It is taking me ages to edit this bumper double edition, but I think it will be worth the wait! It should be out soon – possibly even later today. Here’s just some of what it contains:
With a new Computing curriculum that focuses on students learning to code and writing simple programs it’s important for school ICT and Computing heads, teachers or those responsible for ICT/Computing to make sure their school network is secure and able to handle the new requirements without compromising the rest of the system.
Here are a few considerations to help with that and make sure your data is safe and the students can enjoy exploring new learning securely.
I’ve been working on a long-ish article about big data for my newsletter, Digital Education. To give you a hint of some of my misgivings, here is a diagram I prepared to illustrate some of my points.
Derek Wemoth, the Director of CORE Education in New Zealand, tells us what's going on in his part of the world.
As the school year has not long started in the Northern Hemisphere, we’re looking ahead to the final term here in New Zealand, with summer on the horizon, along with exams and the usual end of year events.
To borrow from Mark Twain, reports of the death of the interactive whiteboard have been exaggerated. Despite often being used ineffectively or even badly, it still has much to offer.
I’ve written a brief guide to making the most of your interactive whiteboard which I’ve called, logically enough, Making the most of your interactive whiteboard. Originally, this was in response to a request I received while teaching on a teacher-training course recently.
"... when we look at education technology, we find that almost nothing has changed at all."
Many teachers have been utterly dismayed by the seemingly impossible demands of the new Programmes of Study for Computing. How can we all suddenly develop a wide range of new skills in Computing? Can our pupils, aged from only 5 years, really understand, write, and debug computer programmes? It seems an impossible task. But help is at hand…. And from a teacher of English, with no Computing training! (Though with some experience in using ICT.)
Lawrence Williams explains.
Did you know that today is International Ada Lovelace Day? Information about this, online poetry, journalism and novel writing, may be found in our latest newsletter. It’s a relatively short “interim” edition, but it’s still packed with lots of wholesome goodness!
Here’s the full list of contents:
There are literally millions of free media resources for use in education. Theo Kuechel introduces some of them, with suggestions on how they might be used not only within the Computing curriculum but also more generally.
I was delighted to read, via an email from Terry, (our editor), that UNESCO has announced a World Day for Audiovisual Heritage to be held on the 27th of October this year. This timely initiative seeks to draw attention to the urgent need to preserve the worlds audiovisual heritage of film, television and sound recordings. Why this so important is graphically illustrated
Some news from Terry Feedman...
The October 2014 edition of Digital Education, the free ezine for those with a professional interest in educational ICT and Computing, was published a few days ago.
There are articles on research, a couple of cynical articles (Ambrose Bierce said that a cynic is someone who sees things as they are, and not as they ought to be!), and much more, covering digital literacy, computing, assessment and management stuff. Here’s the full list:
Kathryn Day describes how she and her colleagues have approached the teaching of the Computing Programme of Study in Suffolk, England.
We’re in the first couple of weeks of the new school year here in England, and the first edition of Digital Education, our free newsletter, is now available! Pardon the exclamation mark, but the fact that it has now been published is a minor miracle. Right at the very last minute, I tried to delete a letter, and Microsoft Word went insane. It reform mated the whole document into just three pages, and hid most of it. I managed to retrieve it though — by selecting it all and then copying and pasting it into a new document. So, given that I almost threw the newsletter, my computer and the cat out of the window in frustration, I think an exclamation mark is more than justified!
Now that we’ve have had a week or so to get settled in to the new school year, I thought a short edition of the Digital Education newsletter would not come amiss. That will be published tomorrow, and here’s what it will contain:
This application is designed to teach Computing at Key Stages 1 and 2 (a more sophisticated version for older pupils is being worked on).
What struck me immediately on using it is the amount of guidance available, both in verbal form and videos. There is quite a large range of modules to choose from, including “Starter” ones which take you through the basics and, where appropriate, recapitulate what has already been learnt.
Code Academy is an online tutorial-based website for teaching yourself how to code. You can select which programming language you wish to learn, from the following list
As usual, I gave this application a workout without seeking help from a manual or anything like that – which is just as well because there does not seem to be a comprehensive manual.
There are three applications in one: JIT5, LOGO and Visual. This is quite useful because if you are familiar with LOGO but not JavaScript, you can start pupils coding in an environment that is familiar to you. Also, if you teach very young children, JIT5 is highly visual and colourful.
An advantage of J2Code as a whole over 2Code is that it covers the age range from Key Stage 1 (5-6 year olds) to Key Stage 3 (13-14 year olds).
John Partridge, Assistant Head for eLearning, explains how Computing is taught through a project-based learning approach at his school.
I remember clearly looking at the first draft of the new curriculum and just being totally shocked by the degree of change. It had been clearly signalled that the new draft would be a step-change, but I didn’t appreciate the shift which was about to take place. Almost nothing remained from the previous programme, save a few references to digital resources and, in a later draft, safe use of technology. So it was clear that some serious work was going to be needed to make sure our school adapted.
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