Strategies for Integrating ProjectEVOLVE into your Curriculum
Curriculum?
ProjectEVOLVE isn’t a curriculum; it’s a set of resources, assessment and tracking tools that support the UKCIS/DSIT digital competencies framework “Education for a Connected World” This framework is a seminal attempt to define what educators should focus on with children and young people at each stage of their school journey. It covers eight strands of their online lives from Early Years right through to 18+.
There are over 600 expertly written resources for each of the 365 statements in the framework which we know is a lot! And teachers just do not have time to teach all of it.
So the question we get asked the most? How do I use it? How do I integrate it into my Computing Curriculum. Which elements do I focus on? Do you have any examples on which we could base our curriculum mapping?
It depends?
As you have probably guessed, there is no single answer to this. It depends on how your current curriculum is structured. Whether you have shaped a broad and balanced curriculum engineered to your own needs or whether you use a national curriculum programme of study.
It’s one of the reasons we at SWGfL swerved a proscriptive curriculum route as they vary so much. Remember, ProjectEVOLVE is a UK Safer Internet Centre resource that is meant to address need across all four nations. And approaches are very different between those four.
So what follows are several potential strategies that might help and a few examples of how others have tackled this.
Computing Curriculum and “cherry picking”
A primary strategy to embed ProjectEVOLVE resources into the computing curriculum is to identify areas of overlap between the ProjectEVOLVE framework and the existing computing curriculum.
Review the framework strands in ProjectEVOLVE's UKCIS "Education for a Connected World" digital competencies framework and identify areas in the computing curriculum where these competencies can be enhanced with ProjectEVOLVE resources.
Introduce a digital citizenship or responsible use strand into your computing curriculum.
For each year group for each half term, choose a strand (or two) on which to focus
From each half term strand choose a selection of statements (not all) that:
- You have prioritised as being important
- You have heard children discussing or those issues have arisen and you have had to deal with them
- Play to your staff’s knowledge strengths
- Have activities that interest you or are more engaging with students
Cross-curricular integration
The computing curriculum alone may not be the most appropriate subject in which to teach what are a very broad set of skills for the complex online ecosystems children inhabit.
The competencies are designed to be flexible and adaptable to a range of curriculum areas and can be incorporated into a variety of teaching activities and topics.
For instance, online safety concepts can be incorporated into English lessons through discussions about misinformation/disinformation; fact/opinion; hoax/satire etc , or Computational Thinking concepts can be applied in Maths or Science lessons.
An area where we have seen the greatest adoption is supporting the digital pillars of the PHSE and SRE curricula, particularly in Self Image & Identity; Online Relationships and Health Wellbeing and Lifestyle strands.
To assist curriculum leads with this mapping we have created a curriculum mapping search area for resources here.
Teaching to need
The most powerful curriculum is that which can flex to the needs of the children sat in front of you.
The Knowledge Map tool in ProjectEVOLVE has been designed to:
Assess global knowledge across strands collectively for a class
Return data that encourages you to prioritise statements according to the knowledge the class have across the strand
Reduces workload by adding those statements to a planner and packaging all the teaching resources needed
Measures impact of teaching
Tracks progress for the class over time
So a typical curriculum approach may be:
For each year group for each half term, plan/ choose a strand (or two) on which to focus
Run a knowledge map at the beginning of the unit to which each child contributes
Use the data to prioritise two or three statements
Add to planner, download and teach
Measure impact by running the second knowledge map
Review the impact on the dashboard
Rinse and repeat for the next half term strand so you build up a collective track of progress for that year group throughout the year.
Some examples
Some schools publicly share their planning online and the following are a few who have used ProjectEVOLVE as part of their computing curriculum.