With that in mind, have you ever researched your own area
John Donne wrote that no man is an island; he might have said the same thing about schools. Many schools have a mindset perhaps best described as “splendid isolation” – except that there is nothing splendid about it. In fact, in many cases it is just plain daft. Here are my reasons for saying so.
This article considers the need for computing and ICT to be taught by experts in those subjects. Anything less simply will not do.
Preparing for the new curriculum doesn’t have to be as difficult as it might look. Here’s a suggestion that you may like to consider, although it won’t be appropriate if you teach very young children.
I am a member of Computing At School, and every day someone uploads a new scheme of work for the new programme of study. IT’s fantastic to have so much good stuff to choose from. It’s also a bit overwhelming if you’re not sure where to start in the first place.I believe a lot of people are worried by the forthcoming Computing Programme of Study, judging by the number of people I’ve spoken to who say they have not yet begun to think about it. And that is quite understandable. Although looked at from one point of view it is more of a change in emphasis from the old one, there is also a lot more required in terms of computer programming and related matters. Schemes of work will need to be modified – I don’t think they should need to be completely rewritten if you have been teaching to the old ICT programme of study properly. This is the first in a series of posts that aim to encourage you to think about the new programme of study, perhaps in a new way. It is based around a keynote talk I gave a short while ago.
What does it mean to be a maverick? To me, it means not going along with the general consensus about something, just because it’s a consensus. There is always a natural tendency to think “all those people can’t be wrong”, or “there’s no smoke without fire”, but in fact all those people could be wrong and there could be smoke without fire. (Think, for a moment, of all the vilified minority groups throughout history and throughout the world about whom all sorts of ridiculous and terribel things were believed by the majority.)
It’s that time of year again. No, I don’t mean the Christmas lights and shopping, but starting to think about BETT in January. If you’re serious about educational technology you really must try to get there, even if you can only manage a day: you’re bound to see something that you find interesting and useful.
Who’s afraid of life without Levels? Quite a few people if the number of schemes of work and assessment grids being developed that incorporate levels are anything to go by. Working without levels is clearly very hard: it is almost impossible to think, much less talk, about pupils’ progress without mentioning levels at some stage.
Yet this is precisely what the government expects.
My beloved netbook is in a sorry state. It has been languishing for quite a while, becoming more and more depressed as it realised it could not compete with my iPad in terms of cool-ness. In the end, it was too lethargic to fire up at all, and attempts to run it direct from the mains were met with a cold snub.
Well, I bought it a new battery, and a new mains charger. I thought it would be pleased, and to an extent, it was. It actually works now, which is a novelty. However, depression or resentment runs deep, and it refuses to work for any longer than two hours on a full charge, instead of its original seven or eight.
What to do?
I suffer from an unfortunate form of doublethink. In my personal life, I tend not to be an early early adopter. That’s because I rarely have an urgent need for whatever it is the new technology has to offer. However, when I was head of department in a school, and then when I ran a team of advisors and technical support staff in a local authority, I was very keen to spend money on brand new stuff.
Why?
I thought you might be interested in two new sets of video resources which are, and are becoming, available. The big problem with video in general, in my opinion, is that it’s hard to find the time to sit down and watch something for any length of time because you can’t do much else while you’re doing so. And by “any length of time” I mean anything over about 5 minutes.
So it’s good that there are some 3 minute videos now and some micro-videos coming on stream.
(c) Terry Freedman All Rights Reserved