Planning the student experience
Both sets of resources provide a comprehensive learning journey for students. Often you may find when using the Craig’n’Dave resources that you would like a few more examples, different activities or an online textbook to use with the students. This is where The Paul Long Ultimate GCSE resources can help.
Before the lesson
The first decision is whether you want to give students a flipped learning experience. With flipped learning students learn the body of the taught content for themselves in advance of the lesson. This means they come to the lesson prepared with much of the knowledge already and can begin activities immediately. This contrasts with a more traditional “chalk and talk” approach where the teacher introduces the topic of the lesson and teaches the content before students start activities.
Flipped learning requires a new approach to teaching and learning that some students may have difficulty adapting to, because it is not how they are used to being taught. You may find that your students lack the maturity for this approach, and therefore using The Ultimate GCSE resources with activities supplemented from Craig’n’Dave gives you a perfect delivery model.
If you choose a flipped approach, then students will need an opportunity to learn the content. You could do this by setting the students a video to watch from the Craig’n’Dave Student Stream, or by reading relevant pages from the e-text book from the Ultimate GCSE resources. Either way, a critical component of this approach is that students write summary notes using the Cornell method of notetaking in an exercise book. They bring these to the lesson to assist them with their classwork since there is no teacher-led component at the start of the lesson.
Start of the lesson
We suggest giving students something to do as soon as they enter the classroom to minimise the “down-time” and enable, “engagement on entry”. Students will arrive at the lesson at various times, and this can cause disruption and lost learning time if not managed effectively.
The Craig’n’Dave resources include a short starter activity for every lesson that can be displayed on the board. It does not require further introduction from the teacher and all students should be able to engage with this if they are following the flipped classroom approach. Even better, if you have Smart Revise get students into the habit of using Quiz mode for 7 minues at the start of every lesson as soon as they arrive.
The Ultimate GCSE resources include a “Read page xx” at the start of each PowerPoint. This is a good opportunity for students to do this if you would prefer to have a silent start to the lesson. Be mindful that reading may be challenging for some students.
The Craig’n’Dave workbooks and the Ultimate GCSE resources both contain PowerPoint slides and activities. The examples and activities are different, so you can choose which visualisations and classwork to use with your learners.
Homework
An alternative approach is to use the Craig’n’Dave workbooks as homework, and the Ultimate GCSE resources for classwork. This is particularly effective if you are not teaching with a flipped classroom approach and need to set more traditional homework. Students can complete their Craig’n’Dave workbook at home. With some minor adaptations you could even print these workbooks for students too. As each activity is only intended to take 20-30 minutes, this is the perfect amount of time for homework.
Programming
Both sets of resources use a PRIMM approach to teaching programming. Time2Code provided by Craig’n’Dave is intended to be a self-study approach, with Ultimate GCSE resources providing a teacher-led approach. You could introduce programming concepts using the Ultimate GCSE resources to structure the learning, but use Time2Code to provide additional differentiated challenges and programming assessments.
