Teaching computing, assessing computing, and a lot more

I'm on the final proof-reading stages of the latest issue of Digital Education. It's a free newsletter for people with a professional interest in ICT and Computing in education, ed tech, digital skills etc. This issue includes an article by William Lau on the 5 mistakes he made when teaching Computing, and an article by Sam Hunter on the ladders approach to assessing Computing.

For more information on what the new issue contains, read on.

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ICT and Computing Reading catch-up

people in a stationGreetings! I hope you have had a nice summer break. I’ve taken some time off, in the sense of not trying to update this website as frequently as I usually do. But I was doing some reading and writing, so I thought you may find these links interesting as you start a new school year.

Believe it or not, I started this post a week ago. It’s not that I’m a slow writer (I’m not), but I kept thinking “Ooh, that would be interesting to include” and “Ooh, that looks good too”. well, after a lot of “ooh-ing” I thought “Ooh, I’d better stop and hit the Publish button”. Just as well, because one of the conferences I mention is tomorrow – eeek! Anyway, now even this intro has started to take on a life of its own, so I’m going to stop right now. There. See? It’s just a question of self-discipline.

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Book review: Don’t Change the Lightbulbs

This book collects together the thoughts and observations of over 71 people in education. These are each a little longer than the bite-sized comments typical of Twitter – I understand that they were curated from Google+ discussions. Being longer than 140 characters makes them "meaty" without being too long.

In total around 70 topics are covered, not all of them curricular.

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Some interesting-looking computing conferences coming up

There are several conferences coming up in computing, ICT and education technology. If you’re not careful, you could spend all your time and money going to conferences without getting any actual work done! Still, I do think it’s worth going to two or three a year if you can persuade the powers-that-be that it’s in their interests to allow you to attend. So, here’s the current listing. I’m not saying it’s a definitive list, just the ones I know about.
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