On this day: Presentation: 10 stimulating ideas for the Computing curriculum
This is an article I originally published on 2 October 2017. The conference it refers to has been and gone, but I’ve added a few annotations relating to my methodology.
Archives, by Terry Freedman
I'm giving a presentation at the EduTech conference on Friday 6th October, and I have two related problems. First, I'm no good at arithmetic, so my '10' ideas is actually 13. Secondly, I've only got half an hour so although I'll do my best to pack everything in, it will be a bit of a squeeze.
No matter though, because I've compiled a stupendous resource sheet to accompany my talk, so people can download it after the session and explore the links at their leisure.
I always provide a link from where people who attended my talk can download an ebook or document or presentation containing the resources I’ve referred to.
In deciding which stimulating ideas to include, I thought about the following. On the one hand, ideas that are interesting and exciting, but not ones that you could, realistically, implement tomorrow. I don't like setting impossible goals, but I think it's important to look at different possibilities, even if you decide after all said and done to reject them.
On the other hand, I've included a few things that people could start to consider now for, say, next half-term or next term.
And there are also a few suggestions that could be implemented next week.
I think it’s important, in a talk like this, to come up with practical suggestions that attendees can implement easily and quickly. It’s all very well having visions. However, a vision is necessary but not sufficient.
What links all my suggestions is the common thread that Computing can be interesting, relevant and accessible. I tend not to like 'coding weeks' or anything like that because they place all the emphasis on coding -- not even programming, which I think is more than merely coding.
In fact, I wrote about this quite recently, in relation to “National Coding Week”: National Coding Week: Why?
And at the end of the day, all my suggestions are just that: suggestions. You may well already be doing some of them, but I always think that even if I come away from a session like this with just one thing I hadn't thought of before then it was worthwhile.
To book up, and check out all the seminars, here's the link:
(No longer available or relevant.)
If you'd like around 350 tips for getting the most out of Education Conferences, buy my book! It's called, appropriately enough, Education Conferences: Teachers' Guide to Getting the Most out of Education Conferences. Click on the cover below to find out more. At the time of writing it is still only 99p or ither currencies' equivalent (more or less).
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