Junior Viewpoint

Delivering the datahandling strand of the curriculum

Finding Things Out is at the very heart of ICT. It is also an essential component of every statutory curriculum. Using Junior Viewpoint is the very best way to give your children the skills and knowledge they need in this vital aspect of ICT.

Finding Things Out is often seen as searching for information using CDs or the Internet but its real value lies in the power of computer databases. When we access holidays, train times, or national crime statistics we are using computer databases although we might not realise it.

Children must acquire relevant skills and knowledge, and both the Mathematics curriculum and the National Numeracy Strategy include datahandling for all children.

The best way to deliver these is to use Junior Viewpoint. It offers unrivalled simplicity and power in an easy-to-use package. Junior Viewpoint comes complete with over 30 high quality datafiles together with outstanding curriculum-focused documentation, all created to encourage pupils to interrogate, search, sort and analyse information.

Over 30 datafiles cover many curriculum subjects including:

• History
• Geography
• Science
• PHSE
• PE
• English
• Food
• plus many, many more...

Junior Viewpoint allows you to view the data in sheet or list view and this means that you can easily perform simple and complex searches and also sort, select and graph data in many powerful ways. With Junior Viewpoint you can sort and search through your data easier than ever before.

Analyse your data by creating clear and understandable line, bar, pie and scatter graphs, even with subsets of your data. In this way your pupils will quickly discover patterns in information that they would never see otherwise.

With Junior Viewpoint you can set up or join in exciting international projects such as this example where children in four countries investigated their lifestyles. Using Junior Viewpoint your pupils will be able to analyse the data, developing both their ICT and their thinking skills. And this is the crucial element. A computer cannot interpret the data in the way that a person can. Why, for example, do the Danish favour cycling to school? Perhaps the sample taken was not big enough? Perhaps the sample was localised? Or perhaps Denmark promotes cycling with cycle ways?

Creating a new datafile is simple and intuitive because Junior Viewpoint follows the most natural way that we collect information. First create a layout using simple but powerful tools. It contains the questions you will ask and is as easy as typing a questionnaire using a word processor. All the power is hidden but automatically included. That’s all there is to it! You can then enter your data in either the sheets or ‘list’ view and begin to analyse it!

You can even add web links to your pages. Imagine the benefits of being able to simply link to any web page from any sheet in your datafile.