacher created video learning content, known as West OS.
West OS The National e-Learning Partnership knew that to make this pre-recorded content on West OS easily accessible to busy teachers, it needed to be hosted and streamed in a secure and reliable vehicle to structure the growing bank of over a thousand teacher recorded videos by curriculum area and rapidly make available to all primary and secondary schools. Already used and trusted by over 5,000 schools, colleges and
universities around the world, 90 per cent of Scotland’s colleges and local authorities including Edinburgh and Inverclyde, ClickView was selected to host and stream West OS’ video content.
West OS + ClickView content The success of the West OS platform led us to realise that schools across Scotland would benefit from the opportunity of having free access to our full range of dynamic, highly visual resources to extend the West OS provision with 1000s of curriculum ready video resources. The three-month agreement made with Education Scotland is valued at
nearly £500k and is currently being offered until the end of March, to support schools through lockdown. As John Stuart added, ”ClickView’s current offer of free access to their
educational videos until the end of March, complements the continually growing bank of West OS content to provide excellent support for remote learning.” Each video visually illustrates both the key learning points and the more
complex underlying concepts, in subjects across the curriculum. They are also there to help to educate students on sensitive and important topics from wars through history, to relationships and sex education. Gayle Gorman, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Education, added, “It’s
fantastic that practitioners in Scotland now have free access to ClickView’s educational videos to provide additional support for the work they are doing locally at this time. Complementing the National e- Learning offer, this further strengthens the overall national offer of support for remote learning.” At ClickView, we and the National e-Learning Partnership encourage all
schools to take up this offer to help them through the current challenges of remote learning.
u To find out more and benefit from this offer please visit
Clickview.co.uk
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www.education-today.co.uk
Offline Computational Thinking; an oxymoron or just surprisingly simple and effective?
Comment by Andrew Tidswell, Director of International Professional Development at Discovery Education
In our digitally connected world, it can be argued that Coding and especially Computational Thinking have become essential parts of a new ‘Computing literacy’ to run alongside traditional literacy and ‘Digital literacy.’ It seems obvious that these Computational
Thinking skills can be developed by following Coding courses and developing apps using coding languages such as Scratch, Python or Discovery Education’s own Coding service. However, the need for ‘offline’ Computational Thinking remains a vital part of building students’ abilities to develop these problem-solving skills effectively and to apply them more broadly, both in learning and in life. The ‘Four Pillars of Computational Thinking’ are essential to this literacy.
They are defined as: • Decomposition - breaking down a complex problem or system into smaller, more manageable parts • Pattern recognition – looking for similarities among and within problems • Abstraction – focusing on the important information only, ignoring irrelevant detail • Algorithms - developing a step-by-step solution to the problem, or the rules to follow to solve the problem
For Decomposition children can explore some ‘Fermi’ questions. These
are problems that initially sound difficult to answer, but a reasonable solution can be reached if they are broken down into a series of related questions whose answers can be estimated. Here are a few child friendly examples: • How many words are there in the book you are currently reading? • How many grains of rice are there in a 1kg bag? • How old would you be if you have lived for exactly 1 million seconds? • If you wanted to fill an Olympic size swimming pool with milk, how many cows would you need? • How many tennis balls would fit in a bathtub?
How about learning dance routines by breaking them into smaller parts
to make them easier to remember? Students can even name the parts and then recombine them into different sequences to share with others. Pattern Recognition can easily be supported offline by activities such as
‘Image Sorts’, where children are provided with a collection of pictures and asked to sort them into as many categories as they can, sharing these with other family members and trying to work out each other’s categories. Simple games like ‘Top Trumps’, ‘Happy Families’ and ‘Snap’ can develop this skill. Abstraction lends itself easily to games of ‘Pictionary’, whereby children
have to create simple drawings to convey a word or phrase to others. In order to be successful, they have to focus on the essential details of the word or phrase and include these in their drawings. An Algorithmis simply a set of steps that need to be followed in order to
solve a problem. These aren’t limited to computing and can be represented in a variety of ways, for example: as lists, numbered diagrams, flow charts or storyboards. These can be developed offline by asking children to follow and then create recipes, or to build models then develop the steps needed for someone else to build their model. They can present these in various ways – such as diagrams or flow charts. How about creating a storyboard for a favourite story or scene from a film? All of these skills do, of course, relate back to coding, but crucially working
offline helps students to see them as broader more widely applicable problem- solving approaches. There are plenty of other ways to develop these skills further, some of which are included in Discovery Education’s free ‘Offline coding activities’ guide.
March 2021
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