On Wed, Aug 01, 2012 at 09:17:09AM -0400, Bonnie MacKellar wrote: > My kids are in public school in an affluent district in Westchester County, > NY. There is plenty of money for video production labs, drama, and trips. The > schools are well equipped with computers. NY state has a "technology" > requirement. And yet, we have no computer science in our schools at all. We > have plenty of classes in Powerpoint, Word, and digital scrapbooking. The 6th > graders are required to take a course that teaches them those skills. But > there is no real computer science.
I think the term computational thinking is more useful than 'technology skills'. It describes better what we want to teach and what its purpose is. > > I volunteered to run a Scratch club afterschool at the elementary school > (parents are not allowed to run clubs in the middle school). It was vetoed by > the district IT director, who didn't want open source software on the > computers. If its not too much to recall, can you recall what the objections was to OSS? I mean, you can use a live CD/USB and not 'install it'. if that was an issue. > > There is no interest in adding courses on computing here because the parents > see it as "vocational". I suspect this attitude is common in affluent > districts everywhere. Those are usually the districts that drive innovations > - many of the schools in my area are adding Mandarin for example - so I > might suggest that reaching out to parents is a better way to bring computing > into the schools. well, learning to use 'word' is vocational, I'd say. Which is why 'computational thinking' is less likely to seem 'vocational' -- | .''`. == Debian GNU/Linux ==.| http://kevix.myopenid.com......| | : :' : The Universal OS....| mysite.verizon.net/kevin.mark/.| | `. `' http://www.debian.org/.| http://counter.li.org [#238656]| |___`-____Unless I ask to be CCd,.assume I am subscribed._________| take forceful action: Do something that should have been done a long time ago. _______________________________________________ tos mailing list [email protected] http://lists.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
