On 06/05/14 09:46, Marghanita da Cruz wrote: > As usual, what I heard of this discussion, focussed on the device rather than > the human > capability of schools/teachers to support the stuff ...
I spent last Friday and Saturday at University of Canberra, with school teachers and university academics, working out to teach the new technology curriculum in Australian schools. The computer science academics had laptops, whereas the teachers had Apple iPads, except for one with a Google Chromebook. Apparently the netbooks acquired through the previous government scheme are now all but unusable. The teacher with the Chromebook was saying how much easier they were to support at school than Microsoft Windows or Apple iPads. They wanted to turn the old Netbooks into Chromebooks (which sounds a reasonable idea to me), but have yet to track down the code needed to unlock the BIOS to change the OS. More on the Australian School Technologies Curriculum: http://blog.highereducationwhisperer.com/search/label/Australian%20Curriculum%20Technologies What worried me more than support of hardware or software, was support of the teacher and teaching. As I understand it, a curriculum is produced nationally, but no teaching materials are provided for teaching it. Each state, and private system, decides how to implement the curriculum. In the ACT, each public school then decides what to do and each teacher then teaches the material, on their own, to their students. This does not seem to be an efficient or effective way to teach anything, but especially not for a technology curriculum. Why not have online teaching materials and specialist on-line educators, who assist teachers in the class-room? On team teaching: http://blog.highereducationwhisperer.com/2014/03/blended-multi-lingual-schools-for-all.html -- Tom Worthington FACS CP, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150 The Higher Education Whisperer http://blog.highereducationwhisperer.com/ PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia http://www.tomw.net.au Liability limited by a scheme approved under Professional Standards Legislation Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science, Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/ _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
