Doing Something Useful

[suityou01]

Think PI.

[bobspud]

You are barking up the wrong tree with this one Dominic if you are expecting IT people to become teachers.
Teachers need to communicate with children not behave like them

If we can handle wayward bobs, project managers and Agents we should be able to talk to kids.

Init!

[doodab]

IT education is desperately short of people who understand IT, less than 1/4 of IT teachers have any formal education in the subject and they keep changing the curriculum.

So is IT

25% with formal education in the subject is probably a better ratio than you'll find in the IT industry, unless you count people who have been on training course jollies, and especially amongst management. Even among working developers, most of them get upset if you suggest you might expect them to know how to traverse a tree, as I found out recently, so expecting them to teach programming is going to be a big ask.

I do think there is room for a sort of "how computers fit into the modern business world" course, but perhaps that belongs in the realm of business studies.

[EternalOptimist]

I reckon 25% of IT teachers have 100% more formal training than do I, but I have 100% more experience than 100% of IT teachers.

[TheFaQQer]

Part of the problem is trying to work out what you can teach in schools - it's all very well for Michael Gove to say that teachers don't teach programming, but where do you start? The days of just switching a BBC B on and being able to write BASIC from the start are a long way off - you need to know what language to teach, and then make sure you have the right skills there to teach it. Just having something which says "Hello, world" in Java isn't very interesting either.

I agree with Dominic on a number of things, though - I'm a parent governor at my children's primary school, and I'm also on the ICT committee at school as well. The two IT teachers have no experience of IT - the technician said at one stage "we need to get a new server", so they were about to buy one. No-one could explain to me what the server actually did - they have a separate backup device, they have a separate box which does the website, they don't know what the server does but they know they "need" one.

The school knows that they have a decent resource nearby that they can call on, and a number of teachers ask me about different IT things - some I would say that I know next to nothing about, but I know that even the limited tiny bit that I know is more than they do. Schools are encouraged to try to get governors who want to get involved and can provide skills that the teaching staff lack, but that's a lot easier said than done.

[eek]

I can't fix the supply of decent IT teachers, we can support the ones we have to make them more productive, I'm working with someone at the Open University who will supply cut price degree level materials for IT teachers. That's not an ideal fix, but it will make things better, so we're not all that far away from the sort of "perfect is the enemy of good enough" that we do in the real world.

Although there are some small businesses doing IT for schools, a more common setup is for the local council to appoint an outsourcer who does tulip like lock the system so that they can charge £800 to install Python. That's a real example BTW.

Only £800? wait until you pay for them to unlock it and you discover they don't have the password any longer.

Oh and there are a lot of things you can do without even visiting a school. Anyone willing to help write a cloud version of SIMs would be gratefully received 25,000 schools would be happy using something not crapita and from the stone age and probably £4k a year better off.

[TheFaQQer]

they keep changing the curriculum.

Worse than that, they keep saying that they will be changing the curriculum, and then don't give any details until the last possible moment.

Gove announced some time ago that there would be a new IT curriculum, but the DfE haven't actually got as far as writing and publishing it. So schools know that they need to change, they know that they will have to teach different things, and they know they are doing it wrong - and yet no-one can tell them what they will need to teach.

[OwlHoot]

I'm proposing to start a not-for-profit "agency" that will match IT pros up with schools and suspect that resting contractors might be a very useful part of this. ...

I'd consider it, but only if we're allowed to birch any kids that step out of line.

[bobspud]

I can't fix the supply of decent IT teachers, we can support the ones we have to make them more productive, I'm working with someone at the Open University who will supply cut price degree level materials for IT teachers. That's not an ideal fix, but it will make things better, so we're not all that far away from the sort of "perfect is the enemy of good enough" that we do in the real world.

Although there are some small businesses doing IT for schools, a more common setup is for the local council to appoint an outsourcer who does tulip like lock the system so that they can charge £800 to install Python. That's a real example BTW.

I agree but its only once you have been near government procurement and found that you need to commit in excess of 20k to bid for most work by the time you have done the pre-qualification and won a bid. Suddenly see why doing stupid stuff like installing software gets that expensive...

For the record I'd be interested.

[Peoplesoft bloke]

Hacking the future: Clare Sutcliffe at TEDxBrighton - YouTube