ICT

FUNDAMENTALS OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY IN A WORLD OF SOCIAL MEDIA

The Year 7s have been working on the fundamentals of digital citizenship for the last few weeks. We have had many interesting and engaging discussions about what the positives and negatives are of social media and how we can keep ourselves and our peers safe when communicating online.

One of the activities we did focus on was defining and understanding terms related particularly to cyberbullying issues. To help process this, the students created word clouds which highlighted the key terms and ideas of the topic for them in a fun and visual way! Here are a couple of examples from Grace George and Hannah Barranyk.

Mrs Krishna Fleming

ICT/ Maths/ Year 10 Student Manager

WHAT ARE THE YEARS 7s MOVING ON TO NEXT?

The Year 7s are moving/have moved onto identifying and learning about Cyber Security using an online platform - Grok. The topic looks at “purposeful sharing”, in that social media is a great way to stay connected but also learn how much people that aren’t “friends” can find out about you. Students will play the role of a cyber security expert to find information about others online. It is fictitious but does bring to the fore how much information can be found by doing a little bit of sleuthing.

They will also be learning about passwords and how easy it could be to find people's passwords when they overshare information or choose weak passwords. This will help students understand the importance of 1) not oversharing, and 2) choosing strong passwords to help keep their information and data secure. These topics will be assessed and contribute toward their learning task. 

ICT Team

10ICT – SPREADSHEETS USING EXCEL

The 10ICT students are just finalising their term’s work of studying the use of spreadsheets using Microsoft Excel. 

They have investigated areas of spreadsheets, such as formulas, formatting, using the drawing tools, creating charts (pie, column, line and sparkline) and having the software to make decisions using IF statements, AND and OR logical operators and Goal Seek. Some students were also able to complete some extension work on Pivot Tables, Lookup functions and preparing Invoices.

As well as the mechanics of these operations, the students have also focused on trying to produce the optimal presentation of their work to make it not only efficient but also as effective as possible.

We are using Excel rather than Google Sheets so that the students have experience with both the Microsoft and the Google platforms and the differences between them, such as having to consciously save their work in Excel. It has also meant that the work is completed using the school desktop machines, so any work not completed in class needs to be done using the school labs and can’t just be taken home to be completed on their Chromebooks. Many students have found this to be quite challenging!

Hopefully, students will find this useful preparation for those continuing into VCE Applied Computing and/or Data Analytics as well as being a marketable skill set for their future careers.

Diana Hatch

10ICT Teacher