Pete Astbury

We have taken the decision at my school to start teaching computer science in discrete lessons from next year instead of ICT, with digital literacy being taught cross-curricular from September.  My first task in reorganising our curriculum has been to decide what should be taught to who, when and by whom.

I have combined the current ICT programme of study with the functional skills for ICT specification and with the curriculum proposed by the Computing At Schools Group and then split this into the three headings used by the Royal Society: Computer Science, Information Technology and digital literacy.  Lastly I have broken this down by key stage according to what I think it is reasonable for pupils to be know and be able to do by the end of each stage.

Now begins the mammoth task of writing and resourcing schemes of work to cover this content and to look at opportunities across the whole school curriculum where the digital literacy parts might fit nicely.  However before I went any further I thought I’d share what I have so far in case anybody else finds it useful.

Bear in mind I wrote this with my own school in mind, but as it is based from the same documents I imagine everybody else is using it may be of use to others.  I expect that the IT and Computer Science bits will get bundled together in discrete lessons with just the digital literacy parts taught cross-curricular.

I have done this for key stages one to three.  Key stage four and post sixteen work will most likely be dictated by exam syllabus in most schools.

I am sharing it under Creative Commons so feel free to tear it apart and use it how you will. Feedback and suggestions for amendments are very welcome.

Computing Education by Key Stage

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computer science, curriculum, digital literacy, planning

The BBC Micro introduced a whole generation to Computer Science

As I imagine most people reading this know, Michael Gove announced in his speech at this year’s BETT show that there are big changes in store for ICT from September.  This was followed a week later by a report from the Royal Society about the state of computing education in schools.

The essential findings of this report were that, while there are many examples of good practice in ICT, there are still many examples of schools where ICT is taught as little more than a course in how to use MS Office and search the Internet.  The report says that this is harming Britain’s position as a driving force in the world of Computer Science and that drastic action is needed to improve the status of the subject and to increase the academic rigour of computing education in schools.  They argue that a complete rethink on the way that computing education is taught in schools is needed; that it is in fact three separate subjects rather than one and that the term ‘ICT’ should be removed from school timetables to try and remove the reputation it has with many pupils for being “boring”.

Agreement in Principle

In principle I have to say that I agree wholeheartedly with the main findings of this report and that the changes they recommend are long overdue.  I would however say that those of us who have (and continue to) push the boundaries with ICT education, to inspire students and to make ICT so much more than a course in using MS Office are more prevalent than is implied by the report.  Certainly my experiences in working with the #ictcurric group and many fine colleagues in the schools I have worked in bear this out.  But I’m prepared to accept that I may simply have been privileged to have worked with some of the best ICT teachers and to have avoided meeting many of the ones who lack either the ability or the inclination to teach the subject to its full potential.  Perhaps I and the people I have met are in the minority.

With that said, I do still think that a far greater focus on computer science rather than digital literacy is needed in the curriculum.  There is too much emphasis in the statutory program of study on what is rather superficial use of IT.  It is woefully inadequate preparation for anybody who wishes to pursue studies in computing at university or as a career and while the opportunities to teach computer science are there in areas like control, modelling and data handling, there isn’t enough emphasis placed on these areas for them to be covered in any great depth.

I can completely understand the view that many of the digital literacy skills taught in the ICT curriculum would be more meaningful for students if taught cross-curricular with some other subject providing a context for those skills to be used in.  I have in the past leapt on opportunities to teach ICT together with other subjects.  Last year I collaborated with the English teacher at my school to do a topic on e-books where year 8 students wrote short stories which they then published on the Kindle.

But are we ready?

Let’s skate over the fact that there aren’t enough computing specialists in teaching for a moment as that has been discussed ad infinitum by others.

Michael Gove said that these changes would be introduced from September.  However despite that there is currently no programme of study for computing and no indication of when one may be published.  Although I teach at a private school outside of the UK and am not legally bound to follow the UK national curriculum; we have decided at my school that we will be teaching computer science in key stages two and three from September.  A move which I pushed for and completely agree is the right way forward.  However it now falls to me to plan this new curriculum and I don’t want to leave it until the last minute given that I’m planning for years 3 up to 13.  Although perfectly capable of planning my own computing curriculum, what I don’t want to do is do so only to then need to radically change it when the government finally publish their own.  If this is going to be statutory from September, then they really need to get their skates on with publishing a program of study.

I have been working from the CAS group’s proposed curriculum, which they have submitted to the government’s curriculum review and which is endorsed by some pretty weighty names including the BCS, Google and Microsoft.  It’s pretty comprehensive and I think it’s a fairly safe bet that the curriculum the government publishes will look at least fairly similar to this.

On the whole I’m finding it to be a challenging and interesting curriculum which I think I can do a lot with.  I do have a problem however with the level descriptors they have published in that they only seem to focus on the programming aspect of the curriculum and completely ignore the other elements they described.

Curriculum Content

The CAS curriculum, unsurprisingly for any computing curriculum, has a large amount of programming.  This is very probably going to be the easiest part to make engaging and with so many child-friendly programming environments around (Scratch, Robomind, Alice, Game Maker to name a few) I’m confident that my students will be both challenged and engaged by it.

There is also, quite rightly, a lot of quite heavy theory; bits and bytes, binary representations, packet-switching, the client-server model and so on.  The parts which, I feel, aren’t really assessed by the level descriptors published by CAS.  I’m sure that the very many inspiring teachers I’ve had the privilege to work with will also be able to teach this content in an inspiring way.  Of course there’s also the potential for some of this theory work to end up being at least as “boring” as the lessons it is supposed to be replacing.  I’ll be very interested over the next year to look at some of the ways this area of the curriculum, above any other, is being taught and I’m looking forward to seeing and sharing examples of good practise with others.

Digital Literacy

The Royal Society consigns a large part of what is currently taught in ICT to the heading of ‘digital literacy’, which it encourages to be taught in a cross-curricular way rather than in discrete lessons.  While delighted that this gives me the chance to focus on computer science in discrete lessons what I do not want to happen is for these digital literacy skills to not get taught very well at all.  I agree that in an ideal world digital literacy would be most effectively taught within a context provided by other subjects.  However this entails it being taught by non-specialist teachers.  The majority of whom are vastly less literate with these technologies than the students are.  Many of the non-specialist teachers I know, all very talented and inspiring teachers, will themselves admit that the way they use ICT with the students is very superficial.  Essentially it often boils down to ‘typing up’ work done in other lessons, ‘making posters/leaflets/etc’ or ‘researching stuff on the net’.

For digital literacy to be effectively taught to the same level it was taught (or was supposed to be taught) as ICT then all teachers need a lot more support in teaching it.  The majority of current teachers did not grow up with ICT as embedded into their daily lives as it is now for students; as it was for me.  I have no doubt that as this shifts and as the iPod generation not only enter teaching but become the majority then this problem will fade into obscurity.  However in the short to medium term a lot of support and training is needed for the non-specialist teachers who will be teaching digital literacy skills.

At my own school our plan is for discrete lessons to be used to teach computer science.  Specialist computing teaching staff will, in addition to teaching CS, go into other lessons and work with their colleagues to team-teach digital literacy and to support them in embedding effective use of ICT into their lessons.  However this has an implication on teaching time.  At a small school like mine, this is easier to manage as there are fewer staff and few lessons to coordinate.  At a much larger school I imagine this would be a mammoth task with a massive impact on teaching time.  When the country is already very short on computer science teachers I don’t see this becoming common practise.

A Step Forward

Despite the disparaging things said about ICT in Mr. Gove’s speech and in the Royal Society report, a subject which I’ve spent 6 years teaching, I feel that on balance this is a very positive change for computing education.  For those teachers who have always taught ICT well I think that the new curriculum will help them make the curriculum more meaningful, challenging and engaging for their students.  This is of course a good thing.  I’m not convinced however that ICT will be taught any better in the schools which are criticised by the report for teaching ICT badly in the first place.  In fact my worry is that it will have the opposite effect and that discrete ICT will simply be dropped in favour of teaching ‘digital literacy’ cross curricular by non-specialist teachers who themselves may well be less digitally literate that the pupils they are supposed to be teaching.

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change, computing, curriculum

When I started this blog I promised myself I wouldn’t be one of those bloggers who opens blog posts with “sorry it’s been so long since I last posted”.  As a strong believer in the phrase “If you have nothing important to say then just say nothing”, I felt it is much better just to post as often as you think of something worth posting about and not worry if it’s a while between posts. However, when I made that promise I didn’t think it would be nearly a year between my posts. So here we go: sorry it’s been so long since I last posted.

When I moved out to Egypt I knew the first year would be tough. After all there has been a certain amount of disruption to the continuity of ICT teaching at the school I’ve moved to and a lot of work needed to be done. I didn’t however bank on having revolutions, earthquakes, stabbings and last minute escapes from the country to contend with as well. So here I am, less than a couple of months until the end of the academic year with my first blog post.

I have a few blog posts in draft format which I’ve been trying to post for a while now, but what with everything I just haven’t had the time to finish them.  However, I will get back to them very soon.  Promise.  In the meantime, because a bunch of people have been asking and even though it’s not really related too much to education or teaching which is what this blog was supposed to be about, here’s a quick summary of what happened back in January…

Thursday, 20th January 2011

A perfectly ordinary day at school.  Living in a Muslim country our weekend is Friday and Saturday so Thursday was our last day before the weekend.  So we’d finished work and went to a friend’s house to help celebrate her birthday.  A disappointing turn-out after a whole load of people phone to say they can’t get through because there are some sort of protests going on on their route in.  We have a great night anyway, head home and go to bed thinking no more of it.

Friday, 21st January 2011

I wake up surprisingly early for a weekend and after my usual morning routine go to check my e-mail.  Now we’ve been having problems with our Internet connection, which I thought were sorted now.  So when I discover that the Internet is down again I’m a little annoyed and go to ring our ISP yet again to see what the problem is this time.  This is when I start to realize something is not as it should be because although I have full signal on my phone I find that it doesn’t work.  I cannot call anybody.  I send a couple of text messages and get error messages.  So I assume that the phone network is down, after all these things happen.  It’ll be back soon enough right?

A couple of hours later Lu wakes up and I let her know we have no net or phones and we get on with our day.  I don’t remember now which of us it was, but one of us looks out the window at some point and realizes that there’s a group of Egyptian men on the street outside holding a mixture of metal bars, broom handles, kitchen knives and other weapons of convenience.  Not an average day it seems.  Getting a little more concerned now we decide it might not be a terrible idea to double lock the front door, just in case.

As our land line phone has never worked we can’t try that.  Our mobile phones don’t work and we have no Internet.  We don’t have any way of contacting anybody else so we basically bunker down and decide to wait out whatever it is that’s going on.  Surely it won’t go on for long?  We’d heard about large protests the night before and figure that worst-case scenario there’s more protests going on and they’ve got out of control.  But  life will probably get back to normal in an hour or two.

Saturday, 22nd January 2011

A new day and still no Internet, still no phones and still armed men on the street outside.  We start getting a bit worried until we see that our boab (doorman) is one of the Egyptian men on the street outside.  So, we reason, at least the armed men outside are protecting the building.  At least we aren’t here on our own if things go bad.  It was worrying however that whatever was going on was worrying the locals enough for them to need to be there defending the street at all.

Later in the day we get a call on my mobile from the deputy head at school.  Looks like the phones were back on.  This is the first time we realise the extent of what has been happening throughout Egypt.  The mobile phone network had been taken down by the security forces to try and stop the protesters being able to coordinate with each other.  The land line network was uneffected and our deputy head and head teacher had been trying to get through to us since the day before but, of course, our land line doesn’t work.  We’re told that school is closed for at least tomorrow and probably Monday and we should just stay inside, keep our heads down and wait it out.

Now, we have no Internet.  Our flat didn’t come with a TV and we haven’t bothered getting one because we can get stuff to watch on the Internet anyway.  We had intermittent access to telephones and we couldn’t go out anywhere.  Boredom ensued.  With nothing really to do and stuck in the flat it was a long day.

As it turned out – the night was longer.

We head to bed early out of sheer boredom and just as we’re settling down to sleep we start to hear a lot of commotion coming from a couple of streets away.  Mostly shouting and general sounds of a large crowd of people.  The shouting sounds quite angry, but its hard to tell.  Looking out of the window we try to see if we can see anything.  All we can really see is people on balconies of apartments at the end of the street looking out in the direction of the shouting and people occasionally running past the end of our street.  After a little while of lying awake in bed listening to this we start to hear gunfire.  Then more gunfire.  Looking out of the window we see more people running around but still can’t get any idea of what’s actually happening.

It was around now that we decided that a double locked door might not be good enough if worst comes to the worst and after hearing what we’d been hearing its safe to say we were imagining the worst.  So we went to rearrange the furniture in the living room to barricade the door.  Satisfied that only the most determined group of looters would be able to get in we went back to bed.

Sunday, 23rd January 2011

Now that we have phones again, for the most part, we managed to find out that the police had all gone and the noise we heard last night was the police station being broken into and the weapons stolen.  There were absolutely no police anywhere.  The policeman normally outside school (next door to us) was gone.  The police stationed outside the British Consulate (just behind our apartment) were gone and there were rumours of looters roaming around, which is why there were men on the street protecting the neighbourhood, taking it in six hour shifts.  There were, we heard, even local civilians taking it upon themselves to take over directing traffic and keep traffic moving since there we no traffic police to do it.

Some people from the school had gone for a walk around the area we all live in and found that there were manned barricades stopping anybody they didn’t know and stopping all vehciles to find out what they were doing.  We heard that the army had tanks at checkpoints to each entrance into the area.  That at least made us feel a bit safer with the situation and as we were getting low on supplies I went to the local supermarket to stock up.  When I got there it seemed like a lot of other people had had the same idea and there wasn’t an awful lot in the shops any more to stock up with.  But I bought what I could and came home again to re-barricade the door.

Things started to get a bit less scary from this point as we knew more about what was happening and felt as secure as we could be where we were.  Of course the worry was always there that although we were okay at the moment what would happen if things got worse?

Monday 24th – Monday 31st January 2011

Things carried much as they were for a week.  We heard snippets of information from outside but with still no Internet news was slow and came in chunks.  We knew about what was happening in Cairo.  We knew that Mubarek was clinging on to power.  We heard rumours, some of which I still don’t know whether there is any truth in them or not.  Rumours about train tracks being pulled up so there were no trains to Cairo running.  Rumours about mass breakouts from the country’s prisons since the police disappeared.  Rumours about car-jackings on the desert road between Cairo and Alexandria.  The word from the FCO in London was that British Expats living in Egypt should seek to leave the country through commercial means if it is safe to do so.  However with no way of getting to Cairo and with the security of the route even as far as Alexandria’s two airports very unclear we felt increasingly trapped.

News circulated that it might be possible for the British Consulate to arrange safe-passage as far as the airport for any British citizens wanting to leave the country but of course that wouldn’t help unless we could get tickets on a plane.  We didn’t want to risk going to the airport and then getting stranded there with no way to get safely back to the apartment again if we couldn’t get a flight out.  We decided we wouldn’t go to the airport unless we knew we had seats on a flight out.

As we had no Internet and since all the local travel agents were now shut for the foreseeable future this presented a problem.  We rang home to see if friends and family in the UK could arrange flights for us, but UK travel agents were telling people that there were no flights leaving Alexandria.  The FCO did not have any plans to charter a flight for British citizens and the feeling was that such a flight was very unlikely.  However other governments were chartering flights out and there was some hope that there may be spare seats either on a flight arranged by the Turkish government or on a flight organised by the German government.

After being assured that safe passage back home again was guaranteed if we didn’t get a flight we decided to take the secure transport to the airport and try to get on either the German or Turkish flights.

Tuesday, 1st  - Sunday 6th February 2011

To cut a long story short, after a shorter wait than we expected, we managed to get a flight to Germany.  From there, after successfully dodging the media who were apparently waiting to greet those fleeing Egypt, we got a connecting flight to Leeds and home.  We were only in the UK for a few days watching the news and attending a rally in London outside the Egyptian embassy to show our support for our friends in Egypt.  We watched what became known as the Battle of the Camel on the news.  We watched Mubarek clinging on to power.  Things seemed to be in a stalemate, but the violence was lessening and things seemed to be calming down a bit.

We learned that the school was going to reopen on the 6th and flights were running again back to Egypt so we booked flights to get us back to Alexandria.  The day we flew home we landed to the surprising news that Mubarek had resigned and handed power to the army.  The protests continued and are still continuing periodically.  There is still some unrest but things are mostly peaceful now.  A referendum on a new constitution passed peacefully and the country’s first free and fair elections are expected for September.

It’s been a difficult term to say the least, but we’re looking forward to a well deserved Easter break and what I’m sure will be a much better summer term.  My hope now is that the Egyptian people get the government that they want and deserve and that they can enjoy the freedoms that in the UK we all take for granted.  I’m only sorry that people had to die before it happened.

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egypt, revolution

Is a paperless classroom possible?  This is the question I want to try to answer over the coming academic year.  Actually what I’m more interested in is – why bother with a paperless classroom?

There are obviously environmental benefits, but how about educational ones?  We’re getting to the point now where technology, web technology in particular, is becoming a little more intelligent in the way it works.  I’m hoping that by forcing students not to use paper and keep everything electronic it will make them use these technologies more intelligently.

I have been moving towards being paperless for a while, I didn’t even use one of the Teacher’s Planners provided by my school last year, I exclusively used Outlook instead.  This was not for any educational reasons, just because I’m sick of living in a mountain of paper.  I can never find anything, it’s not as easy to share stuff or to collaborate on work and, frankly, filing has never been one of my great passions in life.  It is the benefits of sharing and collaborating with work that I hope to see emerge as this experiment goes on.

The only rule for my use of paper this year is that I won’t use paper for anything that it is possible to do electrically.  Unfortunately I can’t make exam boards, colleagues or outside agencies join in with my paperless experiment so in dealing with others I accept that there will be times that the use of paper will be unavoidable.  However for my own purposes and within my lessons ‘paper’ is strictly a taboo subject for the next twelve months.

I plan to write a series of blog posts over the year to document my efforts on this, so watch this space!

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collaboration, paperless, technology

HTC Mogul Smartphone

With the increasing array of tools that available on the latest smart phones is there an argument now for encouraging their use by students rather than prohibiting it?

As with most things there are two sides to this argument.  The reasons why mobiles are prohibited in schools are compelling.  The danger of theft and damage, the pressure it places on students who can’t afford the latest phone and of  course the risk of cyber-bullying.  Imagine for a moment if these were not issues.  What are the benefits?

Much of the technology which has been available in classrooms but under utilized because of its price tag would become much more accessible.  Handheld electronic voting systems are a perfect example.  They are expensive for what they are, useful perhaps as an occasional starter or plenary but not something you would use every lesson and so not really worth the price tag.  Now, if every child had a Bluetooth enabled smart phone, it would be considerably cheaper to get an app to do the same job as an electronic voting system.

Augmented Reality App

Perhaps more exciting are the possibilities offered by augmented reality.  I have just purchased my first smart phone and was blown away by a free app called Layar.  By using your phone’s camera, coupled with the GPS receiver and access to the net this powerful app can transform the world around you.  I look at the world through layer and I see extra data superimposed over everything I see.  Much like the Heads Up Displays used in modern aircraft.  This data can be anything.  I can overlay directions to nearby restaurants along with a copy of their menu and recent reviews.  I can overlay info from Wikipedia.  Many people are using this technology to create games.  Sonic the Hedgehog style races around Hyde Park  collecting coins and so on.  While all fun and useful if on holiday, the uses this could be put to in the classroom are staggering.  Imagine a history lesson where the classroom is transformed into a virtual battlefield or a biology lesson where students can look at and walk around a heart without needing an actual heart in the room.

Ever wanted to get students to visit a website but the URL was insanely long? How about just providing the link as a QR code that their mobile can scan and then take them straight to it. 

These are just three examples of the opportunities for making  lessons easier logistically and for making lessons more fun, interesting and memorable.  What then are the barriers to actually harnessing this in lessons?

Cyber-bullying

Bullying is not a new thing.  It exists in every school.  The use of new technology to take bullying into the digital realm is something which has received a fair amount of media exposure.  From so called “happy slapping” attacks to unkind comments on social networking sites, it is far from uncommon.  A reason often given for students not being allowed phones is that it could result in increased cyber-bullying. However unlike other forms of bullying it much easier to track and trace cases of cyber-bullying because of the electronic trail of evidence left behind.  As long as lessons on bullying in schools also discuss these issues and as long as teachers and school leaders are able to understand and can use the technology then it should be a much easier problem to deal with than other forms of bullying.

Theft & Damage

Another argument for disallowing phones in schools is the possibility of them being stolen or damaged.  However, this could just as easily happen outside school.  People don’t get mobile phones to leave them at home out of fear of them getting damaged.  Perhaps instead of preventing students from carrying phones we should instead be encouraging them to insure them properly.

Inequality

The problem of mobile phones becoming status items is not a new one.  If phones were allowed in schools wouldn’t this place unnecessary pressure on students and their patents to get the latest phone when they can’t afford it?  Of course this will be more of an issue in some schools than in others.  However students do still see each other away from school.  Preventing them having phones at school doesn’t stop this problem for occurring.  In  fact in may make it easier to spot and deal with when it does.

Given the many ways that the technology embedded within mobile phones could be used within phones I suspect it may not be too long before many schools start to weigh up the pros and cons of banning them and to ask whether such bans really are in the best interests of students.

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augmented reality, mobile, phone, rules, technology

I used Google Docs with a class for the first time yesterday and after Trick11 tweeted “Any1 use google apps 4 education? Would appreciate your thoughts.” I thought I’d share how it went.

The Lesson
Over the past couple of lessons with year 7 I have been looking at online collaboration using wikis.  We’ve used, albeit briefly, some etherpads for collaboration and now I wanted to introduce them to Google docs.  I started off with this excellent Google Docs in Plain English video off YouTube.

With the scene set I talked my students through what I wanted them to do and summarised this with a Google Docs Presentation.  I put them in to groups of 3 or 4 and gave them a list of some different collaborative tools.  I asked them, in their groups, to choose one of the given tools to create a single document between them which they could share with other year 7s.  The document should explain which tool they chose to use and what they thought about it.  They were told that they were only allowed to talk to each other for the first 5 minutes, after that they had to be completely silent and only communicate electronically.  I summarised what I wanted them to do with a single slide of a Google Presentation, which I shared with them.

The Response
I should probably stress that this is the first time I’ve done group work in this way and wasn’t really sure what response I would get as my students aren’t used to working like this.  So far I’ve tried this with three classes with a mixed response.  At least one group from each class did choose to use Google Docs.  As a plenary I asked them how they found using these tools and what problems they had.

A quick summary of the feedback they gave me:

• Our logins to the school’s Google apps site didn’t all work.
• Google apps was better than etherpad because it was harder to accidentally delete each other’s work.
• Google apps was better than using a wiki because we could all edit the page at once and weren’t locked out because someone else was editing.
• The word processor wasn’t as good as MS Word because there are less features and it was harder to get started (logging in, sharing, etc).

The logins issue was a problem at the school’s end as we hadn’t setup all the logins properly.  I wasn’t involved with this, but I suspect that when the csv file was uploaded to Google Apps to create the accounts they didn’t all import properly.  Not really a drawback of Google Apps itself, but perhaps a sign that their account creation/management systems aren’t very easy to use and administer?

Most groups using etherpad had very little to share by the end of the lesson.  Although not done intentionally they found that they were deleting each other’s work and they found it difficult to work simultaneously without problems.

We’d been using a wiki on the school’s Moodle in class for the last couple of weeks and this only allows one person to edit a page at once, something most students picked up on and didn’t really like, which seemed to put off a lot of students from using a wiki for this task – most used either etherpad or Google docs.

Google Apps seems to still be an evolving product.  For what it is I must admit to quite liking it.  However it doesn’t have all the same functionality as other word processing packages and was a little buggy when I used it to create the Google presentation.  For instance it seemed to crash Internet Explorer occasionally when I tried dragging objects around, it’s possible that this was an issue with the network at school as it’s been known to behave strangely with some other web 2.0 apps I’ve tried.  A quick look at the OCR Nationals spec compared to the features list of Google Apps quickly shows that it wouldn’t be suitable for use for this.  Mail-merge for example doesn’t feature at all as yet.

Once the technical issues with the accounts were sorted out I found that it worked quite well and would probably work more seemlessly once students were used to working like this. As a tool for collaboration and group working it has its benefits.  With Google’s infrastucture and servers running it it doesn’t fall down so quickly when you get a full class all trying to use it at once where many other services become laggy and buggy quite fast with many concurrent users.  Using Google Docs would remove problems with students taking work home and forgetting to bring it back in, or having different software at home.  Another huge advantage to the way Google Apps works is that it autosaves every few minutes meaning that if it does crash, or if things go wrong students don’t lose as much work, something which happens quite frequently with Word, regardless of how many times I tell them to save often.

Overall my impression was positive, but I think it still has a way to go before it can completely replace an installed office package.  Has anybody else used Google Apps in lessons?  If so, how well have you found it works?

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collaboration, etherpad, Google docs, group work, ICT, KS3, web 2.0, wiki

The recently published coalition agreement has outlined the new government’s plans for education.  One of the promises made is “We will create more flexibility in the exams systems so that state schools can offer qualifications like the IGCSE.”

As I will be teaching the IGCSE ICT course in September when I take up the subject leader position at an international school in Egypt I thought I’d share my thoughts about this course here so that others can consider it too ahead of the promised changes to the exams system.

The new KS3 curriculum allows teachers a great deal of flexibility in what is taught with much more focus on new technologies with opportunities to teach the kind of ICT that kids are used to – online communication and collaboration through social networking, wikis and other web 2.0 technology.  Sadly KS4 courses have lagged behind and really good ICT qualifications have been difficult to come by with many of them boiling down to what Donna Hay describes as “teaching students which buttons to press in various Microsoft Office Applications”.  As I sit down to read the syllabus (conveniently embedded below for anybody who is interested) I am, rather optimistically perhaps, hoping that this may be different.

Course Content
At first glance the list of section names isn’t overly inspiring.  There’s a full three sections devoted to the different bits that make up a computer system.  A section on networking, a database section and a product life-cycle section.  What caught my eye the most however was sections 6 and  7:

1. Types and components of computer systems
2. Input and output devices
3. Storage devices and media
4. Computer Networks
5. Data types
6. The effects of using ICT
7. The ways in which ICT is used
8. Systems analysis and design

A lot of what I saw in sections 6 and 7 was not a surprise and wasn’t very ground-breaking.  It does however include some very interesting content too.  To highlight a few of these:

• describe the use of internet developments such as Web 2.0, blogs, wikis, digital media uploading websites, and new types of social networking websites.

• communication applications (such as the internet, email, fax, electronic conferencing, mobile telephones, and internet telephony services)

• interaction communications applications (such as blogs, wikis and social networking websites).

• control applications (such as turtle graphics, control of lights, buzzers and motors…)

Syllabus

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ICT, IGCSE, KS4

I must admit that despite dismissing Twitter for a long time as “just a passing fad”, and figuring that as I was already on Facebook there wasn’t much point using Twitter as well, I have been surprised at just how quickly Twitter has grabbed me and sucked me in.  I signed up to Twitter less than a month ago and I have been increasingly impressed with it ever since.  However it wasn’t until the other day when I read a paper on how web 2.0 is changing educational technology that I really started to notice just how radically it is starting to enhance my teaching and professional development in a way that Facebook never has.

Until I joined Twitter my experiences of social networking were exactly that social.  I’ve been on Facebook for quite a while now and that has been entirely social; used for keeping in touch with family, old friends and so on.  The short time I’ve been on Twitter has, almost exclusively, been what Steve Hargadon, author of the above paper, describes as educational networking.

It’s important to acknowledge up front that, while the phrase “social networking” has a history that predates the Internet, for most people the term retains a specific connotation of a certain kind of website - MySpace, Facebook, and the like. Social networking sites have worried many educators (and parents) because they often bring with them outcomes that are not positive: narcissism, gossip, wasted time, “friending,” hurt feelings, ruined reputations, and sometimes unsavory, even dangerous, activities…. It may come as a surprise, that there is actually nothing inherently negative about the technology that’s the basis for social networking. Social networking sites, at their core, are just aggregations of a set of Web 2.0 building blocks - forums, directories, “friending,” chat, etc. Just as you can build either a casino or a school with basic construction materials, the materials are not the issue…. There’s no reason why the same building blocks that built those social networking “casinos” can’t be used to create schools, libraries, meeting halls, teachers’ lounges - which is exactly what we’re starting to see happening today. It’s even arguable that these building blocks are more effective as educational tools than as social ones. Therefore, to help alleviate any confusion or negative preconception…. I’ll use the term “educational networking” instead of social networking when I’m specifically calling out the educational value and use of Web 2.0 technology.

Steve Hargadon

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cpd, social networking, twitter, web 2.0

A few years ago I discovered a colour blending website which I started using within an Applied A Level unit on website design.  I built it into my scheme of work and linked it in to our Moodle.  Then a year after I started using it it disappeared inexplicably. Not a problem, I just found another one.  It has since returned and I’m using it again.  More recently the social networking website Ning announced that it was discontinuing it’s free service.  Currently at my school we run two Ning sites one for keystage three and one for keystage four.  Fortunately in this case Ning have given plenty of notice about the upcoming changes and have provided a backup service where they will take a copy of all your content for you so that you can move it elsewhere if you don’t want to start paying for your Ning and it’s all fine.  Both of these cases however have made me start thinking about how reliant we may be becoming on web 2.0 apps on other people’s servers over which we have no control and more particularly about the data we keep on them.

I feel that these cases highlight two issues which we should all consider when using web based applications in our lessons.  Firstly, what impact would it have if that app became temporarily or permanently unavailable?  Is there a readily available alternative?  How easy would it be to switch at short notice?  Secondly, what procedures are in place for backing up any content we store on these sites?  Every school I’ve worked at has procedures for backing up data stored on school servers but has anybody considered backing up data stored on the net?

A, purely hypothetical, student is using the sound editor application on Aviary to do say, Unit 22 of OCR Nationals, and has all their work saved there. What would happen if Aviary suddenly disappeared without warning? The unfortunate student would likely have to redo the work using some other application from scratch, unless of course they had the foresight to keep a local backup of their work.

When students are using web-based applications like Google Docs and Aviary do they backup their work locally or do they just save it within the app?  Knowing how difficult it can be to get students to backup their work at all I think I already know the answer to that question.

As a teacher I will be continuing to look for new technologies on the web and elsewhere and impressing on my students the problems I’ve outlined here with using web-based applications and hope that they do keep offline backups of their work as well as saving it online.  I certainly won’t stop using web 2.0 applications.

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reliability, security, web 2.0