Learning to Dance

The term coined some years ago for the child of our time is “digital native”, indeed there are some of us who could hold that tag from their childhood, but the term is now ubiquitous with any child enjoying a UK education. Teaching children to use computers is about as necessary as teaching them to walk, it is something that just seems to happen. The difference with the student of the day is that, to continue the metaphor, the expectation is that you can dance, and I know, from my ballroom dancing experience, that this is something that does need to be taught.

There are the street dancers, self-taught, unorthodox but quite often very talented. There are pupils that create their own websites, tinker with a server in their bedroom, understand TCP-IP and IPSEC more easily than most adults, some love animation or photo editing but quite often there are holes in their digital vocabulary.

However, most pupils fall into the category of Friday night disco where being able to customise your Facebook page or send an email to more than ‘ten friends’ (and save a failing Nigerian business) is the pinnacle of achievement.

Our digital native still needs to learn, not to cope with ICT, which was the requirement 10 years ago, maybe less than that, but to let ICT empower their learning and open up worlds previous undiscovered; to bring information to their fingertips never before accessible and to handle it correctly. In ICT we now teach Theory of Knowledge as part of a topic on the internet. It is understanding and application that is still the goal of learning and just because the digital world has opened vast oceans of data, information and misinformation, doesn’t make this any less so.

When my teacher presented me with a book I was fairly certain that what it contained was useful to me. When we ask children to “do research” there is either a lack of confidence in them that they can produce anything of value or an over confidence that everything they produce is of value. They need to have the skills to discern and judge and to seek after understanding in same way that we had to when we read from our textbooks.

We can do this is in several ways:

• Leading pupils to information that we trust, by providing a list of recognised websites we can help to find information and not have to make judgements about its authenticity.
• Setting pupils questions and then requiring them to provide and evaluate answers from more than one source. This make them consider the value of the information they find and also use different approaches to finding information.
• Setting questions that require pupils to show understanding rather than the ability to recite information. Targeted questions are less susceptible to “cut and paste” answers. “Write two sentences about the habitat of Cheetahs” rather than “find out about cheetahs”.
• Get pupils to be creative. Tasks that require a creative response become subjective and less dependent on the objective nature of the information found on the internet. “Write a poem about a story in the news this week”, “Describe what it would feel like to live somewhere which had been flooded”
• Ask pupils to find out about a particular topic, but then get them to write down what they have found out in the classroom. In a similar way to the way controlled assessments will work. Pupils have to prepare the topic, with the use of ICT or books(!!) and then show their knowledge and understanding in what they write in class.

Future of ICT Qualifications

There has been recent comment on the HMC ICT discussion group about the future of discrete ICT lessons. The conclusion to which is that Heads of ICT are of the opinion that ICT cannot be left to be taught successfully as an adjunct to other subjects and does require contact time with ICT specialists.
However, I’ve been following this thread with interest because I am beginning to doubt the necessity of an ICT skills qualification, which when offered in early Year 8 actually has very little relevancy in the work place 10 years later at the age of 22 when looking for employment. The reality is that employers will sit you in front of a computer with an ICT assessment tool on it and ask you to do a test there and then. If we just think back 10 years would the office skills taught then be valid now. It may be different for us as we use these skills all the time but can a qualification gained in spreadsheets, then not used for 10 years be of any value to an employer?
Surely the ICT we teach has got to be ICT that is relevant to what pupils need to do now: how to conduct effective web research, how to present an essay, how to prepare a science report, how to graph field results, how to stay safe on the internet, how to best use social networking sites, how to program simple games, create flash animation, image manipulation. Supporting learning rather than preparing for employment. I’m sure we can all think of things that pupils should be learning in ICT that don’t require adherence to a syllabus which includes running queries in Access.
The AQA course we now offer in the Sixth Form has dispensed with testing ICT skills and focuses on design and development issues, ICT in society and so forth. Is it time for a move in this direction with our lower years too?

One size fits all??

A number of things have been going round my head recently. Mainly the fact that one size doesn't fit all. This is principly in relation to the dreaded VLE that everyone must have in education. From my experience it has become a bit of a buzz word, an expectation that most teachers only pay lip service to. Indeed most heads probably don't know what it is either, but their education authority says it's what they need, the government says it's what they need. But is it delivering... really?

Does this sound familiar? Keen teacher discovers Moodle and sets it up for their class. They become the expert and it works for them, the pupils get excited by it and another couple of 'keen' teachers take it on. Then comes the problem, the other pupils have heard about this and it's new and exciting and they want the other classes to get involved. Problem now is that other classes' teacher isn't one of the 'keen' ones. In fact they find difficulty with email and electronic registration which they 'had' to do. So pushing anything more will always cause problems.

Finding a solution that people want to buy into is not about telling them that this will make things easier but about showing something that when I see it think that will make my life easier. When I developed a reporting database for a previous school it was successful because it made life easier, it wasn't even obligatory for staff to use; but it worked and even staff a year from retirement for whom learning something new was completely unnecessarily wanted to use it.

The point I'm trying to make is that the solution has to be plainly obvious that it will make things easier/better/more efficient and then it will be adopted. In fact the bottom will demand it of the top. What's the solution? Some thing flexible, something adaptable, soemthing that can be tailored to ones needs rather than having to bend ones needs to suit the technology.

My view: I think Sharepoint can do this. Principly because it is not a VLE but an architecture and platform on to which we can define our own way of doing things.