MAC - January 2025

Boost to students’ digital skills

We have been strengthening and developing our students digital skills by embedding Microsoft Teams and associated technologies to give them increased confidence, skills and processes in using computers.  At year 8, we have also introduced a basic skills curriculum to address the weaknesses that some students have through a heavy increase in exposure to tablets and smartphones, rather than desktop computing.  These skills will have an increased impact on their ability to use computer software across the curriculum and, later on, when they enter the workplace.  The assignment below shows an excellent piece of Year 9 work, where the students have been learning how to program the microbit to learn coding skills; the assignment was submitted in Microsoft Teams, assessed and then returned to the student for revision, enabling high levels of progress in their learning.

In maths we have continued our use of SPARX online learning platform, using this for homework for years 9,10 and 11. Once the homework has been completed, students then use time in lessons to work on individual areas of need taken from the homework, and for those who would benefit from more challenging homework there are personalised challenge questions. We have also embedded this into our assessment cycle, students are given the Sparx codes before an assessment to help their independent learning outside of lessons in preparation for an assessment, and the after the assessment students go to a computer room, and then work on which ever areas they struggled on on the assessment, hence completing the assessment cycle, this is proving to have a big impact in pupils progress and comfidence.

Since September, students at the National academy have completed 4264 hours of learning on sparx and answered 192, 343 questions correctly. Our top 3 students so far this year are Hannah G, Niamh O, and Oliver S. Year 9 has the highest percentage of students with 100%.