http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012 ... it-lessons

Sounds good to me

That is good. I'm sure my daughter would love to do a course like that when she's older.

I totally agree with this. The reason I stopped doing IT in A Level was just because it was excel/word/website shit that I wasn't overly interested in. This would be a much better way of doing it

I guess you agree with this no? xd

I definitely agree with it. I didn't do IT at GCSE (well, except the compulsory short course) because I knew it would be mostly a joke and not really useful. Knowing how to use MSO is all well and good, but proper computer use is programming and scripting, makes all the difference between being a user and a poweruser.

I read this erliar. I was pleased.

I remember IT lessons being rather soul destroying.

a) I think this will fail, while the concept is good, the implementation is likely to go south.
b) (In my biased opinions) I think everyone in this thread is biased because of their own interests. While tweaking IT is a good idea, full on CS I think not. Computers are still generally tools and consumption devices and maybe more useful lessons in this area would be more of use.
c) Am I the only one who enjoyed IT lessons (much to the annoyance of the staff with my new approaches, etc.)

New approaches?

The most complex spreadsheets known to man(TM)

I might be winning at that!

a) Probably. There aren't many good IT teachers.
b) Possibly, but teacher stuff past Office would be much better. Anyone can use Office to a competent degree, learning other stuff would be useful. Also, stop teaching Access and Publisher, useless programs.
c) I sort of enjoyed it a bit, but mostly cos I was messing around. I felt the actual lessons were a complete waste of time.

I'm with you Si, IT was the one and only thing I could look forward to in my school timetable.

How much of looking forward to IT was because it was an easy lesson where you could just mess about on computers?

All of it. It was one of those classes where I could just do nothing and get an auto pass.

I leaned back on the chair a few times, but it was a few times too many.

Exactly, while IT was enjoyable cos you could dick around, it was an absolutely shit class from an education perspective. I would have enjoyed to learn programming or other non-office things in IT, and it would have actually been useful aswell. I would bet that the IT that we did was useless for 90% of the people in the class, because the stuff taught would either be known already or worthless (Access...).

I agree, from an education point of view it was mostly useless to those unless you didn't have a computer at home. Well, even if you didn't I guess it was still mostly useless. And yes, Access. I used it twice after school in the 8 years I've been working now, and umm... it would have been better to learn basic SQL or the concepts of relational database management.

I think the point of access was to learn some of the concepts of RDBMS without complicating things by adding SQL. However it failed and ended up with "this is how you use the form wizard"

I had to teach the class about form driven interfaces today ._.