Are netbooks really such a success?

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

We get a lot of press releases talking about research in PC Pro, and studies have shown that 83% of them are entirely made up (boom boom).

But recently the NPD group, a market research company based in the States, published a study that showed only 58% of consumers who “bought a netbook instead of a notebook” (my italics) were happy with their purchase. That compares to 70% of buyers being happy if they intended to buy netbooks from the start.

The study then went on to say that 60% of buyers “never even took their netbooks out of their house”, which kind of suggests they shouldn’t have bought netbooks in the first place. (more…)

ICT curriculum last updated in… 1999

Monday, June 8th, 2009

Things move incredibly quickly in technology. Back in the March 1999 issue of PC Pro, for example, our news section was bemoaning the fact NT4 was as “secure as a piece of Swiss cheese” and marvelling at the prospect of some blue-sky BT technology called ADSL.

Why the sudden flashback to 1999? Because that, according to the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority’s website, was the last time the ICT National Curriculum for 5 to 11-year-olds was updated. Scan right down to the bottom of the page, and there you’ll find: “This content relates to the 1999 programmes of study and attainment targets.”

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My first-hand experience of a first-class IT education

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009

PC Pro’s had a fair bit to say about the standard of IT education over the years, not least the shambolic ICT GCSE examination papers that thousands of pupils will be sitting this summer. Good luck with those, kids – even our IT experts were baffled by some of the poorly-worded or just plain wrong questions.

Yesterday, however, I had the pleasure of visiting Sacred Heart High School in Hammersmith – a refreshing example of what can happen when a school gets IT teaching absolutely right.

IT clearly isn’t just another subject that’s taught in the computer rooms at Sacred Heart. It’s intelligently woven into the entire school curriculum and is an everyday part of school life.

I saw how a class of 11-year-olds were practising their French by recording themselves on  pocket Flip Mino camcorders, and then editing the footage on Dell’s new Latitude 2100 netbooks. It didn’t matter if the netbooks didn’t have video-editing software installed, because the pupils could log into their virtual Windows desktops and access the required software over the network.

In fact, virtualisation is second nature to these children. Work completed in school is saved to each pupil’s virtual hard drive, which they can remotely access from home to complete their homework.

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Back to basics

Thursday, November 6th, 2008

Charles Clarke MP (Remember him? Pointy ears, former Education Secretary, made a pig’s ear of the Home Office) has been heading up a “major Policy Commission into the needs of the education system.”

The Commission has made five recommendations. At number five on the list is “Uses of technology”, and making sure the hardware and software used in schools in “interoperable”. Hardware and software that works together? The man’s a visionary.

But that pales in comparison to recommendation number two: back pain in children. “Children are generally taller now and the range of heights in any cohort is greater than in the past (BackCare, FIRA and BESA research). As a result, an increasing number of children are suffering from back pain due to unsuitable furniture.”

Are bigger seats for beanpoles really the second biggest priority for our schools? What about the deplorable state of the IT GCSE exams for starters?