Technological Knowledge and Skills documents

Today the Ministry of Education and DTEP released a joint statement committing to the future direction of ICT education in schools.

This announcement marks the most significant change to ICT education in schools in 15 years.

From the techlink site: officially

Future Subjects of Technology

The Ministry of Education has been exploring the place of technological knowledge and skills within the learning area of Technology. This project seeks to identify what might become the 'future subjects' of technology to support coherent learning programmes for students; and, in this context, develop technological knowledge and skills to support programmes in senior secondary technology through the provision of:

Context specific knowledge and skill achievement standards for technology; and

Technology Teaching and Learning Guides.

Future Subjects of Technology (PDF download, 271Kb)

Digital Technologies Expert Panel

The Ministry of Education and the Digital Technologies Expert Panel (DTEP) are pleased to jointly announce the high-level outcomes of the work of the DTEP.

Outcomes from Digital Technologies Expert Panel / Ministry of Education Process (PDF download, 159Kb)

Press Release: Future Direction Of ICT Education In Secondary SchoolsPDF download, 5Kb)

Now for the other stuff,

anyone else look at this as being one of the biggest croc of s**t around.

Lets look at the recommendations from the DTEp about removing ICT from Technology, oh look its now back in Technology, you can tell that that is a Ministry thing, heaven forbid they don't want to admit that they f**ked up. Instead we are going to have to live with this for the rest of our lives.

Professional Development, this is going to be a big one. The majority of ICT teachers in New Zealand are not trained ICT teachers. Yeap, they are teachers that have had an interest in computing, know how to use a few software applications, have been forced to teach ICT because they have a gap in their timetable. There are but a minority that have ICT degrees in the subject. Training for these teachers is going to be interesting. I am waiting for the part from the Ministry that is like the G3 debate from years ago, we are going to have to sit a qualification to say that we are capable of teaching the subject. Who is going to create this test, some busy body at the Ministry of Education who isn't an ICT teacher themselves and doesn't have any qualifications in ICT, hmm I feel like this is deja vu, wasn't this how we got Technology Achievement Standards in the first place, they we by a Physicial Education Teacher.

Let the rant stop, and being the last day of the term, have a break for two weeks. Yeah right (I am a fan of the tui ads)

Technology draft matrix

For those that are interested, I thought I would inform you that you can now give feedback on the draft technology matrix and rationale in the first stage of the feedback/consultation process of the achievement standard alignment process. There is an online feedback form which you need to access from the left hand nav panel. You can access the material here: http://www.tenz.org.nz/Consultation.htm

You can also access it from the What's new box on the DTG home page http://dtg.tki.org.nz - keep an eye on this space as it does change relatively frequently highlighting all sorts of things in the digital technology space.

I am busy working out how to nicely put my disgust at this matrix

Programming problems in High Schools

We use a managed network system at our school which limits the students ability to run .exe files.

I have been using gamemaker through a virtual environment and discovered problems that would not allow students to run the executable in the virtual environment, due to Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 would not allow a graphics card greater than 16meg to be created, gamemaker requires a 64 meg graphics card or greater. We solved this by enabling an area on the network to run .exe files so the students could test.

The other programming software environments we teach run fine in virtual environments, visual basic and visual c# run well in Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, but this does not have USB support.

When my year 13 students asked whether we could create games for the xbox 360 through the XNA creators kit using the skills they have gained in Visual C#, I thought sure, this sounds like something we can do and works in well with Achievment Standards and the competition/learning resources for STUDENT INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY DESIGN COMPETITION located at http://www.nzfact.co.nz/education.html.

After a couple of months figuring out that Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 won't run the xbox 360 for windows game controllers, installing vmware player and getting all the systems working and testing we have encountered our next problem, vmware player does not support directx3d, there is no drivers or solutions around.

We cannot create the exectable file and copy it through to another area as XNA reequires you to debug the program first. How are other schools providing computer programming experiences, do you dual boot, run liveCD's run off USB sticks? have a complete computer science lab that is setup just for those classes?

Your help would be appreciated.

Note: 28/7/2008 While reading Lance Armstrongs book, it's not about the bike I came up with the answer for my troubles, give the students privileged user rights on the machine. they cannot access anywhere else or so anything on the network due to permissions, but user rights on the machine might just work. I just need to work out what machines they privileged  use and grant them access, no messy creating different user rights or anything like that. Why did I not think of that 6 months ago. I think it because I had my mind on something completely different. Shows what reading a book can do for you. Also we can test out the web browsers that we are going to create...

Library Competition

I am working on getting my clients for the classes Achievement Standards, I am looking at the students developing a solution for literacy in the school. This is the year 13 web design class. One is for the library to try and promote the borrowing of books through various means. They have to design a whole campaign around it. From posters, cards, through to a web site. That should make the design students happy. They might even be able to combine it into their design work in their class. I will have to take to the design teacher about it. The other involves the use of flash and some sound recording. Click on a sentence and it will read it out. This will involve patience and is quite simple to develop. Though they will have a rough client to work with.

I have been working through new zealand library websites, a number of them have been doing some good competitions encouraging teenagers to read books at there library, fill in the details and work from there, Invercargill City Library has by the looks of it just recovered its password to its blog site and started posting again, the first time in two years. Which brings up when developing a website it has to be easy to use as well as maintained. If you want to create a web presence you have keep it going. It is no use just using it once then forgetting about it. You need to keep your audience and content up to date. Manukau City Libraries has put some work into their site this year with Manix 2. This seems to be going well and they have put some thought into their design and development. i hope that they keep it up. It would be interesting to see what your local city library is doing to encourage teens to read. For me, this was all started when waitakere city libraries started their books in the wild scheme through the local high schools, that is where I think it would be great for our students to do the same, develop something that they can start at our school. it is just a short time frame. Which raises a question, how much time do you give them for a level 3 achievement standard.

As I said before, I have gone through a number of city libraries websites and had a look, I have print screened these pages and put them in a powerpoint presentation which I have put up on google docs, I have still to do more work on this before putting it out as a resource pack to my students.

The year 13 programming class will have to develop a game for Intellectual property as part of a campaign to help promote it. thought it might be nice to use XNA development. The other would work to the ones that are more interested in Hardware, to develop a wireless hotspot for a motel. They have to look at all the equipment required, setup and installation as well as documentation.

I hope that we can get through all this, i have 12 weeks as well as exam time, though i am going to have to come up with an exam for all these classes. Something that is simple enough to mark and something that others can understand.

I still have to organise a meeting with team solutions about intergrating what I am doing into a more defined subject. It is just a problem when you do not know what your client are going to be or how they will work. I have to get this more defined and talk to them about what we are planning to do.

I am only doing this because twitter is down for maintenance for an hour, and I just needed to get something down on paper, ok, keybaord. The other issue I had today was that the hotfixes for the compuiter still had not been allocated, i had been told they had been. emailled the outside support desk and found that they were waiting for the servers to be restarted before they allocated the packages. I hope I do not get told off on Monday about this.

Kiwi students being 'put off' computing

Kiwi students being 'put off' computing
The Dominion Post Monday, 26 May 2008

Unrealistic and vague technology achievements standards are putting school pupils off tertiary courses and careers in the information technology industry, according to a highly critical report commissioned by the Computer Society.

The society commissioned a team of high-powered academics to investigate the 18 technology achievement standards approved by the Education Ministry as part of its National Qualifications Framework. They found none of them were appropriate.

Education Ministry spokesman Mike Bodnar said the ministry had not had time to consider the report but agreed assessment standards for computer science could be improved.

The ministry was undertaking "substantial work" on the senior school curriculum though its Digital Technologies Guidelines that would provide pupils with programmes that were "clearly focused on areas of future training and interest", he said.

But the report's authors – Auckland University of Technology lecturer Gordon Grimsey and Lynfield College computer teacher Margot Phillipps – say that using those guidelines to tackle the problems it identified would be "like painting over flaking paintwork adhering to rotten timber".

Several university professors were among a team of 11 academics and Computer Society office holders who reviewed their findings.

The number of secondary school pupils achieving unit standards in physics and calculus at NQF level 3 exceeded those achieving in computer science by a factor of five-to- one, the report found.

Many achievement standards were "unachievable" by most pupils or didn't assess pupils' competence in any detail. There were also "huge gaps" in the coverage of the skills and knowledge assessed.

"We suspect there is a huge number of potential computing professionals who have already opted out of the discipline during secondary school, either because of the lack of relevant achievement standards, or because of the unpalatable offering of what they are told is relevant for a future computing career," the report says.

The Computer Society commissioned the report after becoming concerned with the suitability of the assessment of ICT pupils at secondary school level and after discussions with the Post Primary Teachers Association.

Computer science needs to be given its own curriculum, which could be aligned with the mathematics curriculum, the report says. "Without this, we see the downward trend of computer science tertiary enrolments in New Zealand continuing. As a nation, we are spurning massive opportunities that come with having highly-skilled computing professionals in our workforce – something we can ill-afford to do.

"The New Zealand curriculum document ignores ICT completely. There is no reference to ICT, IT, information technology or computing anywhere in the document."
The report noted there were few teachers with the necessary skills and knowledge to teach computer science in schools. But it said that if non-specialist teachers were to be encouraged to take these courses, "they should not be put in the position of trying to make unworkable standards work".

Education Minister Chris Carter announced last week that schools would get extra funding of $65.3 million over four years to help meet the costs of ICT.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/4560782a28.html

Computing Acheivement Standards - the rationale continues

I have been looking at what other schools are doing for Programming Assessments and have gathered a variety of information, most of them however are doing Unit Standards, this is one thing that we are trying to move away from at the school I am at, we are looking at Achievement Standards. However we find that they are difficult as the Technology Process is different from the commonly used System Development Life Cycle.

Here is the information that I have managed to find: located here

The Process of Creating a Computer program

The Technology Curriculum from the Ministry of Education uses a Technology process to develop programs which was designed for 'hard' technologies such as Wood, Metal, Food, and Clothing.

This process was never intended for, nor is it optimised for, creating Computer Programs. This means that NCEA assessments (Unit Standards) based on the Technology Curriculum, require students to use a different, non-standard design process to design programs.

According to Dr. Peter Andreae from the Computer Science Department at Victoria University, the design and planning process encouraged by the NZ Technology Curriculum has been shown by international research to be inefficient and inappropriate for creating computer programs. Certainly in my experience the NZQA Unit Standards do not encourage a process that easily leads to robust, well-designed programs.

It is obviously necessary to use the Ministry's process to gain Programming credits in NCEA, but for other purposes we will be using a more industry-standard method - one which is commonly used by programmers world-wide.

You can compare the two different processes here:

Technology Curriculum Programming Process
Industry-Standard Programming Process

ICT Achievement Standards

Should there be specific achievement standards for ICT in the NCEA qualifications, yes.

The current Unit Standards are more focussed towards the skills of using an application, whether it be word processing, spreadsheet, presentation or desktop publishing. Where are the computer science ones?
There are 2780, 2781, basic computer fundamentals. 18740 is a basic level 2 programming one that gets you to design the most basic of basic programs, you don't even have to use a recognized programming language. you could use gamemaker with its GUI interface.

There is no ITO (Industry Training Organization) in charge of Computing in schools, there is no real organizations looking after computing unit standards, there is the NACAQ, which looks at the tertiary side of things. It needs someone else to come along and get the government to recognize that the Technology Achievement Standards just don't cut the mustard when it comes to computer science.

You can get the Technology Achievement Standards by planning and putting on a cultural performance, or putting on a play. We need specific ones to look at programming, computer ethics, computer fundamentals.

If we want more IT graduates in New Zealand then we have to start really looking at what is happening within secondary schools. Can everyone use a word processor? But can everyone describe why when importing another text document in that all these hieroglyphics come up instead of what should be coming up?

Technology Achievement Standards have a defined technology process you have to go through, where ICT programming has a clearly defined SDC (System Development Cycle). These two conflict with each other.

Looking at the this, the following list came out of the meeting
Rationale for Achievement Standards in ICT (Computer Science)

1. If Technology Achievement standards are used in other areas of content, we don't have enough Achievement Standards available for students to complete a wholly Achievement Standard assessed course.
2. There are specific knowledge, skills and processes that are not covered by the current Technology Achievement Standards as they differ in their assessed processes.
3. The unit standards do not cater for meritorious or excellence approaches to the assessments and as a rider to this will not encourage provide scholarship or Scholarship respectively.
4. Student motivation is limited by Unit Standards as they do not encourage students to push for "greater heights."
5. There are problems with the allocation of credits if the Technology Acheivement Standards are used elsewhere (no double dipping)
6. We would like standards that are better suited to pathways in ICT that leads to I.T. graduates and other more academic post secondary learning. These standards are less industry orientated and more computer science based.
7. To provide Achievement Standards that could complement the proposed ICT Curriculum Framework.
8. ICT is not treated as a tool for the purposes of assessments with these Achievement Standards, but as an area of discipline in its own right. (The tools are created by those working in the computer science line to contrast this with the users of ICT)
9. There are concepts, processes and practices in Computing that have existed for many years and will continue to do so. These concepts, processes and practices lend themselves to assessment with these proposed Computer Science Achievement Standards.
10. As there is no ITO in the ICT area, the Unit Standards are not being developed to cater for the type of learning that encourages higher thinking structures. the style of unit standards is also an obstacle in this regard.
11. The Technology Process in the Achievement Standards does not really cover the needs of the Systems Development Process which is more commonly recognized in IT education and industry.

Looking at this and what has been developed, I think I would have the change the title of the course that I run at school, away from the programming and more look at Computer Science, i can just see the leaders of learning face when I say that I want to change the name, "Oh, not again"

12CSI <- I like this, I can't use 12SCI that relates to Science.
12 Computer Science :)