Fuse Creator

ICT capability

Focus: Children use and apply their ICT knowledge, skills and understanding confidently and competently in their learning and in everyday contexts. They become independent and discerning users of technology, recognising opportunities and risks and using strategies to stay safe.

Children learn how to:

• create, manipulate and process information using technology .
• collaborate, communicate and share information .
• refine and improve their work, making full use of the nature and pliability of digital information to explore options and improve outcomes

Fuse enables teachers and pupils to create interactive activities. The software is very intuitive enabling even the youngest primary school pupils to make use of it. This could be, for example, to work through activities created by their teacher or by other pupils, or depending on their ability to create activities of their own.

Fuse Creator provides a set of activity creation tools within which content for any subject or topic can be added.  Pupils and Teachers can easily create, revisit and refine their work.

It is also possible for teachers to add comments into a sequenced activity so they could feedback to pupils should they get a question wrong and encourage them have another attempt to improve their answer.

Fuse activity files can be shared with other users on the Fuse Community website and can be used within a Virtual Learning environment.

Literacy

Focus: Children use and apply their literacy skills confidently and competently in their learning and in everyday contexts. They convey ideas and opinions clearly, and respond creatively and critically to a wide range of information and ideas.

Children learn how to:

• read fluently, listen and respond critically to texts of all kinds, on paper and on screen, in order to access ideas and information
• write, present and broadcast a range of ideas, in a wide variety of forms and with awareness of different audiences and purposes; communicate these ideas with accuracy on paper, on screen and through multimodal texts

In undertaking a Fuse activity, pupils will need to read instructions and text on the screen and respond appropriately.

In creating their own activities, pupils will need to write, present and publish to a range of different audiences, for example:  a Year 4 pupil creating a minibeast activity for pupils in Year 2, by way of them revising a topic.

Fuse is fully multimodal, enabling users to add text, images, videos and sounds to their activities.

Learning and thinking skills

Focus: Children have the skills to learn effectively. They can plan, research and critically evaluate, using reasoned arguments to support conclusions. They think creatively, making original connections and generating ideas. They consider alternative solutions to problems.

Children learn how to:

• investigate, asking relevant questions, identifying problems, analysing and judging the value of information and ideas, questioning assumptions
• plan systematically using time and resources effectively, anticipating, taking and managing risks
• communicate, interacting with different audiences in a variety of ways using a range of media
• evaluate, develop criteria for judging work and suggesting refinements and improvements

Fuse provides tools and templates but what pupils / teachers put in these templates is completely open ended. The thinking skills children will use when designing activities is key and they will naturally evaluate their own work. When all members of a class are set the task of creating activities this can easily lead to discussion and collaboration with peers.

Given that Fuse enables users to build up a sequence of activities, which can be designed to branch depending on the response given to the questions, pupils need to thoughtfully plan and piece together their sequence systematically. This process requires users to consider their audience and use content which is most appropriate to them.

Fuse includes a scoring mechanism which enables those designing the activity to include comments in their activity sequence which can provide feedback and suggestions which their audience can learn from.