It has been an interesting year for those concerned with advancing education through technology.

The relentless pressure of Moore’s Law makes for a fresh wave of devices and desires. More and more pupils have smart phones. More and more pupils, and teachers, have tablets. Increasing numbers of schools are finding ways to provide 1:1 access to technology, either as class sets, loaned devices or permitting pupils to use their own computers, in one form factor or another. Ubiquitous access to the whole of the web is transformative for learning, but it’s only in the schools at the cutting edge, such as those recognised in Naace’s Impact and 3rd Millennium Learning awards that we see evidence of this being transformative for schooling too. I’m hopeful that what’s innovative this year will be commonplace before long.

At conference last year, we heard about a server-free school. We see more and more areas of applications which were once confined to the desktop or laptop now routinely delivered over the web. This opens up so many opportunities for genuinely collaborative work, with the network, in both human and technical senses, becoming the real locus of learning. Whilst techno-enthusiasts like me see this positively, I think we would be in danger of failing in our duty as educators if we didn’t encourage pupils to adopt a critical stance, asking questions about data security, privacy, identity, ownership and trust. To be digitally literate must include an understanding of managing risks and making the most of opportunities, as well as staying safe.

Alongside the fresh opportunities which new technologies and innovative practice present across and beyond the whole school curriculum, the year has also seen the development and publication of a new National Curriculum programme of study for computing. Thankfully, this is still in draft, with the public consultation closing on 16th April. Naace contributed to the development of the document, although it’s clear not all of our input made it through to the version released by the Secretary of State, and so we as an association will be responding, but I hope that all fellows, members and sponsoring partners will also take time to make their views clear.

The move to a far greater emphasis on computer science on the National Curriculum presents fresh challenges and opportunities for Naace and its members, and this years conference provides many opportunities to consider these together. Naace though is concerned with far more than just one subject on the curriculum: our unifying vision is for the transformation that technology can bring to learning in all subject, and to education in its broadest sense.

The association is in good health. We are fortunate to have Mark Chambers as CEO, bringing great integrity, intelligence and insight to the role, and thus a fitting successor to Bernadette Brooks, who did so much to ensure the voice and vitality of the association. Naace’s board evolves too: I hand over, with some relief, to Lucinda Searle as chair in the sure knowledge that we’ll be in good hands, and Rachel Ager, Richard Allen and Julie Frankland retire from the board, having contributed much to the association, each in a way uniquely their own. Like many, I was thrilled by the high calibre of folks nominated for the board seats they vacate, and whichever way members have voted we know the new board will be able to draw on fresh ideas and wise counsel. The portfolio of services offered by Naace to members and the wider community continues to grow, with many in the sector looking to Naace for the clear and impartial advice that might once have been offered by government agencies: a role we can fulfil more than adequately.

The programme here for our two days together is exciting and packed with much that will sustain and motivate as we return from Leicester. I wish you all a good conference, and look forward to many interesting conversations.

• Plenty of blogging – we’ve a Drupal powered bespoke blog/portfolio system, so trainees quickly get used to adding links, uploading images and embedding media; we also showcase The 100 Word Challenge and a few sign up for the team.
• Developing online courses (in Fronter, as we’re in London) and a shared wiki on online resources with second year undergraduates (computing specialists);
• Populating a children’s literature wiki as part of 2nd year English lectures, using a framework set up by the specialists;
• There’s the option to submit the big, third year summative reflection in the form of a website – we’ve had a fairly even split between Wix and Google Sites this year, although I’m not entirely happy with either
• Computing specialists similarly can submit their final project work on creating an outline scheme of work and school IT policy in the form of a website. They also get a workshop on HTML by hand.
• All our third years also are required to submit their final Teaching and Learning project, on either assessment or behaviour, in the form of a website. How we teach the techy bit of this, specifically the platform we demonstrate, is the focus of my thinking at the moment – see below.
• We’re including some webmaking using the Mozilla webmaker tools for our KS2 PGCE trainees, playing with hackasaurus and thimble. I’m really excited about this.

I’ve been asked for advice about web design. This is hard, as much of this is down to personal aesthetics but my key points are probably the following:

• less is more in this space, certainly at the moment – look for simplicity and consistency
• Think of the structure of the site and let that determine navigation
• Content is king; only use images/media when these add rather than distract
• Hyperlinks are the soul of the web

So for this big T&L project, I’m inclined to move away from Google Sites as our suggested solution, which works, but very few trainees seem to get excited about: the sites look far from professional, and it’s all too tempting for some to adopt a ‘let’s throw everything in’ approach. As I say, many trainees have been using Wix, without any prompting from us, they’ve thus tended to produce polished, perhaps overly ‘designed’ sites with rather too many bangs and whistles for my own taste. Weebly is a similar platform, and I just discovered imcreator yesterday, although this seems to focus more on photography than text. It’s worth my emphasising that we strive not to specify particular tools or platforms, although we’ll tend to use just one or two in lectures, and refuse to guarantee support for other things.

Which leads me to thinking in terms of going with WordPress as the platform we’ll look at in lectures for T&L, especially as this seems more professionally relevant given the current enthusiasm for blogging in schools. I’ve a hosted multisite instance which it would be easy enough to provide access to, but WordPress.com itself is quite tempting; there’s big range of themes available, some of which are quite tasteful, and structure and navigation can be handled easily if they go with pages rather than posts as content holders. Education specific options like John McLear’s excellent Primary Blogger, and EduBlogs. I’d welcome thoughts from those reading this below…

Moving forward, I’m starting to wonder if we ought to move to encouraging our trainees to blog publicly using WordPress (etc), with a Planet Roehampton like aggregator bringing their posts together into our Drupal platform.

I’ve some inclination to run a couple of geeky workshops on the hard core HTML-by-hand approach, probably using Bootstrap as a framework, especially as I see this can be hosted for free on a Google Docs account now. There are some excellent resources on learning HTML and CSS from Alasdair Blackwell’s Decoded in association with O2 Learn.

The skills have been easy enough for many to pick up, but without a more encompassing understanding they tend to be tied rather too closely to particular technologies, resulting to some extent in a learned incompetence, the separation between users and developers and the choice between program, or be programmed [1].

I should declare a particular interest in the computing curriculum, as I was part of the two drafting groups assembled by the BCS and Royal Academy of Engineering to pull this together as expert advice for the DfE. I did not, however, contribute to the further work which took place on the programme of study after our draft was submitted at the end of November. I do have some serious concerns particularly about what’s been left out of the version published for public consultation last Thursday.

I am, however, delighted to see that there’s a significant amount of computer science on the new computing curriculum. This includes the craft of coding, from KS1 onwards – floor and screen turtles at KS1, Scratch at KS2 and both Scratch and Python or Javascript at KS3 would work well for progression, I’d have thought. A little HTML/CSS would be a useful addition, and whilst this can obviously be included, the requirements say ‘programming’, not ‘coding’. I’ve some hope that children learning about programming, data, algorithms and networks might develop an understanding of the principles of computer science which I see as an essential part of a liberal education in the third millennium.

I’m also pleased that there are aspects of this which look set to develop computational thinking. Notable here are ideas about predicting and testing what programs will do: I’m sure this is meant to be interpreted in the context of children’s own programs, but playing a few COTS games would be relevant to this. There’s also a focus on problem solving: using logic and ideas about systems, patterns (and pattern languages), abstraction and decomposition have wide applications to problems across, and more importantly, beyond the curriculum. If more folk in management grasped these ideas, many an organisation, and many a school, would run more effectively and efficiently.

Honestly, I’m pretty ambivalent about the name. I never liked the term ‘ICT’, as it never seemed to have much buy-in from outside UK school education. That said, I did quite like the way ‘information’, ‘communication’ and ‘technology’ partly characterised the three aspects of the subject that the Royal Society labelled as ‘IT’, ‘digital literacy’ and ‘computer science’, although I know this mapping is very far from exact. Whilst I know many pupils report having found ICT boring, a simple rebranding won’t address this. Windscale and Sellafield. Marathon and Snickers. The new PoS won’t address this either, unless we have at least an equivalent shift in pedagogy and assessment. The rebranding to ‘computing’ does reflect the shift in focus to knowledge of computer science in place of IT skills.

By the way, I’ve been really surprised by the number of folk over the past year who’ve argued that a name change would require primary legislation and was thus out of the question, when a reading of the relevant bit of the 2002 Education Act shows the Secretary of State can pretty much define the contents of the National Curriculum to be what he wants it to be, although he can’t tell schools how long they should spend on each bit, which may be significant here.

Peter Twining, who was with us for the first part of the drafting, and I have both done analyses of what’s changed since between the draft submitted by the BCS/RAEng as a result of the consensus process they led, drawing on the expertise of stakeholders from industry, schools, universities and other representative organisations, and that which was produced by the DfE. You can find his online on his EdFutures Bliki.

Like Peter, I’ve some serious concerns about what’s been left out in the re-draft. Applying the Wikipedia principle of ‘assume good faith’, I’d like to think that at least some of these omissions are honest mistakes, which the DfE will be eager to put right after the public consultation, as the subject contents we have seem in part logically inconsistent with the stated aims, and potentially detrimental to creative industries and individual well-being.

One of the over-arching aims for the new curriculum as a whole is that it ‘helps engender an appreciation of human creativity’. That’s got to be a Good Thing, and this is reflected in the preamble to the computing curriculum, which makes clear that pupils should become able to “express themselves through information and communication technology”, and in the aims, which include ensuring that all pupils are “are responsible, competent, confident and creative users of information and communication technology.” (Emphasis added). Where then is pupils’ entitlement to be taught how to use ICT creatively, to make original content in digital media? Well, it is there at KS3 and KS4

undertake creative projects that involve selecting, using, and combining multiple applications, preferably across a range of devices, to achieve challenging goals,

create, reuse, revise and repurpose digital information and content with attention to design, intellectual property and audience

develop their capability, creativity and knowledge in computer science, digital media and information technology

It’s just that there’s no mention of creativity at Key Stages 1 and 2. We had statements for this on the draft:

Create, manipulate and evaluate digital content in a range of formats for use by a familiar audience. (KS1)

Work collaboratively to plan, create, test and evaluate a range of digital products for a given audience (KS2)

but, for one reason or another, these seem to have failed to make the cut. Of course, there’s nothing in the National Curriculum which prevents teachers from continuing to teach children to create digital photographs, images, audio, music, animation, video, 3D models and so on. I’m sure many will interpret statements such as

organise, store, manipulate and retrieve data in a range of digital formats (KS1)

select, use and combine a variety of software (including internet services) on a range of digital devices to accomplish given goals (KS2).

as providing the National Curriculum hooks (not that any are necessary), for these sorts of activities. What we lose here is the entitlement for all children to be taught these things. Given that the creative digital economy isn’t going to be built merely by an army of computer scientists, this seems rather myopic. Whilst Next Gen, rightly, recommended putting computer science on the curriculum, it’s hard to see that the games and visual effects industries will be strengthened by simultaneously eliminating computer graphics, animation and audio in primary education.

Here’s another example of where the push to increase CS has, for now, resulted in a curriculum which is leaning too far in that direction, arguably failing to provide a technological education which has breadth and balance:

Remember that bit in the aims about ensuring pupils are responsible users of ICT? This one word has been added in place of a whole further aim in the BCS/RAEng draft, which attempted to address a more critical digital literacy, developing pupils’ understanding of the implications of computing:

Can critically articulate the individual, cultural, and societal impacts of digital technology, and know how to stay safe, exploit opportunities, and manage risks

Indeed, all the references to criticality in our draft (we had four) were removed from the DfE copy. Other programmes of study are allowed to develop criticality by the way, just not computing.

We did provide language for this in both the KS3 and KS4 content:

Critically evaluate digital content, including its context, provenance and trustworthiness; reflect on the personal, social, economic, and ethical impacts of technology and technological change, and the implications for rights, responsibilities, and freedoms. (KS3)

Manage their online identity, participate in online communities, develop and critically evaluate digital media, and take account of ethical, legal, social, and environmental consequences of information systems. (KS4)

At least the notion of responsible (if not critical) use does get expressed in content at KS1 and KS2, but the above statements for KS3 or KS4 have been removed, leaving no reference to safety, responsibility or criticality. Can this really be on the assumption that they’ll have learnt enough about their online responsibilities by the time they leave primary school? Imagine the Y6 lessons: “Now children, when you’re 13 and can legally sign up for Facebook, please remember to…” To my mind the e-equivalent of putting all the sex ed in primary schools and never mentioning it after the age of 11.

In place of subject content focussed on creativity, responsibilities and critical digital literacy, we do see much more computer science. Some of this is good, so, for example,

use logical reasoning to predict the behaviour of simple programs

is a great addition to KS1, and, as I indicate above, provides scope for a little game based learning.

In the draft we had “appreciate how [search engine] results are selected and ranked”, as part of the Key Stage 2 programme, and I still see this as a crucial component of web literacies. This has now moved up to Key Stage 3, but is replaced in KS2 by “describe how internet search engines find and store data”. I think I could teach the first bit of this – web crawlers, robots.txt, link following etc, but I’d struggle to do the latter justice; I’m really not sure 11-year olds will be quite ready for Bigtable and the GFS, even after all this new CS.

Further additions, all at KS3, include “understand at least two key algorithms for each of sorting and searching”. I see an interview question coming on here… There’s also content on Boolean logic, in relation to program execution, search or database queries, as well as evaluating alternative algorithms (thankfully moved up from KS2 on our draft) and carrying out binary ‘manipulations’ by hand – I wonder if this means more than binary arithmetic?

I think the subject knowledge challenge for both ITT and CPD is manageable for KS1 and 2, although I know others take a less optimistic stance. Subject knowledge at KS3 seems a big step up on what we’ve had; the raised entry requirements for PGCE Computer Science at secondary will help for ITT, but giving current secondary ICT teachers the subject knowledge they’ll need to teach this is non-trivial. Subject pedagogy is another matter, particularly given the absence of creativity and critical digital literacy here, which would have allowed teachers and students to explore the applications and implications of the CS foundations. CS is a rigorous academic discipline, but I suspect it’s best learnt through play, exploration and experiment. I’ve written elsewhere about how we might address some of the CPD challenge through an approach based around teachers making things.

Anyhow, you’re welcome to disagree with me. Do comment below if so. If, on the other hand you agree with me at least that pupils ought to have an entitlement to creating content in digital media at KS1 and KS2 or that pupils should be taught to take a critical and ethical stance to the online world at KS3 and KS4 then please, take a moment to fill in a wonderfully anachronistic Word based form and tell the DfE this, sometime before 16th April.

This is really quite radical change to the curriculum, with a much stronger focus on programming and other aspects of computer science than we’ve had thus far. Whilst the draft PoS covers IT, DL and CS there’s no mistaking that the emphasis is very clearly on the latter of these. This is challenging as it’s going to mean teachers are teaching things most of them weren’t taught themselves, even many secondary ICT teachers.

The name of the subject changes, from ICT to computing, in line with the recommendations from the Royal Society’s Shut Down or Restart report in January 2012. However the proposed PoS goes significantly beyond the minimum entitlement of a rather narrow definition of digital literacy in that report.

KS1 includes work on algorithms and programming. This can be taught using programmable toys, although I anticipate most schools moving to some screen based programming during KS1, perhaps using iOS tools or games (eg Bee Bot app, Light Bot). There is no entitlement to creative work in digital media, despite this being included in the aims and in the BCS/RAEng draft.

KS2. Again we see an emphasis on programming, linked to algorithms probably motivated by a desire to develop computational thinking. The programming work here may be easily accomplished in Scratch (but perhaps not Kodu) through developing a game or drill and practice maths quiz. There’s an expectation that pupils understand how the Internet works, and that this is different from the Web. They should also understand how search engines operate and be able to use these. Creativity is missing from the subject content, which was not the case in the BCS/RAEng draft.

KS3. The content here is quite exceptionally ambitious, with a strong emphasis on computer science (seven of the nine bullet points). Programming needs to be in two languages, one of which is text based (this could be logo, although the smart money will be on Python, I think). There’s much detail specified here, that might not have been expected before KS4, such as fetch-execute cycles, Boolean logic and two key search and sort algorithms (although these are not specified). This is going to demand quite some work in terms of CPD for schools and academies working to this programme. In contrast to KS1 and 2, the two remaining bullet points both provide some entitlement to creative work.

As with other subjects, the statutory requirement to specify an attainment target is met simply with the statement that:

By the end of each key stage, pupils are expected to know, apply and understand the matters, skills and processes specified in the relevant programme of study.

I’ve also spent some time looking through the Switched On ICT units, written by Naace immediate past chair Rachel Ager and me, and edited by Terry Freedman, himself a former Naace chair. These already had a strong programming strand from Year 1 onwards, and I think could still be used, perhaps with some modification or change in emphasis, to provide one structure for covering the new programme of study at Key Stages 1 and 2 and much of that at Key Stage 3.

The above is (c) Rising Stars, all rights reserved. It is reproduced here with permission.

In the distant, final days of the Labour government, when publicly accountable bodies such as the QCDA and Becta would advise on such matters, Sir Jim Rose did an extensive review of the primary curriculum, consulting widely and proposing six broad areas of learning with ICT alongside literacy and numeracy at the core of the curriculum as ‘essential for learning and life’. I’ve posted a copy of the ICT proposals here. Most of us expected this to go through on the nod as as part of the parliamentary ‘wash up’. It didn’t; the Tories rejected it as lacking rigour and promised they’d produce a new version themselves. Almost three years on, on Thursday we got to see the fruit of their labours.

Gove, and former school minister Gibb, admit to being inspired by E D Hirsch’s writing on cultural literacy. Some of Hirsch’s work is really quite odd to the eyes of UK educators, consisting of long, long lists of quite isolated facts. In the UK, Civitas have produced something not dissimilar, although rather better organised. Thankfully, the Gove curriculum isn’t quite this bad, but he has focused, unashamedly, on the knowledge children should be expected to acquire, and there are a number of areas (notably history and science) where there’s perhaps a few too many facts and not enough understanding.

The National Curriculum Review Expert Panel were clear that the curriculum ought to be based on a clear and coherent statement of overarching aims, with more detailed aims for each subject. The new Framework starts by acknowledging that all schools, have to provide a broad and balanced curriculum which:

promotes the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of pupils at the school and of society, and

prepares pupils at the school for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of later life.

The curriculum produced by Gove and his advisors though has a further set of aims, specifically to

• provide pupils with an introduction to the core knowledge that they need to be educated citizens.
• introduce pupils to the best that has been thought and said; and help engender an appreciation of human creativity and achievement.

Some of the language here is almost a direct quote from Matthew Arnold in the preface to Culture and Anarchy (1869), although Arnold goes on to write about

turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits

Something which might have been a useful addition to the aims of this document: education is about a transformed life, or even society, not merely an extensive knowledge.

I think it’s the focus on the past rather than the future where the principal difficulties lie with the new curriculum. We’re living in a time of ever accelerating change through technology, and whilst it is vital that our pupils have a firm foundation, drawing on ‘the best that has been thought and said’, in our own and other cultures, other things are needed too if schools really are to satisfy our legal obligations to prepare pupils “for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of later life”.

Reading through the new curriculum, I do wonder to what extent it will actually do this. Shouldn’t there be something here about inculcating a love of learning, of responsiveness to change, of developing the ability to work collaboratively, of tenacity, resilience, criticality and curiosity? Aren’t qualities like these going to be more important in these children’s future lives than knowledge of Our Island Story and ancient Greek?

Tim Oates and the rest of the Expert Panel went much further than the document published on Thursday, including such aims as

Satisfy future economic needs for individuals and for the workforce as a whole, including … confidence in acquiring new knowledge and skills; …

Support personal development and empowerment so that each pupil is able to develop as a healthy, balanced and self-confident individual and fulfil their educational potential;

Promote understanding of sustainability in the stewardship of resources locally, nationally and globally.

It’s interesting, but perhaps not surprising, that these have not been included in the curriculum published on Thursday.

Whetting our appetite for his new curriculum, Gove spoke at length on Tuesday about how important it is for pupils to know stuff, and, of course, he’s right, or at least partly right. If learning is about making connections, then there does need to be something for new ideas, new knowledge, to connect to. The educated person does have a wealth of knowledge on which they can draw. That said, all of us who can read and use the web have a wealth of knowledge on which we can draw, so I think we’ve got to move beyond merely knowing stuff.

Gove argued that without knowledge Google’s results are all ‘babble’:

“Unless you have knowledge – historical, cultural, scientific, mathematic – all you will find on Google is babble.”

Which is perhaps putting it a little strongly. What I think he’s failed to recognise is that the way we acquire and retain knowledge now is really quite different from how it was for him in his own school days, or indeed in Matthew Arnold’s time. Berners-Lee’s invention of the web outsources the connections – I’ve argued many times that learning is now (and perhaps always was) about exploring a landscape rather than following a journey. The locus of so much of my education has been libraries rather than classrooms, and for my trainees and their pupils, so much of what is learnt is outside of formal education, through exploring the links and recommendations. Similarly, remembering stuff, at least in detail, seems less necessary when clouds and devices can do that for us.

There does seems scant mention of technology as a tool to enhance, extend, enrich or support learning in the draft curriculum document: I believe deliberately so. It’s fine to say that the curriculum shouldn’t say how things should be taught, eg using technology to enhance learning, but rather should limit itself to specifying what should be taught, but I’m far from persuaded that this rule has been applied consistently (have a look at some of the maths, for example). In fact, there’s an almost anti-technological bias in much of this:

• not mentioning any technology more advanced than books and pencils in English,
• the emphasis on handwriting, but no mention of keyboard skills,
• focussing on spelling, when my computer will check and correct that
• lots of pencil and paper, formal methods arithmetic, when that’s been something computers have been pretty good at for a while now (see Conrad Wolfram’s TED talk for what we could be doing in maths if we used computers properly here), although, to be fair, the maths programme is the only place, other than the computing programme and fleeting mentions in science and D&T, where there’s any serious consideration given to the use of ICT
• specifying sketchbooks but not digital photography in art and design
• focussing foreign language work on translation, when Google and Bing FAMT gets better and better.
• and, in general, as above, framing things in terms of knowledge factoids that have to be taught, when Google etc provides instant access to all this.

Knowledge matters, but wisdom and understanding matter more. The touchstone of my Purpos/Ed piece last year was RS Peters notion of what it means to be educated. For him, this was about how life is transformed by some degree of all round understanding and sensitivity. Perhaps this is the greatest flaw in Gove’s endeavour, that he’s focussed on specifying knowledge to be taught, rather than the understanding to be developed.

There are things here that I like though. For example:

I’m really pleased that the level descriptors have gone. The statutory attainment targets are now merely repeated statements that

By the end of each key stage, pupils are expected to know, apply and understand the matters, skills and processes specified in the relevant programme of study.

This is what we teach. We use assessment to establish whether this is what has been learnt. Simples. I think this opens up some really exciting opportunities for a badge based approach, perhaps using LA/RBC instances of Mozilla’s Open Badge infrastructure, despite Henry Jenkins’ concerns.

Having been told that the policy focus has moved from inclusion to SEN/D, I’m glad to see that there’s a clear commitment to a more inclusive approach to inclusion in this document, setting out the need to set high expectations for all whilst recognising that we must strive to remove barriers for those learning English as an additional language or with special educational needs or disabilities.

I am, of course, delighted to see far more programming and computer science on the new computing programme of study, which replaces those for ICT. I’m very concerned that we’ve lost any mention of creativity in digital media at KS1 and KS2, and attention to safe and responsible use of technology at KS3. I’ll write more about the computing curriculum in another post [update: here].

So. If learning though making is such an effective approach to ICT for initial teacher training and in schools, why not also for CPD? I know I’ve blogged on this relatively recently, but the idea continues to take shape. There are two sides to the CPD challenge:

• mastering the subject content: to teach computer science it’s (almost) necessary to know that computer science;
• developing the subject pedagogy: the Secretary of State complaining that many had told him that ICT was “too off-putting, too demotivating, too dull”, wasn’t merely because of the subject content, but at least in part because of how some of us have taught it; I don’t doubt that we can teach Scratch just as badly as we’ve taught PowerPoint.

So, to tackle the first of these, I’m coming round to the position that the best approach is to get teachers coding, rather than merely teaching them about coding, but the learning is likely to be most meaningful if the stuff they’re coding is actually something they might use in their day jobs. What I have in mind, is a CPD programme that focusses on teachers working collaboratively to make interactive and online learning resources for their pupils. I know there are plenty of counter examples, and many of the commercial products are highly polished, but far too many of the curriculum resources bought by schools are suboptimal because they’ve been developed by folk who aren’t themselves teachers. So, two birds with one stone here: let’s get teachers coding, and let’s get some lovingly crafted, pedagogically sound learning resources too.

The typical learning journey may not be that dissimilar from their students.

A hands-on CPD programme for teachers

Scratch

Creating a few educational games and simulations in Scratch is really worthwhile and brings an easy win; I know there’d be some (probably more in the secondary phase) who’d see this as a bit of an insult to their intelligence, but Scratch’s ‘high ceiling’ philosophy, and the ease with which teachers can make interactive resources tailored for their own pupils and curriculum might win even these over.

HTML

Some web development work could provide a meaningful introduction to text based languages (and, yes, I know HTML isn’t a programming language, but Javascript is), as well as being highly amenable to learning through modding (qv Hackasaurus X-Ray Goggles). I’m very impressed by the beta version of Decoded’s new web-development course for education for O2 Learn, and I use Shay Howe’s Beginner’s Guide with our 3rd Year trainees, both of which are fine as tutorial resources, but the main thing here is to get teachers coding something useful and, I think, working with the HTML itself, not in a WYSIWYG editor – remember the goal isn’t to make a webpage, but to develop an understanding of the web. Practical projects could be making presentations in one of the many lovely HTML5 presentation frameworks, eg deck.js, a few interactive teaching resources in Undum and then perhaps some static site development linked directly to the curriculum using a framework like Boilerplate or Bootstrap.

LAMP

I’d probably stick with developing for the web for the next phase too, bringing in a server-side scripting language. I’m torn here between Python, which seems the language of choice for many in the CAS community, and PHP which is probably the quickest route into modding useful web-based apps on the LAMP stack. The usual open source favourites such as Moodle, WordPress and Drupal have open and well-documented architectures amenable to module hacking and development, with both Moodle and WordPress having a huge installed base in schools. The developer communities are pretty supportive too. Coding modules or plugins for these will also help / require teachers get to grips with the intricacies SQL databases.

Apps

After that, I think we’d be looking at some mobile app development. I think there’s an argument for the design led approach taken by CDI Apps for Good (and am now wondering if they do CPD courses for teachers), but that’s got to be alongside the programming work, which really needs to be the focus. Whilst the App Store and Play are crowded places, there are ways in for apps tailored to particular subject matter and school contexts. App Inventor is very nice, and really not that much harder than Scratch. I’m told the learning curve for iOS development is fairly steep, but as with many of the above suggestions, a collaborative approach here is what’s needed, ideally with a few more experienced folk helping others along the way, as we see in, for example, Young Rewired State. Whilst it’s not at scale yet, the teacher/developer pairing idea of Computing++ makes sense, and I’d hope that some linkage between the BCS’s professional membership and CAS may yet emerge.

CS

Of course, the above approach focusses on the programming side of things, rather than the more theoretical computer science aspects. I’m confident that much of the theory can be learnt through a willingness to reflect on the experience of programming, but a little reading would, I’m sure help here. John Naughton’s From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg is highly readable and a good start on the Internet if not other aspects of computing. Whilst clearly created as a teaching resource, I’d have thought CS Unplugged ideal for filling in much of the theoretical background, and this would naturally lead on to Paul Curzon’s as yet unpublished Computing without Computers. Blown to Bits is the set reading for Berkeley’s Beauty and Joy of Computing course. I’m enjoying Peter Bentley’s Digitized:The Science of Computing at the moment, and this takes an unashamedly philosophical, whilst still highly accessible, stance.

Beyond these ‘introductory’ texts, there’s now any number of MOOCs on aspects of computer science, such as Udacity’s CS101. I’ve been saying for a while now that we’re at the point where someone literate, connected and motivated can teach themselves most things, CS (if not dentistry) included. Motivation is the challenge, of course, but I’d hope that this is a box that those teaching ICT in primary and secondary schools could tick with confidence. What better way to model life-long learning.

Subject Pedagogy

Which brings me round nicely to developing subject pedagogy. The medium above, learning through making, is the message. It’s a commonplace that ‘we teach how we were taught’, and I live in hope that if teachers can learn programming through programming then there’s every chance that they may teach it that way. As well, though, as making learning resource, there’s plenty of other stuff (schemes of work, assessment frameworks, textbooks, VLE courses…)we’ll need to be making to get CS into schools and taught well, and again a collaborative effort here is likely to be powerful.

Ideally, I’d see this happening in local clusters, and crucially cross-phase; just the sort of thing which the remaining local authorities might facilitate. Primary and secondary teachers both have much to offer to this sort of collaborative effort: the former a long tradition of making teaching resources and learning through play, exploration and experiment which seems particularly appropriate, the latter more specialist subject knowledge and an understanding of what’s needed to get qualifications in the subject. Better still, would be to get university CS and education departments involved, alongside good folk from industries. Perhaps not the way we’ve done things in the past, but very in-tune with the sort of Big Society (OK, I know) approach which is characteristic of the move to more computing in schools.

constructivism’s connotation of learning as “building knowledge structures” … happens especially felicitously in a context where the learner is consciously engaged in constructing a public entity[1]

This figured prominently in my own presentations at BETT, so some observer bias might be involved here. I spoke on Stone’s stand as part of Tony Parkin’s skilfully curated programme about the craft of ICT teaching, right alongside a brilliant ‘hackspace’ that Stone provided aimed at getting teachers working alongside coders. I returned to the theme in my [Learn Live seminar ‘Agile Pedagogy’, on Thursday (recording online), and these ideas surfaced again in the now inevitable conversations around teachers’ CPD for the move to far more computer science in far more schools than at present. Out beyond schools, hackdays and their like have captured the enthusiasm of many a coder, and I’m so impressed by the work of folk like Genevieve Smith-Nunes and Alan O’Donohoe who’ve taken this idea and made it work for the pupils in their schools.

Learning through making is a big part of the Roehampton ICT education modules. I’ve developed a bespoke blogging / e-portfolio platform for our trainees, and this is the focus of the e-learning side of our modules: rather than the usual Moodle thing of resources and activities, the home page for our courses is the shared blog of trainees practical work, their reflections on this and the associated readings or recordings; the actual lecture content is hidden off to the side in the menu tree, appearing in the blog stream alongside the trainees’ own posts.

The practical component of our modules is hugely important, both for lectures and assessment. When I say ‘lectures’, I really mean workshops as these all have a practical component: ranging from making interactive whiteboard resources and presentations, through online surveys via Google Forms and educational games in 2DIY or Scratch to video editing and coding up websites.

We do a fair bit of collaborative work too, combining Roehampton’s default social constructivism with Papert’s constuctionism to arrive at a ‘social constuctionism’ that’ll be familiar to any who have edited Wikipedia, used Google Docs (which we like greatly), contributed to open source, joined a hackday or indeed sat around a table and made a poster together back in their primary school days.

We now have things set up so there’s a large practical component to our assessment. Year 1 submit SMART Notebooks (or equivalent) about their language history and edited, narrated videos of their teaching out on placement. Our Year 1 specialists produce intricate, multi-screen games based on a children’s books (some lovely Gruffalo and Hungry Caterpillar games in previous years) and Year 2 some media-rich and pedagogically sound online VLE courses; the finalists don’t have quite so much fun developing outline schemes of work, but many find this too a medium in which creativity can find expression. The big final year assignment has trainees creating a summative, critical reflection in the digital medium of their choice, on an essay title picked from a list of seven.

It really has been a pleasure to mark some great, and academically rigorous, video essays, animations, narrated slide casts and websites: many of my finalists are of a generation that could be described as ‘digital natives’, and confidence, competence and creativity with digital technology is very evident in so much of the work I’ve been marking. Trainees like these lead me to agree with the Secretary of State (aargh, what am I saying?), that (at least as far as ICT education is concerned), this generation of new teachers is the best ever.

I’ve no doubt that computer science is just as much a serious academic discipline as physics, chemistry and biology, albeit a somewhat younger one. Just as these subjects provide their students with unique insights into the nature of reality and particular ways of thinking about the world, so does computer science. The computational thinking that many of us see as lying at the heart the discipline, and providing the clearest justification for a place on the school curriculum, is akin to but distinct from mathematical intuition and the scientific method as providing a set of ideas, tools, processes for tackling problems and developing new knowledge and understanding.

More pragmatically, I think this means that ICT teachers are more likely to keep their jobs. Head teachers faced with league tables based on EBacc results won’t be quite so eager to reduce the teaching time and resourcing for subjects on this list – we’ve plenty of anecdotal evidence of increasing numbers studying the EBacc subjects, the motivation for which is likely to come from school leadership at least as much as student and parental demand, and thus I think there’s at least some grounds to hope that there’ll be more students encouraged to take CS at GCSE, as part of a rounded academic education. Of course, not all who teach current ICT GCSEs will find the switch to teaching CS that easy, but I’d hope that they might relish the challenge of learning something outside their comfort zone, and that CAS and friends will have in place some high quality CPD to support them in acquiring new subject knowledge and, perhaps, subject pedagogy.

I think there are many bright pupils who’d relish the challenge of a rigorous CS course alongside two other science GCSE – physics and CS as a combination would appeal to many who like to figure things out for themselves, and would be a natural choice for gamers, or those interested in a career in the games industry, and adding in chemistry or biology will have powerful synergies. A rounded scientific education is likely to require a grasp of all four sciences these days, given a) how much of the cutting edge is at the intersection of domains and b) the crucial role that programming (not merely IT skills) has in so much scientific research now.

Although the link between take-up of a subject at school and applications for initial teacher training is one with some latency, I think there’s also hope here that recruitment to CS/ICT PGCE courses may pick up from its current, unsurprisingly, low levels.

Having CS on the EBacc list is not, though, unproblematic.

One of the problems with the whole EBacc concept is the focus on academic subjects, amongst which CS undoubtedy should be classed. There’s more to life than academic study, and the focus on the academic EBacc can all too easily reduce the attention paid to vocational education and training. This is an issue for programming and other bits of IT. Whilst there’s a clear, strong case for teaching pupils the theory and principles of computation, there’s also a strong argument for getting them coding, for getting them to make things in the digital domain. Whilst computing is a science, programming is much more akin to craft, as we see with things like the software craftsmanship movement, agile methods and the day-in day-out work of software engineers which seems quite some way from the discipline of academic computer science, and hence perhaps why IT was first found on the national curriculum in the same ring binder as D&T. So yes, let’s have some rigorous GCSEs in computer science, but let’s also have some challenging, worthwhile qualifications for 16 year olds in programming, systems administration and network engineering.

Another potential issue is the exams. If Mr Gove has his way and EBacc subjects are examined by EBCs rather than GCSEs, and if these all have to be paper based, three hour exams, I can’t help wondering if this might not be the best way to examine a candidate’s knowledge and understanding of computer science. Might not a portfolio of coursework, or some live, interactive coding and debugging be a useful thing to assess for a subject like this? I’m sure you could examine CS on paper, as a final exam, but I think there’s more to knowing computer science than knowing about computer science.

My other niggle is whether this actually makes a difference in schools when it comes to GCSE option blocks – yes, there’ll be some (plenty?) of students who’d like to do (say) physics, chemistry and CS, but if their school hasn’t (yet) (been) converted to an academy, they have to study biology too up to the age of sixteen, because it’s part of the National Curriculum; that doesn’t mean they have to take a GCSE/EBC in biology, but it’s not, strictly speaking, legal for the school not to teach them the bit that’s there on the KS4 curriculum. On the other hand, Mr Gove’s has said that they’ll have to study ICT too in KS4, so perhaps that’s not quite such an issue, although the BCS/RAEng submission for the programme of study kept this content very, very light.

These concerns apart, on the whole, I’m really glad that Mr Gove kept his word from a year ago – having CS on the EBacc is likely to result in more children having the chance to study it, and being encouraged to do so.

I’m still not quite sure how I feel about adaptive learning, and I think this is down to some concerns about the ‘computer knows best’ which can be detected beneath the surface. My first encounter was a rather lovely ‘teach yourself trigonomety’ text (probably Austwick’s Trigonometry: the right angled triangle) that I checked out from our local library at a very young age – pages comprised trig problems with multi-choice answers, you followed the page reference for what you thought was right and then got specific feedback or another, slightly harder problem. Cool stuff, back then, and reminiscent of Ian Livingstone’s Fighting Fantasy game books, of which I played a few not longer after.

As Roger Broadie pointed out on the Mirandanet list, adaptive learning design seemed pretty cool back in the mid 2000s when we were all excited about VLEs and learning objects. Ruth Kelly summed the vision up well in the introduction to the e-strategy:

In the future it will be more than simply a storage place – a digital space that is personalised, that remembers what the learner is interested in and suggests relevant websites, or alerts them to courses and learning opportunities that fit their needs.

These ideas are, perhaps, due for something of a renaissance, with current interest in learning analytics, which I see as essentially the application of the data mining techniques of credit/loyalty cards to the massive data sets that could be generated as more and more of a pupils’ work and interaction with the education system moves online. A sat-nav approach to the learning journey if you will – ie a system that has a pretty accurate picture of where the learner is (their profile), a map of the landscape (curriculum?) and some way of establishing the most efficient route to the destination (ideally crowd-sourced), chosen, on a good day, by the learner themselves. All well and a good way of getting from A to B.

Perhaps, though, there’s more to learning than getting to a destination; perhaps education ought to be a bit more about exploring a landscape, and a bit less about completing a journey? Google and Wikipedia are different: The former has a pretty good model of what I’m interested in (qv Pariser on the Filter Bubble) and is startlingly effective at finding the right content (learning object?), the latter, thanks to the network of links, a wonderful place to explore and discover things that I wasn’t interested in. There are parallels here between downloading the e-text you want from the Web and browsing books and journals in a good library: the former is certainly more efficient, but the latter allows much more opportunity for chance discoveries.

Playing with adaptive learning in the VLE isn’t too hard – Moodle’s Lesson module has plenty of flexibility, and at a higher level Moodle 2 has support for conditional activities. LAMS is still around, and there are polished, commercial tools like Articulate Storyline for developing e-learning materials.

One of the early lectures in the Roehampton Creativity and Computing module looks at non-linear narrative, which gives students a great excuse to check out the aforementioned Fighting Fantasy game books from the library, play old school text adventures (eg Zork), watch a little of Get Lamp and learn a little about Kristian Still‘s impressive work using IF (interactive fiction) at the intersection of literacy and coding.

Now there’s a thought… Surely it wouldn’t be too difficult to take some of the tools used for developing Interactive Fiction, like Inform7 or Quest and use these to knock up some quite complex adaptive learning tools. The tool that’s really caught my attention though is Undum, which is a lovely HTML5 / Javascript client side framework for interactive fiction – check out the tutorial and the Mark of the Ninja to get a feel for this. Like HTML5 presentations and Bootstrap, another example of how learning a little HTML (and a bit of Javascript this time) opens up some powerful possibilities for teachers to build high class teaching resources themselves.

Of course, as Papert argued back in 1971 in relation to drill and practice programs that children learn much more through making educational software than through using educational software:

It is said that the best way to learn something is to teach it. Perhaps writing a teaching program is better still in its insistence on forcing one to consider all possible misunderstandings and mistakes.

I could see a far stronger case for getting students to code up some adaptive learning resources, perhaps using IF tools, than using AL resources. I’m thinking now about where I might be able to squeeze this sort of thing in to Roehampton modules…

The landscape has undoubtedly changed, partly due to the withdrawal of large swathes of government from this territory (gone are National Strategies, the role of local authorities is diminished and there’s no longer funding for teachers to study for masters), but also because of the vibrant online communities and networks that are so easy for teachers to use – blogs, Facebook, Twitter, the TES and Guardian communities are so accessible, and so useful. Technology mediated personal learning networks have transformed CPD for many: this is as much about the development of the profession as professional development – it’s so easy for teachers to share their ideas and resources now, in a way which would once have been impossible.

Getting buy-in from others to ideas lies at the boundary between innovation and creativity: there are many of who can and do teach creatively, far fewer who are genuine innovators in the sense that others take up their ideas and make them their own. David Hargreaves’ insights here are useful: he wrote back in ’99 about the ‘tinkering’ teacher an ‘an individualised embryo of institutional knowledge creation’, making the point that knowledge or innovation transfer was “most easily achieved when a teacher tinkers with information derived from another’s professional practice.” This seems to be exactly what we now see in so many online networks.

I was impressed that the coalition’s education whitepaper, The Importance of Teaching was supported by a summary of evidence in support of this, The Case for Change, even if some of the research was used somewhat selectively. It states:

“Collaborative professional development is more strongly associated with improvements in teaching and learning… [it] appears more likely to produce changes in teacher practice, attitudes or beliefs and in pupil outcomes.”

This really isn’t much of a surprise, and seems hardly unique to teaching. If we’re willing to accept the notion of teaching as a craft, then the sort of apprenticeship and development common to other craft domains ought to work as well for teaching as they do in these domains. In such domains, a community of practice model is commonplace, with the route to mastery from legitimate peripheral participation being characterised by increasingly significant contributions to increasingly complex projects. Professional development for software craftsman is integral to the process of making new code: yes there’s a need to learn new knowledge and skills, to acquire new understanding, but time and time again this comes back to making things with others. This is just one of the reasons why participating in open source projects is such a good training for software craftsman. But if for software developers and other craftsmen then why not also for teachers?

Yes, I think there’s going to be a great need for teachers to acquire new subject knowledge and pedagogic content knowledge for teaching programming and other aspects of computer science; indeed I’d agree that this is probably the biggest challenge facing CAS now. Yes, there is a place for traditional courses, and for high quality self-study resources (ranging from MOOCs and OERs from premier league universities through to interactive tutorials). But perhaps there’s also a place for a more collaborative approach to CPD in which teachers learn together through making things together: what better way to learn programming than by, er, programming? This needn’t be from scratch (or Scratch) either: it might not suit the purists, but hacking around with a few open source modules seems a pretty good way in to picking up a little PHP or javascript. What better way to learn how to teach CS, something, interestingly, which Sue Sentance’s CPD survey suggests teachers are more interested in than learning CS, than through working together with others on a scheme of work, a set of learning resources or a text book chapter?

The new, slimmed down programme of study is a long, long way from a scheme of work: I think there’s a great CPD opportunity here for ICT teachers to sit round a (real or virtual) table and code up a scheme of work to implement the functional requirements of the PoS.