In my lessons I now try my best to embed functional skills as I feel that these are important, and since I mainly teach ESOL ICT, I am already teaching the basics of ICT in the actual lessons …show more content…
Functional skills are essential, as it allows the learners to be able to recognise good value deals. The usefulness to this is that functional skills allow other areas to be tackled in any given task or a problem, and this essentially means that the learner is able to draw up on a range of skills that can be used in a given task or a situation, allowing them to apply those skills in a range of different contexts.
One of the examples that can be given here for good value deals is that in my ICT lessons, I was teaching spreadsheets, and as you know spreadsheet allows one to be able to calculate calculations using formulas, so no real calculations are carried out mentally/using a calculator. Now, in order to check their understanding I get my learners to carry out a simple method to see whether they are able to calculate expenses.
So in order to check whether they are able to do this effectively, I get my learners to do a manual check as well as a check using a calculator to see if they have got the same answer as the one on the spreadsheet. This checks their mental ability to see how effectively they can carry out