One of the underlying principals of DiDA is that students should develop and use “ICT Toolkit” to solve real world problems. Skills should be available for use as required and the specification lists the skills that need to be known and used. Advantage DiDA takes care of teaching and assessing those skills so you don’t have to.

Initially you can assess student skills and use the comprehensive data tracking facilities to see exactly where the gaps in knowledge are. Using these web-based tools you can easily and quickly bring up a report that shows the strengths and weaknesses of all of your students at a glance.

Students can then use the detailed simulations to “fill in the gaps” by learning the skills they need.

The traditional methods of assessing understanding can be very time consuming. If, for example, you are teaching a lesson covering spreadsheet functions, you would need to construct a task involving generating lots of different functions.

Using the automatic data-tracking facilities, combined with the engaging learning tasks you could get the students to play a 20 minute game that teaches and assesses the syntax and application of a variety of spreadsheet functions and marks it all for you.

 In combination with this and throughout the course, students are presented with  practice tasks which allow them to hone their skills on tasks that are similar to those required for their coursework. These are completed in real applications and marked by the teacher.  Marks can be entered into the system for students to see.