Just thought that I would mention that the discussions and ideas raised by the recent UK speech about computational thinking is getting good mention in not only the UK but also the Oz-teachers and eChalk lists.<div><br></div>
<div>Regards Roland<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On 13 January 2012 13:31, Paul Shirren <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:shirro@shirro.com">shirro@shirro.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div class="im">On 13/01/12 12:30 PM, Roland Gesthuizen wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
Tom, it is a teaching and learning device and the idea of where it can<br>
fit into a school curriculum probably has more in common with the<br>
Arduino device that is already popular in some schools.<br>
</blockquote>
<br></div>
Although the Rasberry Pi news was topical I posted it almost as an addendum to the speech by the UK Education Secretary. It felt like a piece clicking into a bigger puzzle. Perhaps it needs to be appreciated in terms of education aims and the movement from industry, academia and government which seems to be on to push curriculum change in the UK.<br>
<br>
I was a bit dismissive of this project early on since it is trivial to throw a virtual machine on a PC and run any environment you want and we have Arduino for the low level stuff. However you could view it and the speech below as almost a successor to the BBC Computer Literacy Project which had an impact as far away as Australia before the lost decades.<br>
<br>
This time around they really need to look at teacher education. The truth is anyone can pick up Word, Excel and PowerPoint in a few days so it is obvious that without providing teachers with specialist training computers in education are always going to tend towards the shallow end. See some of the links to K-6 ICT competencies thread to see what is going wrong.<br>
<br>
<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/jan/11/michael-gove-boring-it-lessons" target="_blank">http://www.guardian.co.uk/<u></u>politics/2012/jan/11/michael-<u></u>gove-boring-it-lessons</a><br>
<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/jan/11/digital-literacy-michael-gove-speech" target="_blank">http://www.guardian.co.uk/<u></u>education/2012/jan/11/digital-<u></u>literacy-michael-gove-speech</a><div class="HOEnZb">
<div class="h5"><br>
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Roland Gesthuizen - Learning Technologies Coordinator
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<p>B.App.Sci., M.Ed.(ICT), ACCE Professional Associate, Educator of the year 2010</p>
<p><i>"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has." --Margaret Mead</i></p></div><br><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br>--<br>
Roland Gesthuizen - eLearning Coordinator - Keysborough Secondary College<br><br>"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has." --Margaret Mead<br>
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