This article is not about education technology or related matters as such; it's more about my experience of attitudes to paying for work. It's worth reading, I think, if any of the following applies to you:
"... when we look at education technology, we find that almost nothing has changed at all."
Whether you are moving to a new school, or staying where you are, it’s good to stand back and try to gauge what the school’s education technology is like. Why you would want to do that if taking up a new post is obvious: you want to see how the land lies so that you can start to identify any improvements that could be made.
When it comes to judging students’ work in Computing and related subjects, there are five things that are crucial to take into account.
Since Michael Gove, England’s then Education Secretary, announced that Levels were not fit for purpose – the purpose being to assess and describe students’ proficiency in National Curriculum subjects – there has been a proliferation of attempts to assess Computing without using Levels. Many of these have taken the approach, quite naturally, of devising a progression grid of some sort. All the ones I’ve seen break the grid down into the Computing Programme of Study’s component parts
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:
If your students use iPads in lessons, what apps could you use in order to help them learn programming? In this article, Adam Foster, aka @iPadTeachers, describes his top 5 apps and how he selected them.
So, you'll be starting teaching soon, whether on teaching practice or in your first job. What should you try to find out in advance, as far as the education technology is concerned? Here is a general, though by no means definitive, list.
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:
Since the Government in England announced that Levels aren't fit for purpose, and so shouldn't be used, lots of people have come forward with their own ideas. With the old system of Levels, the description of each Level was given. You didn't have to think about what Level to give a student who could do certain things: all you had to do was look at the Level descriptors, find the one that was the best fit, and that was it: job done.
In this occasional series, I am outlining the sort of technology I’ve been obliged to use at various stages of my life. On the whole, I think things are much easier now than they have been at any time in the past, especially for teachers. When I did my first degree, for instance, photocopiers produced poor quality copies, very slowly, and at an exorbitant cost. (I wrote about this in the article My grim and distant techie past: the uni years, part 1.) These days, you can buy a multifunction printer for less than £30 (under $50), and have a photocopier, in effect, right there on your desk at home, producing copies for a few pennies each.
In his newsletter OLDaily, Stephen Downes has drawn attention to a blog post by Paul Bradshaw, entitled “The Great British Bake Off copyright grab: We can use your #ExtraSlice Twitter images but not give you credit”.
SMART Amp is an application designed to facilitate collaboration across a range of devices. Ellie Gregson, a Year 10 student, discusses what was good, and what was not so good, about its introduction into her lessons.(c) Terry Freedman All Rights Reserved