Skip to main content

Rose Review

Sir Jim Rose's interim report - the Primary Curriculum Review - is due on Monday. and already the press are talking about it. While the the BBC spends time talking about summer born children and the opportunity for part time starts for these children. The Times online has two articles mainly about the curriculum changes.

Under the expansive headline "Traditional subjects go in Schools shake-up" they say "under the plans, information technology classes would be given as much prominence as literacy and numeracy, and foreign languages would be taught in tandem with English."
While the article "Primary School Children 'should be taught technology, not tradition' " It's reported that

" Computer skills should be given the same importance as reading, writing and arithmetic, and children should be taught to use podcasts and PowerPoint presentations in primary school, a curriculum review will say today.

The long-awaited report by Sir Jim Rose, a former schools inspector and senior government education adviser, will suggest that children are so computer literate at such a young age that ICT skills usually taught in secondary schools should begin in primaries.

This will ensure that what goes on in the classroom is “a better fit with children's developing abilities” and will help to ensure that education in England does not get left behind by the global technology revolution.

It's good that it's recognised that ICT, e-learning has an important role to play for the next generation but I do hope that the phrase "children should be taught to use podcasts and PowerPoint presentations" is actually the Times interpretation of something like "children will be able to use digital technologies to communicate, present and create multimodal texts'. I'm sure that a review to influence education now and in the future would not be so prescriptive as to mention specific old technology tools such as PowerPoint!

Let's see what we see

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The snow walk

Saturday was to be the day for setting up a new blog, but the prospect of a walk in the park , snow still on the ground and sun bright, was tempting. I asked my fellow tweeters what I should do first, walk in the park or work on the blog? And the unanimous response of those around was to walk first and then set up blog and write about it. So no couch potatoes there. Sadly once we were out there it was so good that that we did not return for a long time. No new blog set up :-( Whilst out I tweeted some photos from the iphone but this was not enough, a blog post was required so here it is. Instead of the new blog I'm showing the pictures in two ways, first new to me a Photopeach spiral (Thanks Simon Widdowson and Allanah King for sharing this at about the same time) and then using Animoto . I have an education license for this so can make longer films Enjoy my walk Snow in the park on PhotoPeach . Use the slider to hear the sound and click on...

Little Voices, Little Scholars

I like to keep in touch with what's happening in the early years. One of the ways I have of getting a global view is to follow early years blogs. I follow quite a few occasionally leaving messages of encouragement and will share them over the weeks. Here is Little Voices, little Scholars . Little Voices, Little Scholars via kwout " They have had a focus on Speaking and listening, as well as environmental issues. Take a look at the video Apii's Hippo

Happy Birthday Paddington Bear

Its the big 5 0 for Paddington today " 50 Years via kwout He's having a tour of the London in a Black Cab to celebrate and there's a photo competition for those lucky enough to see him, (see the site) Think of the number of children who have laughed about and enjoyed his stories over the years, he was certainly a regular visitor to my classroom over the years, and how many of them knew where Peru was on the world map but not their own town! Off to drag my duffel coat out of the cupboard to wear while I drink cocoa and eat marmalade sandwiches virtually with, Simon Mills who has just let me know about it via Twitter, and anyone one else celebrating.