ICT teacher Chris Leach explains how he uses technology to invigorate cross-curricular learning and shares some ideas for teaching big events.
For my year seven ICT classes, the Olympics inspired the entire term’s project. The children worked in small teams to prepare a bid to host the Olympic Games. The first step was to identify a city to represent. This utilised their online research skills as they had to find a city that had not previously hosted the summer Olympics and then try and find out whether that city was appropriate to host the Olympics.
The children themselves decided what factors they should take into account when choosing a city – such as transport infrastructure (does it have an airport or train stations?) and the number of sporting venues.
In each class we then put their chosen cities up for the public vote by putting them on Polldaddy – an online voting tool – and asking, viaTwitter, for people to vote for which city they thought would be the best host. This brought into the project social media and issues of e-safety.