Today, in the first official time given to me as an ICT subject leader, I had the morning our of class. Now, the majority of time was spent on paperwork – the changes in curriculum for next year have huge implications. Curriculum changes have been a constant topic of conversation over the last few years and it’s going to get worse!
I’ve come to the opinion that the trend towards Topic based teaching again has been detrimental to some other subjects. It is almost inevitable that something gets squeezed – I know I don’t treat all subjects as equally as I ought to, for instance. However, it appears that discrete teaching of ICT skills has been one of those things that has fallen by the wayside.
I had the opportunity to interview children in the time this morning and this has lead me towards that conclusion. It appears that most of the time ICT is used as a treat. It is for playing games – I don’t think there was a single child who didn’t mention games of the 20 I spoke to (four from each year group, 2 to 6). Some children even went as far to say that adults only use computers to work and never play games on them. I wonder when that transition starts because I play games all the time on my ICT devices!
So, there is the argument that discrete teaching of subjects is better for children as they then have an idea of what lesson is taught when. Mind you, even when I did explicitly state that my class were being taught ICT last year – and they were skills based lessons – they couldn’t recall that when speaking to them today…
I also realise that it will come as a surprise to many people that my thoughts are heading towards September 2014 already. I know we are only three weeks in to the academic year, but I am only likely to get another two or three opportunities in school time to spend on planning and arranging things for then. Every second of that time needs to count.
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