[Yr7-10it] RE: Year 7-10 IT structures

[Alida Bonotto]

You raise a very valid point and it's a dilemma I have come across, but 
have yet to resolve. A couple of years ago I had a Year 7 Somali girl 
who knew very little English and was easily distracted in class. I 
taught her to work with backgrounds and images in Powerpoint and to my 
delight and surprise this girl showed an amazing flair for design, and 
she became totally engrossed in her PP work. Technically she "failed" 
the modified course that I gave to my junior ESL students in IT, but I 
gave her a glowing report. I learned that my modified course needs to be 
more flexible and accommodating. I like the idea of assessing a student  
according to a his/her specific circumstances (cultural and personal) 
and bugger VELS and the progression points if they disadvantage the student.

Paul Chandler wrote:
>  Roland wrote:
>  
> I have some Sudanese lads who are struggling with renaming files yet 
> can happily play computer games and chat online. Is it appropriate to 
> measuring their learning from their understanding of a computer 
> desktop, a metaphor based upon the workings of a small business 
> office? The different ethnic groups at our school have vastly 
> different traditions and ideas of what it means to 'be working 
> together'. I am now not sure if the collaborative, learning model that 
> I carry about in my head is best and only way forward. 
>  
> I once read (in a scholarly text on metaphor in the English language) 
> of an ESL student who was wrestling with the phrase "the solution 
> of your problems".  Rather than interpreting 'solution' as akin to 
> 'output', this student had seen it in a chemical sense, and in his 
> mind was something like the "dancing mothballs" demo (if you're not 
> familiar with this, it's described here: 
> http://www.science-is.com/bubbleballet.htm) ... so every so often, in 
> his mind, a problem/mothball would float to the surface, and needed to 
> be tackled head-on ... but most of the time, life was lived keeping 
> them in motion ("solution") rather than obtaining "the answers".  This 
> strikes me as a rather interesting (but definately non-Western) way of 
> living life.  Cultural context is important.
>  
> I often find myself surprised that here is another group of students 
> who I need to explain what a filing cabinet and suspeded files are.  
> It's a while since someone asked me "what do we need to save our files 
> from?" (the boogie-man who lives around the corner?)    But it 
> certainly seems true that students (of any culture) barely have enough 
> knowledge of the workings of a business office in order to get the 
> most out of the standard computer metaphor, which is based on that.  
> So we should perhaps stand back and query "collaborative business 
> office" metaphor on which must of our work relates, and also wonder 
> exactly what sense of the computer, through the user interface, the 
> student is in fact constructing.
>
> I would like us to engage with what it really means to transform ICT 
> education, beyond rubbing the latest shiny new toy or unboxing the 
> latest bit of commercial software. I like asking the big questions in 
> my IT classrooms so here is one. What can we do to really help our 
> students make this world a better place for us all to live in?
>
> In the spirit of asking big questions, perhaps it is time to 
> explicitly make the computer, the user interface and the metaphors 
> which frame them the object of study.
>  
> Cheers,
>  
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