Soldato
- Joined
- 28 Jul 2011
- Posts
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That takes the **** they never did this earlier. Edxcel and Powerpoint for 2 years was a complete waste of time
I.T. lessons in PowerPoint to be scrapped
- Thread starter NathanE
- Start date
As an ICT Teacher, I'm looking forward to the changes. In reality I think we'll see an ICT curriculum with a computer science slant. Regardless of how boring they are, some office applications are still useful.
"Of the 28,767 teachers who were awarded Qualified Teacher Status... in 2010, only three qualified in computing or computing science as their primary qualification (compared with 750 in ICT)."
That statistic looks misleading, I think it's talking about the teaching qualification and not the undergraduate qualifications that people might have. My PGCE is in ICT but my undergraduate degree is in Computing.
"Of the 28,767 teachers who were awarded Qualified Teacher Status... in 2010, only three qualified in computing or computing science as their primary qualification (compared with 750 in ICT)."
That statistic looks misleading, I think it's talking about the teaching qualification and not the undergraduate qualifications that people might have. My PGCE is in ICT but my undergraduate degree is in Computing.
Yes just not 40% of the curriculum
You can't just learn CompSci over night (or even over a summer break) and be qualified to teach it. So the majority of existing ICT teachers will have to be made redundant.
And new teachers recruited either straight out of uni. with a CompSci degree or from industry.
This is going to cause a rather huge skills shortage. But that's good
I can't see anyone needing a degree in CompSci to teach at GCSE level.
Do you not recall how elementary GCSE level is? It would be a total waste of a graduate.
Interesting, looks like the ICT Teachers are actually going to have to learn something new themselves to then be able to teach the children.
There is going to be carnage
This. My IT teachers were noobs.
One concern I have is this:
-In the modern age, many children will have grown up with computers and the internet
-Thus, a reasonable number of them will have had as much exposure to IT as their teachers
-IT is a fast-moving industry; skills that were learnt 10 years ago may no longer be relevant
-In order to stay 'ahead of' the class, this means that the teachers will need to be constantly learning themselves
-Typically the people who are most interested/adept in IT probably won't end up working as teachers, they'll either be working in industry, or maybe in some sort of research (which is likely to be far more interesting/challenging than teaching)
So in other words, I'm not sure if a traditional school/classroom environment is necessarily the right way in which to teach our children IT. Maybe have some sort of basic qualification (I dunno, like ECDL) that, once achieved, allows children to drop the subject or move on to a completely different style of learning should they desire.
edit: I wish they'd taught PowerPoint when I was at school
-In the modern age, many children will have grown up with computers and the internet
-Thus, a reasonable number of them will have had as much exposure to IT as their teachers
-IT is a fast-moving industry; skills that were learnt 10 years ago may no longer be relevant
-In order to stay 'ahead of' the class, this means that the teachers will need to be constantly learning themselves
-Typically the people who are most interested/adept in IT probably won't end up working as teachers, they'll either be working in industry, or maybe in some sort of research (which is likely to be far more interesting/challenging than teaching)
So in other words, I'm not sure if a traditional school/classroom environment is necessarily the right way in which to teach our children IT. Maybe have some sort of basic qualification (I dunno, like ECDL) that, once achieved, allows children to drop the subject or move on to a completely different style of learning should they desire.
edit: I wish they'd taught PowerPoint when I was at school
One concern I have is this:
-In the modern age, many children will have grown up with computers and the internet
-Thus, a reasonable number of them will have had as much exposure to IT as their teachers
-IT is a fast-moving industry; skills that were learnt 10 years ago may no longer be relevant
-In order to stay 'ahead of' the class, this means that the teachers will need to be constantly learning themselves
-Typically the people who are most interested/adept in IT probably won't end up working as teachers, they'll either be working in industry, or maybe in some sort of research (which is likely to be far more interesting/challenging than teaching)
So in other words, I'm not sure if a traditional school/classroom environment is necessarily the right way in which to teach our children IT. Maybe have some sort of basic qualification (I dunno, like ECDL) that, once achieved, allows children to drop the subject or move on to a completely different style of learning should they desire.
edit: I wish they'd taught PowerPoint when I was at school
Some good points.
The cutting edge does change all the time, but the basics remain the same. Get them learning C or another equally low level language, show them how a computer operates on a hardware level. Those that are interested will learn the cutting edge themselves, and those that are not will at least be not completely computer illiterate.
I find the amount of people that a 'scared' of computers my age sickening, people who have grown up using computers themselves, but are unable to do much more than a google search and some basic office operations.
I didn't take an IT GCSE (my school had it optional due to lack of resources) because I knew how much of a waste of time it would be. I remember walking into a A-level class once to see what they were doing, I had to correct the teacher within the first 10 minutes...
I work for the ICT Support Department in a Private School and I honestly say that this is a great thing!!
The ICT Teaching Department are the most frequest requesters of ICT Support due to lack of knowledge. Shocking when you think about it.
They still teach basic HTML (Frontpage type stuff) and how to create Excel Graphs and Access Databases!!
The only positive is that all our students are given the oppertunity to get their ECDL....something most of the teachers are struggling to do.
The ICT Teaching Department are the most frequest requesters of ICT Support due to lack of knowledge. Shocking when you think about it.
They still teach basic HTML (Frontpage type stuff) and how to create Excel Graphs and Access Databases!!
The only positive is that all our students are given the oppertunity to get their ECDL....something most of the teachers are struggling to do.
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Fellow Comp Sci ICT teacher here, slightly smug hearing this news as I know most ICT teachers are in fact apallingly qualified to teach anything other than Office.
ICT failed me and my generation. I was taught nothing of any value whatsoever, my teachers knew nothing and some of them were just Mums who had kids at the school. It was a complete utter disaster, no programming, no logic. Just a mixmash of teachers following a textbook without knowing how to do anything.
Thank god it's going, geeks are the ones that run the country. I would rather have the IT technicians teach me than the teachers that I had. I actually think it would be better to train Maths teachers and physics teachers. They have the logic that is needed. We also should not forget about Electronics. Understanding software will only get you so far. Imho, what we need is the Raspberry Pi, it delivers it all completely . Computer science could be taught using a mix mash of robotics and programming. It would be perfect, I would spend absolutely hours doing it if I could. We do need software developers, there is a demand and I have had first hand experience of this demand. I have worked for a company for a couple of weeks and they are actively looking for students. They would probably snatch me up if they could but sadly I am in full time education.
Thank god it's going, geeks are the ones that run the country. I would rather have the IT technicians teach me than the teachers that I had. I actually think it would be better to train Maths teachers and physics teachers. They have the logic that is needed. We also should not forget about Electronics. Understanding software will only get you so far. Imho, what we need is the Raspberry Pi, it delivers it all completely . Computer science could be taught using a mix mash of robotics and programming. It would be perfect, I would spend absolutely hours doing it if I could. We do need software developers, there is a demand and I have had first hand experience of this demand. I have worked for a company for a couple of weeks and they are actively looking for students. They would probably snatch me up if they could but sadly I am in full time education.
Question 14 is not answerable. What an utterly stupid exam paper.
I would imagine it's storing data but it's still wrong as they do store data lol.
It does though as it's the hardware that is running the software.
I have experience from a similar exam board and they don't understand what data is. They seem to think it can only be stored on hard drives, which is not the case. Funny as I got told off for saying that SSDs store data once
because the exam board won't accept it.If you apply that logic then CPU does absolutely everything under the sun.
Mark Scheme says the answer is D.
Things like SpeedStep, self temperature monitoring, CPU load throttling and core hibernation are enough for me to rule out the "Monitoring system performance" option as being the one.
But storing data... CPUs do that, there's nothing else in the system that does that operation more than a CPU. They have to store data in registers, L1/L2/L3 cache and RAM all the freaking time!
But storing data... CPUs do that, there's nothing else in the system that does that operation more than a CPU. They have to store data in registers, L1/L2/L3 cache and RAM all the freaking time!