Last weekend I watched an excellent clip of Sir Ken Robinson at TED, explaining how he thought that schools kill creativity.
I have been two weeks back into teaching now, and one course that is new to me is PC Passport. My initial impression of PC Passport is not a positive one. Pupils are encouraged to wade through a series of apparently never ending tasks at their own pace in order to ensure that they are able to complete a range of (very) basic core ICT skills. Opportunities for engagement and creativity are pretty much non-existent here I’m afraid.
One particularly unimpressive section of the support materials (as published by the SQA) reads something along the lines of the following:
1. Go to the Start menu, choose Accessories and Notepad
2. Type the text below into Notepad (pupils then see a screenshot of Notepad with several paragraphs of meaningless text, which they are expected to copy)
4. Close Notepad by clicking the close button in the upper right hand corner of the window
5. When prompted to save changes, say no.
“What was the point in that?” questioned my pupils as they reached the end of the task. I’m afraid I had no answer for them, but I was starting to get Sir Ken’s point loud and clear.
November 22, 2009 at 3:07 pm |
The ONLY good thing about PC Passport that I can think of is that it drove Julie and I to such despair that we’re now developing the NPAs in Computer Games Development
November 28, 2009 at 11:28 pm |
This is one of the curses of IT skills courses. Knowing what the features are called and how to use them in a fixed example but not necessarily knowing how to use the imaginatively or in an aesthetic manner. The example I give my students teachers is the wall mounted pupil work I see in ICT labs where a graphic image (a face picture) has been resized and is now twice as wide as it is high! The pupil has demonstrated the ability to resize a graphic but it looks rubbish; there’s no aesthetic judgement, no creativity.
I’ll stop my rant now!
As Katie indicates one option is to create your own course and have it verified by the SQA.
An alternative might be the BCS Digital Cre8or qualification – http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=nav.8945 I’m not overly convinced after speaking to the man on the stand at SLF09 but it might be worth a look.
December 4, 2009 at 6:33 pm |
I’m actually planning to offer Digital Media Computing next year at Int 1 and Int 2 instead. There are some potentially engaging units in there.
December 8, 2009 at 4:48 pm |
I’m running DMC this year instead of Standard Grade Computing. Have a look at my blog for more info. We’ll be doing a National Progress Award or two over S3-4 then finishing off the National Certificate in S5
I’d point you to the blogs the pupils were using to gather their evidence and show off their work but the council blocked Blogger