Over the last 5 weeks I have had the opportunity to get some experience with year 13 KS5 computing lessons.
This has been a steep learning curve for me and I have seen how complex a topic this is.
The main area that we have been working on is Internet security.
Please see this Lesson plan http://bit.ly/mQ4HgO and this PowerPoint http://bit.ly/iRSE1i to observe what I did in this lesson.
For these lessons I only had two pupils so I really tried to make sure that they it was setup like a tutoring session rather than a lecture. This I achieved by just sitting with the pupils either side of me. I was also able to show them a few not taking tools and barnstorming applications such as bubl.us.
We went the various aspects of networks and how they can be protected with firewalls I asked them to sod some research to see what firewalls where available. I also asked them how they thought antivirus programs worked and what the virus vault was. It was good to talk to them about their experiences with antivirus software and to compare this to macs.
I also then went onto teaching some revision lessons where we were looking at a past paper. These lessons where fairly simple as it was just to ask the pupils to get on with the paper. Please see my Lesson plans for what I did.
The main observation was that the pupils need to understand the concepts clearly and be concise with their answers in orders to achieve all the marks. It was really useful to use the mark scheme to get what was exactly needed it also showed the pupils what the examiners wanted.
It’s a hard task to get them to understand the concepts and not just teach to the test. At A-Level most of the questions do require pupils to understand what is actually going on so it does balance the scales I feel.