Edith's View

As the euphoria around the Rose Review, with its 52 mentions of ICT,continues to gather pace, it seems like a good time to post this video from TeachmeetNEL. Here Edith, a year nine pupil from Essex, gives us here view on ICT education. It is worth watching this and reading Miller's posts on ICT and Esafety, over on Terry Freedman's blog.



Edith calls for more ICT across the curriculum, and is quite down on try hard teachers and Micorosoft Office. I agreed with many of Edith's points and I share her frustration at a limited curriculum, one that does not always take account for what children can do and how even a lesson involving the ICT suite can be dull. I am saddened that all her lessons involving Accees and Excel seemed to be repetitive and dull. Clearly there are many teenagers and Key Stage 2 children around like Edith, who are very able and who are under estimated in ICT. So our response to this should not be to throw out the 'cool applications like Microsoft Office', they are powerful tools which allow us to manipulate, sort and interrogate data, and while we learn to use these we gain skills in problem solving, programming and logic. There isn't a mashup or google app that replicates these just yet, they do take effort to master. They do need to be presented meaningfully and the activities need to be move beyond simple party cost calculators, but I realise I am speaking from a primary perspective here and I know little about Secondary ICT.

I have also embedded another, more established thinker in this post, Marc Prensky clarifies his views on the whole digital native/immigrant thing in his interview at a conference in Cardiff. I find the definition that he presents here slightly more palatable than the simple polarisation that is peddled by many speakers, who present it like its an original concept. However his assertion that teachers should not use whiteboards, the children should is frankly ill-thought out.