Grenville College, if they can't learn the way we teach, we must teach the way they learn.

Aims
The department aims to develop and stimulate pupil's curiosity, interest and enjoyment in using ICT. Student's will ideally become autonomous users of ICT gaining the associated skills to support life long study, the pursuit of personal interests and prospective employment in a modern technological society.

We have a a responibility to educate staff, pupils and parents in the current thinking on how ICT should be used at home and within the college in a safe and productive way.

Resources
All our machines are networked with Internet and Email access. In addition we have centrally hosted resources which are accessible from the majority of our machines.

Wireless access across the main parts of the site provide students with access to email and the internet as well as their files from laptops and other hand-held wireless devices.

We have a main ICT teaching room of PCs running Windows OS and Microsoft Office with other software available across the network.

A high-tech lab of PCs with high-speed network access, additionally runs Adobe Photoshop CS3, InDesign CS3, Illustrator CS3, Dreamweaver CS3, Flash CS3 Professional and Premiere. These are predominantly used by ourAS /A Level students but also for our Film & Flash Clubs and other cross-curricular work.

Open access PCs are avilable in the College Library and Sixth Form Centre, along with PC clusters and laptops in departments.

The College Dyslexia Department and Junior School are equiped with their own computer suites, which run specific software to support the students.

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Staff

Mr M Norris - Head of Department

BSc
PGCE

Mrs F Edmonds - Teacher of ICT

Mrs L Stella - Teacher of ICT

BA Ed

Mr J Santer - ICT Technician

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Syllabus Years 7 to 9

All students in Years 7 to 9 receive two 35 minute ICT specific lessons per week.
Students follow a broad ICT curriculum that reinforces the work they complete in other subjects, while extending their use of ICT at the same time. They complete a spiral curriculum of units covering Use of Computers, Word Processing, Touch Typing, Spreadsheets, Databases, Presentations, Research skills, safe use of the internet, Email, graphics, Publishing, Control and an introduction to Programming.

Alongside this students are given the opportunity to complete units in the OCR CLAiT scheme.

Staff from other departments make use of the ICT facilities by booking groups in each day for their own curriculum specific work.

Class sizes range between 12 to 15.

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Syllabus Years 10 and 11 - GCSE

At present we follow OCR GCSE ICT A specification which has been running for a number of years. It involves both a theoretical taught and examined component (40%) and a significant amount of practical work that leads to the production of course work projects (60%).

Year 10
The students complete the first theory unit, sitting mock examinations for this written paper. In addition they complete the two coursework projects 1a and 1b testing communication, presentation and database skills.

Year 11
Students complete another theory unit, being examined in both of the theory units in the January and June of Year 11. In addition the students are required to complete a large "commercial" project to create a computer system that will help manage information for a chosen business. this usually involves the use of sophisticated skills in Word Processing, databases, spreadsheets and, for more able students, some use of programming in their chosen applications to develop the solution for the end user.

There are an average number of 10 students per teaching group.

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Syllabus AS / A2

We currently offer the OCR AS / A Level Applied ICT course in the Sixth Form as this reflects more closely the interests of our current students.

The Course is split into units of work, 3 completed in each year. Unusually there is only one examination in this course and 30% of the work for this examination is completed beforehand in the classroom.

Unit 1: Using ICT to Communicate - in which students analyse 6 business documents and write a report on these following this up with the creation of 6 communications of their own devising.

Unit 2: How Organisations Use ICT - an examined unit where students study how businesses use ICT and use this information to evaluate the use of ICT in a case-study organisation.

Unit 3: ICT Solutions for Individuals and Society - where students use their research skills to find information on a chosen topic, use databases to source data for analysis, use spreadsheets to perform complex analysis of numerical data and produce a final report to a client on their findings.

Unit 4: Working to a Brief which is completed in conjunction with one of the two optional uinits from -

         Publishing
         Website Design and Development
         Artwork and Imaging
         Numerical Modelling
         Interactive Multimedia Products

Students are taught in groups of between 4 and 8. Due to the proportion of project work, students do not need to have studied ICT at GCSE level before beginning the course, although an acceptable competency is required.

For students in the Sixth Form that do not study ICT as a chosen option there is the opportunity to complete futher CLAiT units as evidence of Key Skills proficiency in ICT to support University and employment applications.

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Extra Opportunities

We encourage the students to get actively involved in the use of ICT outside our normal lessons through a number of ways.

Regular competitions which include a Photography Competition, Programming Competitions, Computer Animation, Doodle4Google and many others.

We have visiting speakers from Universities and businesses to enrich the learning that takes place in the classroom. The most recent of these was a visit from a computer crime specialist and his team who demonstrated everything from Forensic Crime Scenes through to hacking a mobile phone using Bluetooth.

We visit national ICT conferences and attend University conferences.

We visit businesses and locations to support the project work we are completing especially in the sixth form.

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Useful Web Links

Click on the links below visit some worthwhile web resources.
To be updated soon

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