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Supporting Student
Success in Level One
Digital Technology
AS 91070
Operating
Systems
File
Management
Application
Software
Ethical
Issues
Level One Digital Technology PD
May 2013
Auckland
Julie McMahon & Lesley Pearce
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Programme
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Morning

Strategies for integrating the External content in your teaching
and learning programme and Internal Assessments throughout
the year

Morning Tea Break 10:45
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Breaking down the A-M-E Requirements of 91070

Group Work

Lunch
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Afternoon
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Identify – Describe – Explain – Justify -> Literacy Strategies
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Report writing
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Close & Evaluation
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Examiner’s Report
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External Assessment
2012 Examiner’s Report
Key Points

Successful candidates often developed their report based
upon internally assessed units of work completed
throughout the year.

Reports that were less successful were often based upon a oneoff research assessment task.

Reports that only included referenced material without
subsequent discussion or relating of the referenced material
to their own practice, often did not demonstrate
understanding.
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External Assessment
2012 Examiner’s Report
Key Points

Candidates must understand that nominally changing
sourced material using synonyms for key words or reordering the sentence structure does not constitute
presenting their own work.

Templates that provided too much pre-generated or supplied
content, limited the candidate’s ability to demonstrate their own
understanding or provide their own relevant examples.
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External Assessment
2012 Examiner’s Report

Candidates who defined each type of operating system often
relied heavily on Internet sources and tended to provide
verbatim definitions with no attempt at describing an
operating system’s key features or explaining the purpose in
their own words.

Effective reports focused on describing the key features and
explaining the purpose of the operating system(s) that the
candidates were familiar with using in their classwork or at
home.
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External Assessment
2012 Examiner’s Report

Candidates were not advantaged by providing the purpose
and key features of every software application they are
familiar with or every file type in existence.

Effective reports focused on the specific software applications
and file types that candidates utilised to produce projects
during their years’ work in a digital technology course.
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External Assessment
2012 Examiner’s Report

Threats to data and ethical issues are best described in terms
of how they relate to the candidate’s experiences in creating
their own digital information outcomes.

Verbatim definitions of copyright law, privacy principals,
viruses, spyware, etc. without discussion in relation to the
candidate’s own practice did not provide evidence of
understanding.
+ Provide Context
and Integration
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Demonstrate Understanding
of Basic Concepts of Information Management

Students must demonstrate their own understandings of

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
Operating Systems
Application Software
File Management
Ethical Issues
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The report needs to be contextualised to their specific learning
context.

To demonstrate understanding of the basic concepts, students
need to be able to give examples of how they have applied/
considered /utilised the concepts in their own work
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From the 2013 Assessment Specification:


It is essential that the report is produced in relation to what the
candidate has actually done in relation to managing information.
Reports produced without close reference to the individual candidate’s
experience of managing information are unlikely to succeed.
+ Start from Term 1, Week 1
Integrate the Basic Concepts throughout the
Teaching and Learning Programme


Important to integrate the
external content all year
long, so the external does
not become a rushed
research report at the end
of the year
For each unit of work
throughout the year,
specifically integrate
applicable external digital
information concepts

Example: Level One Year
Planner Columba College
Digital Media
Digital
Information
Programming
Basic
Concepts
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Operating Systems
are the foundation layer
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Students are using the key features of operating systems from the
moment they walk into your classroom, when using their smart
phones, when playing on the Xbox or Playstation…..
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Watch some YouTube clips about operating systems
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJjyZ5KIt4s
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTdSs8kQqSA
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General Overview of OS key features – could be an introduction
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzCAP4ZD7CE
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Good for discussing mobile OS pros and cons
Windows 8 new features – long but can be used to discuss the changing
GUI of OS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QRO3gKj3qw
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About the Google Chrome OS – leads to some excellent discussion on
ethical issues; who owns data, cloud computing, internet access, etc.
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Operating Systems
are the foundation layer

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Have a class or partner brain storm about key features of the
operating systems they use

Students could then take screen shots of the key features and
annotate them in a word document
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Example – student documents with screen shots
Alternatively, students could write blog entries on:
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the key features of the operating systems they use
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their favourite/most useful features
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iOS vs Android
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home vs school OS, etc.
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Operating Systems
are the foundation layer
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Integration Idea for Digital Information Internal and
Operating Systems
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Example Task from Columba College (Used as a Year 10 task
2013, but can be adapted to fit Level One Assessment Criteria for
91071)
Start in Years 9 or 10 to prepare for Level 1
By starting the year off discussing operating systems, it
becomes an easy reference point for discussion throughout
the year.
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File type association and launching applications (what happens
when the extension is changed or missing)
Software updates/incompatibility issues
Logons/passwords
Hardware installation/version updates
Gaming platforms OS and version compatibility
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Integration Topics
Notes, Blogging, Homework Activities
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File Types
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Vector vs raster
 Have students experiment with scaling each type of image
 www.clker.com has great royalty-free vector clip art to experiment
with and also has a very good terms of use page which can segue
into ethical issues discussion
Editable/layered versions of files vs flattened/non-editable
 doc/pdf, psd/jpg, ai/png, gmk/exe, wav/mp3
 What makes each file type suitable for a particular purpose (not
all only related to the software choice)?
File Compression
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Provide shared resources in a zipped/rar file – discuss reasons
Have students turn in a zip/rar file of an assessment, keeping folder
structure in place (great for digital media assessments)
Compress images for a website they are creating/Moodle
upload/email/FaceBook/tumblr, etc. and then discuss reasons,
compare file sizes
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Integration Topics
Notes, Blogging, Homework Activities
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File Naming Conventions and Folder Structure
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Decide on a class naming convention or have students
determine their own and provide explanations for the
conventions
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Digital media and programming units have strong links to strict
file naming conventions (obj_cat, index.html, myVariable) and
folder structure.
Managing Threats to Data
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How do they backup assessments and important assignments?
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Do they have a backup system at home? Virus protection?
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Do you use a Dropbox, or Google Docs system at your school?
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Do they use secure passwords? Internet Banking? Passcode on
their smart phones?
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Contextualise
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Integration Topics
Notes, Blogging, Homework Activities
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Ethical Issues – Students have a keen interest in these topics and
enjoy discussing them. Regurgitating the laws doesn’t
demonstrate their understanding and doesn’t capture their
interest.
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Facebook/tumblr/privacy/bullying
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Royalty free images/creative commons
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iTunes vs ripped music
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Survey permissions, opt-in/opt-out conditions on emails
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Access to their school data such as grades, etc.
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Computer game violence
Have them create something and release it under creative
commons!
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Integration with Internal Assessments
Key to Demonstration of Understanding
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As part of your internal assessment tasks, students can
produce evidence for use in their external assessment report
relating to:
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Application Software
 Key features utilised and how they allowed skilful and efficient
completion of the task
 Justification of selection of the application, based on the key
features available within the of the software
File Management
 File and folder naming conventions applied
 Compression undertaken to enhance or submit the outcome
 Backup procedures, management of threats to data
Ethical Issues
 How they avoided copyright issues/plagiarism
 How they respected privacy of data
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Integration with Internal Assessments
Key to Demonstration of Understanding
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Serves a dual purpose:
1.
Allows you to gather evidence towards judgement against
internal assessment criteria (software selection, use of tools and
techniques in a skilful or efficient manner, consideration of
ethical issues, file and folder management).
2.
Allows students to build up their own understandings which they
can use in their reports.
Example Internal Assessment Tasks and Student Responses
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Digital Information
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Digital Media
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Prototyping and Computer Programming
+ Group Work
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Your Programme
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How could you integrate the external content throughout
your year?
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How could you modify internal assessment tasks to include
evidence to support the external report?
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Report back
+ External Assessment Task
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External Assessment
Break down the A-M-E
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Break down the A-M-E criteria with the students
 Give the students a marking schedule that provides a
break down of the A-M-E criteria, including the
explanatory notes.
 Have a class discussion regarding the criteria and a break
down of key literacy terms (identify, describe, explain,
justify).
 Brainstorm some specific examples in a hardware
context (e.g. two types of cell phone, computer mice,
etc.)
 Relate these key terms to their other subjects
 Use this schedule with a “highlighting” scheme to provide
students feedback (general) on their draft report.
+ External Assessment
Provide a Framework, Not a Template

Task should provide a framework for the students to
demonstrate their own understanding, but not a fill-in-thegaps template.
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Use mid-year and/or end-of-year exam time to have students
produce their reports
 Helps with rigor and authenticity
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Example External Assessment Task

Goal is to get the students to reflect on their year’s work and
how they applied the concepts
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Authenticity is not a huge issue because they have to discuss
their own work/processes/understandings.