What next?
As she wasn't assessing students on the new strands, Karllie has no record of the level of student understanding, but notes that they seemed to understand what they were learning at the time. She will obviously be making much more effort in 2008 to introduce the new strands and get the students involved with them.
Although students enjoyed getting NCEA credits in Year 10, a departmental decision was made to drop the NCEA unit standard assessment in 2008. Teachers were finding that Year 11 students, comfortable with their safety net of 12 credits, wanted to pick which unit standards they would work on, or not bother about.
Karllie will teach two Year 10 classes in 2008, one of which doesn't do programming. This group will do the first three terms from this unit, but in the fourth term will work on software, such as multimedia programs.
Students get a taste of programming in the Year 10 course before going on to Year 11 programming. Karllie says that they lose many students at Year 11 entry because the subject choices reduce to five, but there is still enough for two Year 11 classes, which subsequently feed into one class at Year 12.
While the Year 10 programming course is fairly well developed, Karllie enjoys being able to modify it every year to make it better – "Now, with the new curriculum, we've got the option there to spice it up even more".
