[Year 12 IT Apps] comment about Informatics

Tue May 13 10:05:15 EST 2014

Hi Mark

It would also be good if you reminded people who are responding to put in their response that they should be agitating for a subject that just teaches ordinary office skills for ordinary office jobs.

The sort of subject that you and I might call Business computing or business office skills ( a bit like the old shorthand courses and typing courses of yesteryear) and would be run as  VET subject because it is only about developing some competency in doing things like word processing and spreadsheets and low end web pages. No intellectual challenges and no interest in encouraging further study in computing, just something to give them some basic skills as per your other post.

For the next few years we will still need some people who can do this before we finish outsourcing all those low end monotonous tedious mind numbingly repetitive tautological doubling up jobs to the people who are willing to work hard and challenge them selves in some of the third world developing countries. 
As the career teachers keep telling our students, they will have a number of careers in their lives and the most important thing that they can do to help themselves is to learn how to learn new skills. Our job surely is to help them to develop intellectually so that they can improve themselves.

Off my soap box and back to the exciting NAPLAN

and then off to teach seniors how to think about computing. Luckily I don't have to teach office skills.

Andrew

Andrew Shortell
Educator
CRC Melton

shortell at get2me.net (This List)
@acsbear8 (twitter)

On 13/05/2014, at 9:23 AM, Mark <mark at vceit.com> wrote:

> Hi Maggie. 
> 
> I don't want to mislead people. 
> 
> No, the SAT does not mandate databases, but the real choice is going to have to be them or spreadsheets. 
> I didn't think spreadsheets would have the depth to accomplish the sort of data manipulation required for the SAT, but if teachers get into meatier spreadsheet tools beyond VLOOKUP (e.g. pivot tables and array functions) then I agree that databases would not be necessary.
> 
> I am heartened that your students would be cheered by the new course. I can only comment from the experiences I had with my ITA cohorts - and they likely would have been troubled by the complexity of the SAT. I think the SAT will require quite a different lead-up than we are used to.
> 
> Apologies if I have misled people.
> 
> 
> 
> On 13 May 2014 07:31, Margaret Iaquinto <iaquinto at ozemail.com.au> wrote:
> OK, Mark, here's another opinion. I'm not sure why you think the new Informatics subject will require us to teach database for most of the year. And you say that students loathe database. My students see the value of database and the power of queries with respect to issues such as data mining and privacy rights. Energising.
> 
> You have written that 3 of the 4 Outcomes will be on database. Well, the first Outcome is required to use database. But not the other. The next part is a SAT which is much, much different from Outcomes. 
> 
> It's exciting because students can do research and find a hypothesis and then work out, with the data collected,  whether it is wrong or right. To present all the findings, a wide range of software tools can be used. I would certainly be teaching spreadsheets to crunch numbers. My students would be learning how to deal with quantitative data AND qualitative data. Some students will be using software I do not know how to use but they have learned from their other subjects. This is much different from anything we have had in the past. 
> 
> And I know what you tend to do when folks present an opinion which is different from yours: you slam it vigorously in this public forum. There are times when I enjoy reading your bombast because it cloaks the truth especially when it comes to dissecting final examinations. But to be hung out and dried is no fun. Debate, however, is beneficial. Perhaps this is why folks are mute.  And so I expect you to comment on this post and reduce it to worthlessness with low-level analogies such as  unwrapping condoms. And you will poke further fun because I have chosen the wrong verb or misused a semicolon.
> 
> Back to the SAT. Not only will I be teaching spreadsheets but perhaps also Photoshop when my students gather primary evidence to support or deny their hypotheses. Most likely I will also be teaching HTML5 and CSS3 to write forms and to present findings. Some teachers may choose many data visualisation tools to examine the data and to present the information. 
> 
> No long lists of restricted tools and functions. At last!!! Now that is exciting. 
> 
> Maggie Iaquinto
> Teacher, Yeshivah College
> 
> -- 
> 
> Mark Kelly
> mark AT vceit DOT com
> http://vceit.com
> 
> Everything that used to be a sin is now a disease - Bill Maher 
> 
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