sccsux Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 I'm not one for posting positively about our governments over the years (all flavours) but I'll break the habit on this occasion because ... For once Michael Gove is spot on when he describes current ICT school studies as "harmful and dull" and the current curriculum is to change from September this year. Having heard the disparaging words used to describe the current curriculum by one of it's users, I can only see this as a good thing. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-16493929 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Anna B Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 Yep, I have to agree with you on this one. One of the problems is too few teachers are able to teach this subject adequately. This is probably because they do not have enough specialist knowledge, or time to learn it. It might be time to recruit a few experts from industry to teach it, but would they want to take the drop in salary, and could they handle the class sizes? My other concern is how quickly the industry moves. Wouldn't half the knowledge be obselete before the kids even left school? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alchresearch Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 About time. This is something we in the industry have been saying for years. Labour didn't want to know when some of us made our concerns known a few years ago. Thankfully the Tories have been listening to a number of issues. Now we just need to get teachers working to the same standards as colleges and universities and stop telling kids to get facts from Wikipedia and just copy and paste them into Publisher or Powerpoint. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Anna B Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 About time. This is something we in the industry have been saying for years. Labour didn't want to know when some of us made our concerns known a few years ago. Thankfully the Tories have been listening to a number of issues. Now we just need to get teachers working to the same standards as colleges and universities and stop telling kids to get facts from Wikipedia and just copy and paste them into Publisher or Powerpoint. I think part of the trouble is that your average teacher just doesn't have time to learn programing to an acceptable standard. They use computers as a tool to help them with their work of course, but very few have sufficient spare time to play on them, or practise anything else. Let's face it, a lot of computer experts are very single minded, (...er..nerdy..?) which your average teacher can't afford to be. In fact a lot of teachers, particularly older ones, or those that have been in the profession a long time are actually a bit crap on computers. And the teacher training courses they go on are worse than useless. It's not the sort of subject you can bluff your way through. To teach it well it needs people with computer science degrees who really know what they're talking about. However that has to be combined with an ability to teach and inspire young people. Quite a combination. Then of course they will probably be tied to a totally unsuitable IT curriculum put together by a load of numpties who insist they know best. How will they deal with that? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mecky Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 Don't know anything at all about ICT classes so I'll reserve judgement, but it does pay to keep people thick and hold them back doesn't it? I mean, what they don't know won't hurt them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
matsalleh Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 Don't know anything at all about ICT classes so I'll reserve judgement, but it does pay to keep people thick and hold them back doesn't it? I mean, what they don't know won't hurt them. I guess you mean teachers ? As one actually said the kids know more about it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davyboy Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 Not everyone will find programming interesting or be able to do it. I did Fortran (is it still used?) 40 years ago at college. It was the most boring subject you could think of. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Muldoon Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 1 print "Teacher is a retard" 2 goto 1 Heh! :hihi: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L00b Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 It is a laudable initiative, but I'd expect sizeable problems with "mass tuition" of programming (rather than usage of Office-type packages), due to the (expectedly) disparate level of maths knowledge and ability across kids in any given classroom. In an ideal world, both subjects should be coordinated/go hand in hand. Still, a laudable initiative. I wonder if the (only recently mass-publicised) Raspberry initiative was a primer, or related at all, to this? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alchresearch Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 I think part of the trouble is that your average teacher just doesn't have time to learn programing to an acceptable standard. That's a very good point. Back in the early 80s my teachers were really techie nerdy types who could program in Basic and 6502 assembly. And I bet teacher paperwork was a tenth of what it is now, with less emphasis on standards and inspections and constant evaluation and the like. At a school I used to work at only me and my assistant were any good at coding. We set up after school IT clubs to teach CSS, a bit of simple VB, even some retro BBC Basic programming with BEEBEM and it was a complete sell-out. We ended up running three clubs towards the end. It is a laudable initiative, but I'd expect sizeable problems with "mass tuition" of programming (rather than usage of Office-type packages), due to the (expectedly) disparate level of maths knowledge and ability across kids in any given classroom. In an ideal world, both subjects should be coordinated/go hand in hand. Another good point. We taught Moviemaker and a program called Scratch and the different levels of ability was astounding - some kids were going beyond the lesson plan and writing complex programs, others had problems with the basic concept. Saying that, I still can't get my head around the Flash workspace. I think schools need to group children by ability, not by the year they were born. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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