A lot of interest today in announcements over the border on ICT teaching in the classroom. Back in September, I announced the setting up of a task and finish group on digital classroom teaching, chaired by Janet Hayward, Headteacher of Cadoxton Primary, whose previous school, Barry Island, won the Becta award for top ICT school in the UK. I met Janet before Christmas and the work she and her colleagues are doing is very encouraging. I hope to get their report before the end of March. I will post links later to the Written Statement I made on this on 22nd September, but it can be found on the Welsh Government website.
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Wednesday, 11 January 2012
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I think the point Leighton is that we want to remove ICT from schools, so we don't want to reform it. Remember thought that ICT is different to computer science.
In schools and at GCSE ICT involves using word, power point and excel. 15yrs ago this was useful. However now, kids must use this for other subjects (pie charts for maths, essays in English). Which in my view why ICT is useless.
On the other hand, we need computer science. It is a genuine science (coding etc). Its something that can get boys exited as you can use it straight away e.g go home and make an app for an iphone. Unlike ICT, it is really useful as companies like Google are crying out for people who can code. People think they only want to stay in Ireland because of low corporation tax. But if that was the case, they would not continue to maintain their development of software over there. So why do they stay? as computer science is a genuine subject in Ireland.
So to close Minister. I do not want to see a reform of ICT. I want it scrapped. ICT such as word/power point are already taught as part of the curriculum "sgiliau craidd" along with "rhifedd" which wasn't the case 15-20yrs ago. We need computer science, teach kids how to create circuit boards, software, code and so forth.
A neat idea you could do is allow schools to have money to have a club at dinner time to teach kids how to code. And maybe Wales could have success stories like this amazing one from Ireland: http://www.rte.ie/news/2012/0105/pizza.html
I look forward to hear what you say on Computer Science (NOT, ICT),
Pob lwc hefo cario ymlaen a dysgur Cymraeg - ma'ch llafar chi yn wych!
Posted by: Jake | Wednesday, 11 January 2012 at 04:03 PM