Catshanghai

The Key Stage 3 ICT Strategy was launched by the UK government in 2002 to try and improve the quality and consistency of ICT teaching and learning in UK secondary schools. It attempts to clarify the requirements of the national curriculum by offering lesson plans and resources to download from the strategy website. I have to deal with it everyday and I fear that the Strategy is becoming less and less relevant. Technology is changing very quickly and students are getting more skilled at younger ages than ever before. Curricula will always move much slower than technological change. New frameworks have to go through committees and are out of date before they are even published. Anyway, here are a few thoughts on new directions that need to be considered to put Key Stage 3 ICT education back on track.

• Two units should be taught on web design including explicit coverage of CSS, accessibility and useability issues. Table based design should be explicitly discouraged as bad practice. It would be good if older students had a chance had a chance to see how webservers were setup and accepted scripts, although this would make more sense at Key Stages 4 and 5.
• There should be coverage of how to be a responsible digital citizen, including how to keep safe on the Internet, backing up data, identity theft, avoiding viruses, malware, censorship, digital rights management and intellectual property issues.
• There should be discussion of new internet technologies including video
  conferencing, Internet messaging, netcasting, online video, RSS feeds and Adobe Apollo to keep upto date with these new and subsequent developments.
• There should be more explicit teaching of relational databases. At the moment, this is fudged to link in with the whole issue of data handling.
• The whole issue of evaluating information should be updated to keep up with the idea of blogs and user generated content, which bypass any form of editorial cotrol. It would be good if someone setup a simplified “digg” feedback engine that students could use to filter out good and bad content using an agreed framework. I think that would produce some interesting results.
• Lego Mindstorms and Microsoft’s Robotic kit are expensive resources that require a lot of planning, but they could really make learning about systems and control much more engaging.

This is not an exhaustive document and I expect to add to it in the near future as I think about rewriting my own schemes of work.