Who Ofsted’s Ofsted?

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Who will watch the watchmen?

Decimus Junius Juvenal, Satires, 2^nd century AD.

Pragmatic Education on Ofsted.

(The flip side of Four Things from Ofsted. See also What OFSTED actually want.)

Use data to build better schools

Andreas Schleicher: Use data to build better schools from TEDGlobal 2012.

Clay Shirky

Clay Shirky: How cognitive surplus will change the world

I’d watched this talk ages ago and it had lain in the back of my mind, resurfacing from time to time, but the details frustratingly forgotten.

Not matter what Google-fu I tried, I couldn’t conjure it back out of the interwebz. I began to suspect I’d misremembered it.

But today I rediscovered it. And it’s the manner of the rediscovery that’s interesting.

I wanted to include a video by Douglas Rushkoff, on his book Program or Be Programmed, in some material for year 8 students thinking about their transition into year 9.

 

The video supports a book.

Rushkoff’s website for the book links to Amazon to purchase.

The Amazon page had a section for ‘People that bought this also bought…’

In that section was a link to Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators by Clay Shirky.

The link to Cognitive Surplus triggered a bunch of neurons and a quick search for ‘Cognitive Surplus Clay Shirky’ landed me on the long forgotten TED.com page.

Sweet.

OCR Computing and EBacc

OCR confirmation that their GCSE in Computing counts as Computer Science as far as the Department of Education are concerned…

Computer science will become an EBacc subject, the Education Secretary announced today. It will be added to the list of separate science options, making four separate sciences instead of the traditional three. OCR’s GCSE in Computing will specifically count towards the EBacc in performance tables.

I’ll grab a PDF copy JIC.

How we teach teachers to teach programming

The computing education blog poses a long list of research questions in computing education. I was going to quote my favourite, but the whole post is worth reading…

International Computing Curricula (or another reason why CAS is awesome)

The UKs Department of Education has published a draft programme of study for consultation – part of the curriculum changes for 2014. This includes Computing as a subject in Key Stages 1 – 4, distinct from ICT (see previous post on terminology).

What’s happening elsewhere? I started to look and found interesting things in Australia and the United States…

• Australia have a draft curriculum for Technology. This:

draws together the distinct but related subjects of Design
and Technologies and Digital Technologies

• In the United States there is a project to develop a new first course in computing:

Computer Science: Principles is a new course under development that seeks to broaden participation in computing and computer science.

…before finding that CAS had got there already with a document of international comparisons:

This briefing note summarises how computing (i.e. computer science) is taught at (high) school in other countries.  We focus especially on what computer science qualifications are available to students.

UK Child Poverty

The Guardian Datablog has published a map of UK child poverty based on data published by the Campaign to End Child Poverty.

Developing *in* the Browser

For various reasons I’ve been experimenting with services that allow students to develop *and run* code in the browser.