The case for 21st century teachers

A great 5 minute video making the case for a revolution in schools and the way teachers need to be allowed to cast off 19th century ways of working.
Many thanks to JeanetteMcLeod for tweeting this

Uninformative Government

The innovation select committees’ judgement on the overuse of jargon by the DIUS, is reported in Private Eye (issue 1229 p6).
The committee chastised the DIUS for the ‘inaccessibility of the prose’ and ‘jargon-riddled phrases, assumptions backed up with no clear evidence but designed to provide a positive tone, and euphemisms deflecting likely failure’
Here is the link to this marvellously entertaining report

Over 25 years I’ve seen the explosion of information in government outpourings to schools. Government writers regard a website as an opportunity to dump massive amounts of jargonistic waffle and then claim they’ve increased communication.
The QCA website the DCSF website and Curriculum Online (now deceased) have all left me speechless with frustration on several occasions. Cumbersome, disorganised and uninformative are the politest words I can find.

The sites often abuse the facility to link online endlessly to yet another 30 pages of mind-boggling inanity. These sites are dumping grounds for mountains of unhelpful verbosity piled high with no regard to the needs of the audience. Teachers are now enslaved to the whims of politicians, so they’re forced to try and make sense of this jumble of demands, however poorly expressed and organised.
Government Education departments have lost a sense of their duty to communicate powerfully, with precision and clarity.

Why are schools slow to exploit ICT?

An article by Maureen McTaggart highlights the latest Becta survey finding schools slow to exploit technology.  I’m surprised anyone is surprised though. I think the reasons are clear:

1. We tend not to take risks when our leaders have no room for failure and we are boxed in by irreconcilable demands. 

2. Many tech writers fail to make ICT accessible for busy teachers. Only the most dedicated teachers make it through the magic forest

Organisations like Becta  work hard to make ICT accessible for schools but it’s tricky to overcome a curriculum and structure that reflects the 19th century better than the 21st century.