Kay Sawbridge, Faculty Leader of Computing and ICT in a secondary school, has been very active in campaigning against the Government's decision to scrap ICT qualifications. It's a bad decision that could leave thousands of students "disenfranchised" in terms of what they choose to study, and will almost certainly adversely affect a disproportionate number of girls.
In this article, taken from the next issue of the Digital Education newsletter, I interview Kay.
Read MoreI've updated my "About" page. I'd love to know what you think.
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I was going to ask "What do African school children -- you know, the ones who walk for miles and miles to get to school -- know that Sugata Mitra doesn't?
Read MoreA new report from Pew Internet.
Read MoreThe sign-up buttons for the Digital Education newsletter have been in place for ages. So why was there a sudden drop in subscriptions?
Read MoreDiscussion lists, blog posts, teachers' guides and competitions are all featured in today's article.
Read MorePeople really do judge by appearances. (If you don’t believe me, try turning up to your next job interview wearing wellingtons and a pair of shorts.)
Read More"As soon as I found out about how to write code, I was hooked. I realised that this was what I should have been doing all along." Anna Shipman, who works for the Government Digital Service, talks about her love of coding.
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I’m in the process of changing this website to a mobile-friendly version. With any luck, this website won’t disappear in the meantime. If you do happen to get one of those horrible “Page not found” messages, please keep trying. Apparently it can take up to 72 hours for it all to come to life again.
Greetings! I hope you have had a nice summer break. I’ve taken some time off, in the sense of not trying to update this website as frequently as I usually do. But I was doing some reading and writing, so I thought you may find these links interesting as you start a new school year.
Believe it or not, I started this post a week ago. It’s not that I’m a slow writer (I’m not), but I kept thinking “Ooh, that would be interesting to include” and “Ooh, that looks good too”. well, after a lot of “ooh-ing” I thought “Ooh, I’d better stop and hit the Publish button”. Just as well, because one of the conferences I mention is tomorrow – eeek! Anyway, now even this intro has started to take on a life of its own, so I’m going to stop right now. There. See? It’s just a question of self-discipline.
Imagine a train timetable catalogue created along the same lines as Wikipedia. This is how it might work.
Does education technology improve learning? The intuitive answer to those of us involved in education technology is “of course it does”. However, the evidence from research is not conclusive. I think the reason is that it’s actually very difficult to carry out robust research in this area. As the impact of education technology has often been a topic for discussion in the Naace and Mirandanet mailing lists, I thought it might be useful to try and clarify the issues as I see them.
It seems to be depressingly more and more likely to find that a blog article which looks promising is peppered with swear words – or one particular swear word that is repeated ad nauseum. I think that writers of such blog posts are making a grave error. Here are my reasons.
ITTE held its annual conference recently, and I bought a ticket and went along. As far as the ITTE conference is concerned, I was a newbie, and so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I do recall dragging my carcass to the local station in sweltering heat, mumbling to myself something along the lines of “Please let the trains be cancelled; I’d rather be in the garden.” Well, that proved too much for Transport for London to arrange, and so I made it to the conference.
I don’t know what the opposite of “bumper” is (as in “stupendous, 200 page bumper edition”), but the latest issue of Digital Education is small – but perfectly formed. Here’s what it contains:
It is fashionable these days to avoid the ‘F’ word – by which, of course, I mean “Fail”. This is not confined to the area of teaching Computing, but enough people in this field have written about it to nudge me into writing my thoughts on the matter. So, the FAIL acronym, in case you haven’t come across it, is First Attempt In Learning. The idea of it is that instead of telling kids that they have failed at something, you tell that they have not failed. They may have not succeeded, but that is fine, because it was a First Attempt In Learning. Well, I have always been a believer in telling it how it is, and so for me the FAIL acronym does not benefit kids at all. Quite the opposite in fact. Here are my objections:
I attended the Apps for Good Awards last night. Very inspiring it was too. As always, the young people were very impressive. Whatever question I threw at them, they were able to answer it. But for now at least, I just wanted to repeat something that the co-CEO of Apps for Good, Debbie Forster, said at the end of the evening.
Technology and Learning over in the USA has published a list of its choice of the top ten people in education. The list makes for interesting reading.(c) Terry Freedman All Rights Reserved