No Comfort

Categories: Other
I wasn't sure where to put this post as its not Geography and it's not CPD, but I've decided to put this on here seeing as its my class blog and I find myself in the uncharted waters of now teaching an s1 computing class as well as my subject timetable. I have to say that some of the content is taking me right out of my comfort zone, but I'm in the happy position of teaching part of a class that I've already had on rotation in Geography, students I know well. I was talking to the class the other day about how they used computers themselves in our first lesson. We used primarypad to collate group responses and it allowed us to collect a lot of information in one place quickly. Below is a wordle of the results



I was surprised that homework was so prominent, but not so much when they openly admitted to copying and pasting directly from the web. I was less surprised to see Bebo and Facebook, even although I think (?) there is an age restriction on both sites (my class are 11-12 years old). There were so many uses involving social interactions that it made me think about the vital importance of internet safety guidance and the absolute requirement to start using more social media as part of the school experience. Like me, the students were much more interested in what they could do with a computer once they had logged on. Hardware has never really interested me as long as its working :)
I therefore asked 'How much do you know about the computer hardware you are using?'. The results showed a more limited knowledge in most cases:


Part of me wondered why it was important to know so much about the computer so early, but I'm aware that someone with a computing background would probably ask why kids need to know about corries or volcanoes! I'm also not sure how many jobs would be around today that didn't require some knowledge of hardware/software. Tomorrow, I'm going to be talking about parts of the computer system and might use some parts of this until such times as I have the booklets for my class. I think I'll also ask the class to do an advert for someone assembling their own system as a homework, maybe using some of the 100 glogster accounts I've still got to use if I can remember my login! I'll leave the really technical stuff to Mr Alexander on Friday ;)