In September I moved to the beautiful island of St Helena in the South Atlantic. I recently started work on revamping the ICT curriculum, and am currently looking at a blank piece of paper surrounded by piles of reading material. What would you do?
Ever felt like teaching was an uphill struggle? So does everyone else, but impossible it's not - we just need to consider carefully our definitions of the word success. People who say it's impossible to be an extraordinary teacher are part of that uphill struggle, making goals seem more difficult to achieve, but it is possible.
In the 4th century BC the Ptolemies of Alexandria began throwing money at the arts. They did not make the same distinctions between fields of study as we do today, and housed scholars from all disciplines together in the "Muses' birdcage," blurring the lines between otherwise disparate disciplines. I think this should be the role of ICT in the modern curriculum.
Assessing Pupil Progress was introduced in 2010 to supplement the level descriptors for ICT, and I like it. I'd never, ever print out A3 copies of the assessment criteria and give them to the kids, but as a tool for planning out a curriculum, APP is great.
I was interviewed by a freelance journalist for a TES article recently, and was told that our LA ICT advisor was unhappy with the comment I gave on the Rose reforms. “Good ICT is very difficult to teach, and rarely gets beyond skills building, or ‘trivial pursuits’ in primary schools,” I said, annoying primary ICT coordinators everywhere with my sweeping generalisation. “Teaching students to...