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The Perils and Pitfalls of being ‘The Block’ to learning & teaching

, 13th September 2010 at 10:37 AM (1389 Views)

Once again I fall into the role of the fervent defender of the blighted IT Support teams in schools. As much as I enjoyed a good argument (oh no you don’t!) there are times when I feel that the word compromise is missing from the vocabulary of some people.

In a short break from the course I am on at the moment I picked up a tweet to a blog post from our friend Spannerman2.
It makes for good reading and raises an important points about IT and ICT & Computing as subjects, about the lack of subject specialism in teachers of these subjects and about the amount of effort which goes into running (& locking down) a school network.

It does, however, throw stones. I don’t think stone throwing is any good at the moment in education. Read more here...

Tags: anti-virus, change management, fits, innovation, it manager, it support, senior leadership, strategy, tech support, user groups

Categories: Uncategorized

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Comments

Butuz - 6th October 2010 04:02 PM
Wow. The constructiveness of that blog astounds me. He clearly belongs in the 80s with his BBC Master.

Unfortunately for the rest of us things have moved on somewhat since then.
GrumbleDook - 6th October 2010 09:32 PM
Spannerman2 and I agree to disagree on a number of things, but his points are aimed constructively and he has been part of some very healthy discussions since this original post.

I will do a follow-up post in a few weeks time to summarise his contributions and others too.
Butuz - 7th October 2010 10:03 AM
Cheers GrumbleDook.

I would be interested to hear some constructive ideas from Spannerman2 regarding his "new model" of curriculum network. Personally I think virtual machines / virtual images of some kind would be one of the better ways to provide pupils with an unrestricted desktop / unrestricted network for them to experiment with without endangering the curriculum network.

There is simply no way that kind of "abuse" could be allowed on a curriculum network because within 6 months the entire network would either be at best dead or very dysfunctional, and it worst totally compromised and the school would be straight in the newspapers when private pupil/staff data was uploaded all over the internet. I would be willing to wager Spannerman2 would probably be the first to complain to his network manager when he was unable to teach due to not even being able to log on.

Another question – assuming Spannerman2 teaches in a school, has he been to his SMT/Head to put forward his radical new ideas on how to teach ICT? How did that go?

Cheers

Butuz