International Schools IT Meeting - AIS - Thu Nov 4th 4-6pm

Last week I had a chance to chat with some IT Teachers from other international schools in Singapore.

The main highlights were:

Google Apps

There has been a lot of talk about Google apps over the last few months, although it’s considered a bit of yesterdays news it keeps on cropping up whenever there’s a get together. To get started with Google Apps checkout this. At the moment I use Gmail for my students (checkout https://mail.google.com/a/avondalestudents.net), but I find this system slow at times and fiddly to administer. I will be moving all of my ICT Students from year 2 onto Moodle in 2011 as it is locally hosted and runs very quickly over our network.

Paper Cut

The first I heard about Papercut was from our system administrator Stephen Fairclough this has dramatically cut our paper usage over the last few months. To further reduce paper some international school provide a paper use ranking and distribute it to their staff at the end of every term – not a bad idea.

How should we teach IT

Get a room full of IT teachers and there will be little agreement in this area. We are split between the idea that there are important, universal skills and/or concepts which always needs to be taught (if you had somebody who was good at technology in 1975 they would still be good in 2010) and that there are no universal skills that can be taught to students because change happens too quickly (why focus on the subtile aspects of our current communications technology in explicit IT sessions when we know it will not be around when our students enter the workforce).

Another topic which is up in the air is whether or not we should even have dedicated IT teachers, I believe my role is to support teachers to a point where they will be able to deliver technology rich lessons (this is a long term goal). However, there is an expectation to have IT offered as a separate topic both culturally from school administration and from parents who like to see ICT labs and departments, which they are familiar with from their own experience as students.

AOB

Everybody seems to be interested in getting Ipod touches and Ipads ASAP and the community is taken with all things Mac. There was some criticism of Mac & OSX in that teachers and students lack file management skills when they use Macs exclusively (assuming file management is a skill we will need in 10 years time).