The Digital Education newsletter, by Terry
A couple of years ago someone said to me that they like my newsletter, Digital Education, although it looks a bit old-fashioned. I thought about that, and whether I wanted to update the look of it, but decided not to, for two main reasons.
Read MoreA book that offers a glimpse into the way traditional crafts were practised before the Industrial Revolution.
Read MoreA couple of generations before the first internet cafés were opened, someone attempted pretty much the same thing by opening a ‘radio café’.
Read MoreThere's a really interesting section in this book about how ceramic storage of data and information is probably the most likely medium to stand the test of time.
Read More
Yes, I know that this has nothing (ostensibly at least) to do with ICT or Computing, but I thought it might be an interesting book in general, and for history teachers in particular.
Read More
In my recent blogging course, I abandoned my carefully-prepared lesson, or part pf it, threw caution to the winds, and suggested to the class that we experiment with using AI for writing blog posts. Here’s a partial blog post it came up with, which you will agree is utter rubbish…
Read MoreHere at Freedman Towers I have been trawling through the archives, hoping to salvage something of my legacy to donate to the nation, or indeed the world. Anyways, all joking aside, I came upon this email I wrote…
Read MoreIn 1994 I set out with my wife to discover the best place to buy a computer system -- and discovered a lot of sexism along the way.
Read MoreThis issue of my Computers in Classrooms newsletter, dates from 2001. I am reproducing these newsletters partly in order to make sure that some of the history of using education technology is preserved, and partly because some of it is still relevant. That applies especially to the Tips section.
Read MoreThis newsletter, from 2001, demonstrates four main things….
Read MoreThere seems to be no end of attempts to improve education by people who have either never worked in it, or not understood what they were looking at.
Read MoreHere is a very strange paradox. On the one hand, everyone agrees that a key ingredient for success in life is having great teachers. On the other, there’s a relentless narrative that education is somehow broken and that fixing it entails replacing teachers or transforming some or all of what they do.
Read MoreHaving to wait a week for computer results may have been fine at the time, because we knew no better. But who in their right mind would look back on all that as some kind of golden age?
Read More
Planning, by Terry Freedman
Here is the very first article of mine that was published in an education magazine. Not all of it is relevant today, but perhaps surprisingly much of it is.
Read MoreIf you look up broadband in schools, the story these days is that the provision is deemed “inadequate”. I think that’s a lot to do with how aspirations have risen over the past couple of decades, and is therefore a good thing.
Read More
Archives, by Terry Freedman
“There are people around now who are 17 years old. They started formal schooling when they were 5 years old -- in 1988. And some of them have come out of school not knowing one end of a computer from the other!” I hope this still isn’t the case today, but then I tend to be an optimist.
Read More
On this day, by Terry Freedman
It really is quite an eye-opener when you discover kids’ idea of tech history!
Read MoreI always find it mildly depressing when I click on a link in an old blog post and discover that it no longer “works”.
Read MoreHelp to bring education technology alive by introducing a letter from Ada Lovelace to Charles Babbage into your Computing or education technology classroom.
Read More
Photo by Jills, issued on a CC0 licence.
Has the Computing Programme of Study been an unequivocal success? In my article It Wasn’t Me Wot Done It, Sir! The Depressing State Of Computing As A Subject, I said that many students were voting against Computing qualifications with their feet, and also that girls were under-represented. Moreover, I stated that the situation was entirely predictable (many of us indeed had predicted it).
In this article I set out what I see as the key milestones in the journey to where we are now. I have included quotes from the sources, and also given the source in each case so that you can check out the sources yourself.
Read More(c) Terry Freedman All Rights Reserved