Two years ago, I proposed a Computer Science elective. Last Year, I was more focused on the core subjects that I teach, and no one else wanted to teach it. But I did propose an elective in “Technological Literacy”. It didn’t run. I proposed it again for next year, and my boss told me that he would submit it, but that the marching orders in the district are “no new courses.”
It won’t surprise readers to know that this kind of thing makes me sad. Is education some sort of stagnant system that has no need to change and respond to what society expects of our students? Hardly. And given the remarkably terrible state of technological literacy skills in our students, I was hopeful that the utility of this course would be obvious to the decision makers in my district. I guess not.
Provided below is the course description. If you’re interested, maybe you’ll have better luck with it than I did:
Too bad David, looks like a great peek behind the curtain of the computer world. Which books/sources were you planning on using?
I was going to create a textbook as we went along, using a wikispace or something similar. Have the students build Version 1.0. For coding and web design training, I would use codecademy.com, which is a good free resource for that sort of thing. Then we could use various free tools for their projects, as they needed. The ISTE standards pretty much sketch out how to move through the course.
That is a real shame. Perhaps the fact that no real resources are needed will allow an exception.