Help : Making the Most of the ICT Companion

Help : Making the Most of the ICT Companion (Teachers)

Introduction

The GCSE ICT Companion 04 covers 50 topics. If you are studying a full GCSE course in Information and Communication Technology then you will probably have two years to cover these topics. There are many different GCSE courses in ICT, each of which cover slightly different material.

Set Your Course

The first thing you should do is find out which course you are studying by asking your teacher. Then use the course selector to tell the ICT Companion which course you are following. Traffic light indicators on each article page will tell you whether or not you need to learn the information on the page.

Studying a Topic

To make the most of the ICT Companion we recommend that you study each topic in turn :

Select the topic that you are going to study from the Navigation panel.
You can work your way through the topic by pressing the button at the bottom of each page.
As you work through the subtopics within a topic complete the worksheet that is associated with the topic.
At the end of a topic use the interactive quiz to test your knowledge of the topic. Remember that if you are not sure of an answer you can use the look up button to review the article that is relevant to the question.

Keep the worksheets that you complete to help you revise later. If you do not understand a point then try to use the search engine to find out more about it or ask your teacher to explain. You can find definitions of terms in the glossary.

Periodic Revision

Knowledge that is not used regularly is often lost. It is important that you periodically revise the information that you have learnt. The quiz provides an excellent method of doing this. When you have some spare time simply use the quiz module to revise the topics that you have covered. Remember to use the look up button to remind you of any important information that you have forgotten. Your quiz ratings decrease if you do not revise topics regularly.

You could decide to revise topics every time you complete all of the topics in a topic area.

Exam Revision

There are two important aspects to revising for an examination. They are :

Learning the material that questions could be asked about.
Getting used to the style of question that is asked in an examination.

You can use the quiz, revision summaries and worksheets to help you revise the material that may be on the examination. If you have the ICT Companion at home then the quiz is particularly useful as it will help highlight areas that you do no understand.

You could obtain past examination papers from either your school or the examination board. These can be used to practice answering examination style questions. The search engine can be used to look up information to answer questions.

Project Work

The type of GCSE project varies between the different examination boards. The articles on the system lifecycle, analysis, design, implementation, testing, evaluation and documentation should provide some general advice on how to complete and document a project. The summaries at the end of each topic can be used as checklists to see that you have completed all of the necessary work.

You should check with your teacher or examination board to determine the exact requirements for the project(s) you will complete.

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