I’ve just published a couple of documents in the Digital Education Supplement. This is a collection of free resources for subscribers to my newsletter, Digital Education, which is also free. Sign up here if you like:

Here are details about the documents:

Practical ICT Special Edition

This special edition was published in 2007, and deals with an Ofsted report into the state of Information and Communications Technology in schools at the time. That may sound irrrelevant, but I’ve republished it for the following reasons:

Many of the findings are still relevant today.
I thought you might find it interesting.
Official reports have a habit of disappearing; I think it’s important to maintain some form of institutional memory, not just in people’s heads.

Microsoft Office for Teachers - Using MS Office to tackle educational technology problems

One of the reasons that the ICT (information and Communications Technology) was discarded and replaced by Computing in 2014 is that many people thought (a) no programming was included in the ICT Programme of Study and (b) all that was going on in ICT lessons was Microsoft Office.

Microsoft Office for Teachers - Using MS Office to tackle educational technology problems indicates that these assumptions were mistaken. For a start, there certainly was programming included in the Programme of Study, although at one point it was called ‘Sequencing’ — perhaps that confused some people. Secondly, at least some of us were using the tools at hand — which included Microsoft Office, to show pupils how to solve problems and create games through programming — specifically Visual Basic and Visual Basic for Applications.

This document was written and published by ACITT, the Association for secondary teachers of ICT, back in 1995! It was accompanied by a diskette, which so far in my sorting of the Freedman archives remains elusive.

Nevertheless, this is still a useful document because it shows what you can (still) do in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access with a bit of imagination. Also, some of the code given may still work, but even if it doesn’t you will be able to see the logic behind it.

Is The computing Curriculum Too Masculine? Revisited 16 years later!

One of the apparently insoluble problems of the age is how do you encourage more girls to take up Computing? I think a lot can be done, and have done so myself, but I wonder how far a lot of the effort fails to get to the heart of the issue, which could be the curriculum itself, the way it is taught, or a combination of the two?