Getting ready for a new year
Well, everyone’s on holiday now (except for the technicians in ICT who are setting up for the new year).
So … what to do while on holiday? There’s a new ICT room being set up for Applied Art in room 41, new computers in food Tech and in textiles and the science labs will have some more laptops (new ones this time :)). But … how does this help? New computers are fine but do they make the school a better place to learn in? I think so but it does depend on what we do with them, if all they are used for is producing fancy front covers for projects then paper and a pack of pens would be just as good!!!
This has led me to think about the kind of things we teach in the ICT department and how it can be made more interesting. We’ve got to teach some basic skills, wordprocessing, spreadsheets, slide shows etc. but over the last few years we’ve tried to add a few extras such as blogging, podcasting, video editting and the like. We’ve also got to keep an eye on exam results for those higher up the school so that they get the GCSEs and A levels they need for later. Ideally though this should leave us some time to teach other things that are important, useful and interesting like internet safety, wikis, social networking and we will be trying to build these into our courses over the next year or so.
I’ve also been looking at the possibilities for using games in lessons and 2 pupils have set up a club to design and build computer games with a purpose using a program called Missionmaker. Finally, there is an interesting site on the net called secondlife and this allows people to interact using 3d avatars and to build and design their own spaces. A search on ‘education uk’ will find their island in the secondlife world and a space to build parts of courses. Could this be a way of making ICT course more exciting?
(Now you know how ICT teachers spend the summer ;> )
Enjoy the sunshine when it happens and see you in September.
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