Education and society http://www.naec.org.uk If you have been working in the field of educational computing for a long time, its easy to forget how times are moving along and that many of the adults working in the field have grown up with microcomputers in schools. This presents a challenge to those who have been involved since early days to respond to a growing society-wide adoption of technology where education can be seen to be lagging, whereas it once was seen to be leading. daily 1 2008-07-09T06:10:55Z Nothing changes, everything changes http://www.naec.org.uk/stories/nothing-changes-everything-changes New teachers were using computers in their own schooling, unlike many pioneers

I once had a group of teacher education students in the middle nineties in the School of Education at Anglia Polytechnic University. This was a typical group of trainee primary teachers - half 18-year-old women, half mature women and one man. I was introducing simulation programs and began with a Granny's Garden - I played the tune from the program and asked the group could they identify it and had they seen it in use in the classroom on school experience visits. Two 18-year-olds piped up "Yes - its Granny's Garden - we've used it". I asked "What were the children doing with it?" They said "We were those children!"

Lessons learnt

The lesson for me was, time moves faster than you think, and raises the question of whether they were better able as a generation of teachers to make sense of present and future opportunities than the generation of teachers which preceded them? Should professional development for teachers now be quite different from the past and assume a different level of familiarity?

]]> No publisher Richard Millwood society story education 2008-06-22T15:35:00Z Page