I teach a lot of different students this year - the entire year 9 cohort, most of the year 7s and 8s (spread over the year), and a few classes of year 10s. Seeing all of them regularly gives me a pretty good look at how they use technology (with the exception of mobile since, like many schools, students are prohibited from using their phones during the day), which makes for some interesting conversations. ...
I started writing the draft for this post back in December after attending a conference called Switching Tracks, which seemed to focus a lot on gamification and flipped learning approaches to education. As is usual at conferences these days part of the keynote introduction was what Twitter hashtag to use for the back channel conversation. I’m not sure what this sort of conversation is like at other events, since I mostly attend education-themed stuff, but it usually runs something like this: ...
“This thing all things devours: Birds, beasts, trees, flowers; Gnaws iron, bites steel; Grinds hard stones to meal; Slays king, ruins town, And beats high mountain down.” “The Hobbit”, J. R. R. Tolkien This is going to be one of the rare times I write about education, but also technology. As a teacher, it can be quite difficult to get out of the rut of doing the same old thing. Pressures from trying to cover everything in the curriculum, making lessons accessible to a variety of types of learners, looking for new ideas from behind a bunch of marking, the need to keep parity with other classes so that assessments are relatively manageable to organize and consistent; basically planning for new things can be a struggle. ...
I’ve been thinking a bit lately about the identity of Computing as a subject. This has been brought on by a few factors, some recent, like a professional development day held by the local vocational training provider (South West Institute of Technology) where a local business council member looked at results of a survey of small business and the skills that they were after from young people coming from education and training. Of course I mostly paid attention to the technology skills, which were the same old song we’ve heard since I started teaching a decade ago: the Office suite, and not much else. ...