A colleague of mine, Lizzie Wray, assistant head of Chorlton Park Primary School in South Manchester has started a wiki to invite educators to contribute to a multimedia curriculum for the 21st Century.
This chimes with an article that I came across written by John Naughton for the Observer via The Unreasonable Man's blog. The basic premise of this humorous piece being that the QCA is not the appropriate body to write a curriculum for ICT, referring to the result as OPIC (Old Person's ICT Curriculum). How right he is! In a world where the adults are spending so much time worrying about the Internet; sticking their heads in the sand over the power of Web 2.0 to inspire and educate; and generally hoping that the social networking world will be so utterly discredited by media hysteria that they won't have to learn a new set of skills. In the meantime the kids are interacting with each other via Playstation, SMS, Myspace, Bebo, Club Penguin etc, and nobody is looking.
The QCA curriculum for ICT is in danger of becoming a relic that is stultifying good teachers of ICT where schools are still insisting that they follow it - and there are so many of them. The children at Chorlton Park blog, manipulate digital images with Photoshop, make movies, animate, record sound and much more, not as "special" one-off projects, but every day. And what will these children experience in their first ICT lesson at secondary school?
To be fair, it's hardly the secondary school's fault if the year 7s from all the other feeder primary schools think that a multimedia presentation is a PowerPoint with links and a movie in it.*
I am sure the QCA would argue that their curriculum is open-ended and allows plenty of scope for the adventurous. I disagree; it's a curriculum that brings everything down to the lowest common denominator, to allow those teachers who have not embraced ICT to get away with the minimum.
*This is not meant to disparage the other schools near Chorlton Park, as I have no idea how good or bad their ICT is, it's just making a general point.
Lizzie's wiki is http://chorltonpark.pbwiki.com . You can email her at [email protected] if you would like the password to edit and contribute to the wiki.