Once again the summer holidays have come and gone and a new cohort of teachers enrolled on our Technoteach course have begun developing their programming skills. For the Fourth year running the Technoteach CPD accredited course has seen teachers from across Wales attending fortnightly full-day sessions designed to improve their knowledge of programming concepts and how to translate this into fun and effective activities in their classrooms. The sessions for the Primary Cohort this year are based in Cardiff with 17 teachers from Swansea to Newport looking to up-skill in preparation for delivering lessons based around the new Digital Competency Framework. The sessions for the Secondary cohort are taking place in Swansea, and for the first time are being delivered entirely through Welsh as all of the teachers are currently working in Welsh-language and bilingual schools. The teachers from both cohorts are hard at work getting to grips with programming concepts through the use of the Scratch and Python programming languages, creating useful resources along the way.
The course is accredited by VTCT and is delivered throughout the academic year (18 full-day sessions) with teachers meeting once a fortnight to develop their understanding of a range of computer science topics from robotics to Python programming. A strong focus of the course involves preparing schemes of work and accompanying resources so that teachers can use them immediately in their classrooms.
There is every intention to continue running the course for years to come, for more information on the course visit:
http://www.technocamps.com/en/news/free-accredited-cpd-opportunity-for-teachers-across-wales-2018
Just as our teachers are getting stuck into programming challenges this week, thousands of activities are being held across Europe to celebrate EU Code Week. EU Code Week is a grassroots initiative which aims to bring coding and digital literacy to everybody in a fun and engaging way. If you’re interested in finding events or useful resources, you can do so no matter where in Europe you may be!
For more information on EU Code Week visit: