Concentrating purely on web filtering to keep kids safe online is a bit like looking for your keys under a lamp post because, although you lost them somewhere else, it’s lighter there. A third of children in Europe access the internet from a mobile device, according a new report:
33 % of 9 to 16 year-olds who go online say they do so using a mobile phone or other handheld device.
Every time I attend an educational ICT conference, at least one of the speakers talks about how little we know about the future. The refrain goes something like this:
This all sounds profound and straightforward, but it really isn’t.
In England we have a weekly soap set in a school called Waterloo Road. This has everything you would hope not to find in a school: inappropriate behaviour, theft, even attempted murder – and that’s just the staff. The kids are pretty OK by comparison: teenaged pregnancy, illegal drug-taking and gangs. Strangely enough, there doesn’t seem to be more than 30 kids on roll, judging by the number of people who attend whole-school assemblies. But my main interest is this: what (good) use of technology is shown in this programme?
ICT teacher Nigel Willetts discusses ICT qualifications and their associated syllabuses. This is a longer-than-usual article, but it's a great rant read. Enjoy!
I apologise in advance. What follows is a rant! Terry was forewarned! However, the purpose of such a rant is to instigate a debate with regard to what we, as ICT teachers/specialists are expected to deliver and examine our pupils on in our schools. The focus is firmly on the GCSE/AS and A2 ICT curriculum. I am not even sure if I have any tangible answers myself, but, in my experience of educationalists, we all love a good rant/debate, don’t we?
Yesterday I submitted my response to the English Government’s consultation on the issue of whether the ICT Programme of Study should be disapplied from September 2012. The consultation period ends today. I think responding is a very important thing to do, for reasons I’ll go into in a moment, but first, an explanation to readers not living in England, or a reminder to those who are.
In a nutshell, and somewhat paraphrasing, Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education in England, said:
Back in 2010, Maddison Holt, a student in Australia, gave her view of ICT in ICT: A Whole New World. Eighteen months later, what does she think now?
If you tried emailing me earlier and received a bounced email message for your trouble, it’s all OK now. Here’s what happened…
One of the things I like about the ICT in Education site (he says modestly) is that you can listen to the articles as well as read them. It means that the articles are accessible to sight-impaired people. But when I upload presentations, that is no longer true. At least, not until now.
If I were running an educational technology/ICT course now, I’d make taking and sharing at least one photo a week a requirement for remaining on the course. If booting someone off the course was not an option, I’d tie in a significant proportion of the marks to those activities. All this is impractical, of course. Even if I were allowed to get away with such draconian actions, I wouldn’t want to penalise a brilliant student for not taking a few snaps now and again. But think of the benefits to everyone if digital photography were a key component of a course – any course.
In the changing room where I go swimming, there’s a machine that does everything. It measures your height, weight, Body Mass Index (BMI), and about half a dozen other things. I’m surprised it doesn’t measure my waist and shoe size as well. Yet, after using it twice, I have given up on it.
I had forgotten just how unforgiving pure BASIC was on the old BBC computer. Make a mistake, and you had to delete all of the characters until you arrived at the offending one. I had the opportunity to reacquaint myself with such pleasures at the Learning Without Frontiers conference.
I had the pleasure of meeting up with Shelly Terrell and Clive Elsmore (Clivesir on Twitter) recently in Oxford. But look at the text messages we exchanged in order to finalise the arrangements….
I attended a Westminster Legal Forum event about libel reform today, and someone asked whether bloggers were “real” journalists (or something like that). That sort of question implies that bloggers are somehow inferior to genuine journalists. I have to say, however, that when it comes to reporting on education policy, “proper” journalists do not always acquit themselves well in terms of accurate reporting. This was especially true in January 2012 in response to Michael Gove’s speech at BETT.
If ever there was an idea whose time has come, it is surely Bring Your Own Device or, to be less restrictive, Bring Your Own Technology. There are at least two comp0elling reasons for this.
Today I have been working on the new issue of Computers in Classrooms, the free e-newsletter for those with a professional interest in educational ICT. Here’s a summary of what it contains. It will be published later today.
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