[Mossypne]

http://www.bbc.co.uk...cation-16493929

ICT in UK Secondary schools is to be scrapped from September and to be replaced by a simple Computer science course. I'm currently in my final year at secondary school and ICT was awful, we just sat there learning Word and things like that, when they could of been teaching us about computers!

Thoughts?

P.S. For anyone that doesn't know, Secondary school in UK is from ages 11-16!

[negligible]

I was in school around the time computers first became commonplace. I think ICT was far more useful at the time because most house holds still did not own a computer, especially the lower income families therefore basic IT skills where a great use for kids.

These days all these kids have access to computers at home at the very least, so the basic skills are already there. Word and Excel may be pretty boring, but they're very useful to know how to use properly.

ICT has never been about "Computers", it's been about using their common software. Which is why you should never take A-Level ICT if you're into actual computing...

[Mossypne]

Put my application form in for college the other week and I put Computing down, I was never going to put ICT down!

[darek9576]

I am not sure you will learn a lot in college. Have some friends at different colleges doing Game Development and they are hopeless at coding.

[Shane Hudson]

I wonder how much of this is down to 1) Eric Schmidt saying the UK should be back at the forefront of computing and 2) the Raspberry Pi!!! The R-Pi foundation has been involved a lot with both the government, schools and the media.

I think it is a great step, as long as the new curriculum is fun for everyone, not just the geeks and those that know they want to get into programming!

[Kingbradley6]

We were not allowed to take ICT at my school anyway. It was part of a 'general learning' thing in Year 7, but it stopped after that. Learning about Word and Excel sounds dull - don't school children pick these skills up naturally as they go through education (with more homework being set on computers etc)?

This post has been edited by Kingbradley6: 12 January 2012 - 07:25 AM

[master.bennett]

Yeah, I had to go through the the awful ICT system. Fortunately I was able to take Computing at A-levels. You really do not learn nothing and in quite a lot of the cases, the students probably know more than the teachers

[negligible]

I remember showing my teacher how to use our classrooms single Acorn computer when I was in my primary school Year 2 or 3.
It wasn't until midway through highschool, at about Year 9, that my school hired a teacher who'd actually knew the subject.

O'Flarity was definitely the first teacher to have a better skill set than myself, the school's security was laughable before he arrived and the network itself was terrible. I could never toy with the computers after he'd upgraded the system, where as before I was able to remote shutdown, send messages and do stuff like access the Boot.ini and make my own humorous boot choices.