Re: IT Competencies
What I appreciate about this list is the diversity of perspectives: elementary, middle, high school and Higher Ed as well as techies, integration specialists, classroom and specialist teachers.
Larry: your inquiry was to-the-point, and I apologize for dodging it and turning to broader topics.
Attached is the 7th/8th grade curriculum that we had been doing up until recently. It is roughly based on VT Tech GCEs for that grade cluster, but includes reinforcement of skills for younger grades (reality: 7th graders do not come in with consistent experience from grades 3-6). Sadly it is a “broad brush” of topics and projects were done in a contrived context – for a variety of reasons (scheduling in particular) it was difficult to work in conjunction with core teachers. In the final two years of this program (now discontinued) I began to add a smattering of web 2.0 tools including Google Docs and Wiki use. The real drawback was that because we were “pulling kids out” many teachers assumed that the kids were achieving the standards, when the reality was that students need more than brief “exposure” to these tools to master them. Regular opportunity and practice needs to be everyone’s responsibility, not just the “computer teacher’s”
My personal view has been that 8th grade competency is the most critical, for it is the last year that all students receive “the same” instruction. Once they enter High School their experiences will diversify, and the extent to which they learn and apply tech skills will depend on course selection. For that reason our “optimistic” goal would be to send kids to the High School with exposure to a variety of applications and their functions, as well as the ability to learn new applications (focus on universal functionality vs. specifics) and recognize “the right tool for the job” when they have a task to accomplish. I guess this is how we (locally) are defining “technological literacy” as per NCLB etc.
I look forward to the discussions about revisions to GCEs, as clearly there are skills that are overlooked in such a straightforward approach to computer applications. It is interesting to me that the “technology” standards include process skills that transcend the use of tech tools: “21st Century Learning” skills that are incorporated into IT simply because that is the context in which they are practiced?
On snow days you get 10 cents...
Eric
on 1/28/09 8:20 AM, Steve Cavrak wrote:
On Jan 27, 2009, at 9:04 PM, Laurence Booker wrote:
Next step: please tell me what you guys do in your IT classes so I can measure my own classes
and what I teach them. If you're way ahead of me -- and I want to know this, if it is so -- then
I have to catch up.
Following Lucie's reminder, I dug up a link to
Information Technology and Vermont Education Goals: A Vermont State Technology Council Position Paper.
A number of the essential skills relate to more than one strand or area. These are higher- level thinking skills such as analyzing, synthesizing and evaluating. These skills are recognized as basic to the effective use of information technology. We also recognize a core of knowledge necessary for students in the use of technological tools for learning and working. This core includes: basic terminology, ethics, privacy, ownership, copyright, health issues, and vocational implications of technology.
A classic ... http://www.vita-learn.org/resources/eddocs/itveg.html
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This thread reminded me of some of the more modern skills - not included in the "office" suite ...
- social computing a la youtube, facebook, orkut, ...
- collaborative computing a la online conferencing, webinars, wikimedia, twitter, aim, ...
- media computing a la flickr, fotolog,
- datasharing a la delicious, citulike, digg,
- keitai computing a la iphone, blackberry, android,
- ??? a la dslight (brain age, sonomama, ...) or wii/fit
