Head in the Cloud

An article from EurActiv.com caught my attention this afternoon. Titled, " Computing and digital literacy education needs a unified approach " and authored by the ECDL Foundation , the piece argues that "education programmes promoting coding need to be balanced with basic technology skills, which are too often lacking - even amongst so-called 'digital natives'." Also highlighting that there was a danger that "this focus on coding risks diminishing the quality of other aspects or computing and digital literacy education." It was quite refreshing to read this article as I thought that I might be the only one who was having some concerns, especially with the media focus on educational technology at the moment is seemingly fixated on coding in schools. In my post from June I wrote about what I saw as 'skewed reporting' of the digital competence framework, from the BBC. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with the introduction of co...

The last couple of months have been an extremely busy time for my consultancy. My ICT scheme seems to have had a very good reception from schools. I have met with headteachers, ICT coordinators, run Inset training days, twilight meetings or courses for well over 100 primary schools from across Wales. The majority of them having the same concerns of what the Successful Futures report might mean for their school, and wanting to 'refocus' again on ICT. For many this means looking at the basic skills pupils need to successfully and efficiently create, store and organise files (word processing, DTP, handling data, video, audio, and graphics). Alongside these basic technology aspects we also look at the elements of online communication and collaboration (through O365 or Google Apps for Edu) , and digital citizenship / esafety. If you look back at my previous posts on digital competence/literacy, you'll see that these are two areas which consistently appear in existing digital c...