Resources

Background

Computing at School Working Group,Computer Science: A Curriculum for Schools(Cambridge, 2012)

The Royal Society,Shut Down or Restart? The Way Forward for Computing in UK Schools(London, 2012),

Rushkoff, D., Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age (OR Books, 2009)

Teaching Agency,Subject Knowledge Requirements for Entry into Computer Science Teacher Training(London, 2012)

Teaching resources and ideas

Code Club provides detailed plans and resources for extra-curricular clubs, which might be adapted for use within the school curriculum. Free registration required: see www.codeclub.org.uk

New Zealand-based Computer Science (CS) Unplugged produce an excellent collection of resources exploring computer science ideas through classroom-based, rather than computer-based, activities: see http://csunplugged.org/

Computing at School (CAS) hosts a large resource bank of plans, resources and activities. CAS is free to join: see www.computingatschool.org.uk

CAS Primary Master Teachers; for example, one teacher has shared detailed lesson plans for computer science and digital literacy topics via his website at www.code-it.co.uk

CAS has made available a large collection of lesson plans and other resources through the Digital Schoolhouse project, based at Langley Grammar School: see www.digitalschoolhouse.org.uk

Naace (the ICT association) and CAS have developed joint guidance on the new Computing curriculum: see http://naacecasjointguidance.wikispaces.com/home

A group of teachers and teacher trainers convened by the NCTL worked together to curate resources for initial teacher training for the Computing curriculum, many of which may be useful for CPD and classroom use: see http://bit.ly/ittcomp

There are excellent resources available for teaching with MIT’s Scratch programming toolkit, together with an online support community, on the ScratchEd site: see http://scratched.media.mit.edu/

Resources for teaching safe, respectful and responsible use of technology are widely available. Good starting points for exploring these topics are www.childnet.com/teachers-and-professionals and https://www.thinkuknow.co.uk/teachers/

Subject Knowledge

Armoni, M. and Ben-Ari, M., Computer Science Concepts in Scratch (Michal Armoni and Moti Ben- Ari, 2013).

Bentley, P.J., Digitized: The Science of Computers and How it Shapes our World (Oxford University Press, 2012).

Berners-Lee, T.,Answers for Young People

Blum, A., Tubes: Behind the Scenes at the Internet (Penguin, 2013).

Brennan, K. and Resnick, M., ‘New frameworks for studying and assessing the development of computational thinking’ (2012)

Computing at School,The Raspberry Pi Education Manual(CAS, 2012)

Papert, S., Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (Basic Books, 1993).

Petzold, C., Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software (Microsoft Press, 2009).

Media

Mainstream television often broadcasts programmes relevant to topics in Computing, and YouTube has a range of material, from video tutorials to academic lectures.

BBC Learning produced a collection of clips relating to Computing in real-world contexts, and companion pieces exploring these in classroom contexts: see www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01r9tww/clips

The 2008 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures were given by computer scientist Chris Bishop.
These can be watched at www.richannel.org/christmas-lectures/2008/2008-chris-bishop

TED has many high-quality 20-minute talks on Computing topics that would be accessible to primary school pupils: see www.ted.com/topics/technology and http://ed.ted.com/lessons?category=technologyfor a curated collection of videos for schools.

The first two episodes of the BBC’s Virtual Revolution are available online. These provide some excellent background material on the Internet and the web: see www.bbc.co.uk/virtualrevolution/archive.shtml