This document provides guidance for students on developing a skills assessment and essay on digital technology skills. It includes activities for mapping skills, creating a timeline of media productions, and evaluating skill development over time. Students are prompted to consider their current skill level, productions worked on, and key skills learned from each. They are also given guidance on structuring a five paragraph essay responding to an exam question about how their digital technology skills developed and contributed to creative decision making, with examples from their coursework and other productions.

1. Q1a lesson activities
All of the following activities focus on
skills using digital technology

2. Skills Development
Activity 1

3. ‘Pointless’ activity
• You have five minutes to fill in as many skills as possible
on your mind map…
• As well as the obvious skills, try to add skills that not
everyone else will have – be as specific as possible.

4. Working in a group of 3 or 4, score your mind
maps:
• 1 point for every skill you have written down
that no one else in your group has written
down.
• If you finish before we move on, try and add
some more skills to your mind-map.
‘Pointless’ activity

5. On the back of your mind map
• Summarise your level of skill now in using
digital technology for media production work,
in no more than two sentences.
• Try to quantify your skill level. The following
prompts may help…

6. Useful terms/phrases
• Confident (all/some? video/print media?)
• Advanced Skills (many/some?)
• Close to professional standard
• Still learning and developing basic/proficient /
advanced skills in…
• Mastered basic skills in… enabling me to
experiment with more complex techniques.
• With prompting I can…

7. Skills Development
Activity 2

8. Timeline of all media productions
1. Draw a line across the full length of your paper to
represent your time at college (use a whole page).
2. Add all of the productions you have worked on in
college in chronological order.
3. If applicable, add any productions you have worked
on outside of college.
In an exam response, you should mainly focus on your coursework productions but it will be useful to
refer briefly to other productions if they are significant in terms of your skill development.

9. Timeline of all media productions
4. For each production, consider and write
down the main digital technology skill that
you developed.
5. Give an example from your production work
that evidences this.

10. Skills Development
Activity 3

11. Digital Technology Essay
Use all of your notes so far to write up your
response to the following past exam question:
Describe how you developed your skills in the use
of digital technology for media production and
evaluate how these skills contributed to your
creative decision making. Refer to a range of
examples in your answer to show how these skills
developed over time.
There is help on structuring your essay on the next slide.

12. How to structure your answer
Paragraph 1 should be an introduction which explains which main coursework
projects you did. It can be quite short.
Paragraph 2 should suggest something about your starting point with the skills
area in the question - what skills did you have already and how were these
illustrated. Use a brief example.
Paragraph 3 should talk through your use of skills in early projects and what
you learned and developed through these. Again there should be examples to
support all that you say.
Paragraph 4 should go on to demonstrate how the skill developed in later
projects, again backed by examples, and reflecting back on how this
represents moves forward for you from your early position and how the
development of these skills enabled you to be more creative.
Paragraph 5 short conclusion