ITGEN SOLUTIONS

As schools adopt digital tools and technology solutions, educators should pay careful attention to the risks these innovations bring to students. Entering information anywhere online — whether a child’s name or age — means that data can be accessed by others, and even sold. Keeping students’ information protected — and private — is a very real concern. The current trend to personalize or tailor curriculum to a child’s specific learning needs through online classes brings additional concerns. Studies are inconclusive as to the effectiveness of online education as compared to classes taught face-to-face, says Ravitch. Schools, worried that their students are falling behind, may also be eager to invest in technology designed for the educational space. Yet those budget lines are courted by so-called ed tech companies, eager for the funds. Technology is then brought into schools, without any planning on how they’ll be adopted in classrooms. The danger, then, is the tools growing ob...

Ask any teacher about teaching about a controversial topic, and most will tell you to avoid it at any cost. School administrators hate controversy and will often discourage teachers from discussing hot topics in their classrooms at all. Teachers routinely get fired or reprimanded for opening discussion in their classroom about ideas that some may take issue with. Teaching subjects like art, literature, theater, and even history and science, can be fraught with difficulty, as teachers navigate minefields of potentially offensive ideas and images. And since today’s teachers often have less protection than teachers in the past, allowing controversy into the classroom can come with truly nightmarish consequences. But in this day in age, when even the most high-ranking officials are saying and doing inappropriate things in the public eye, when our nation is starkly divided and intolerance creates a constant "us-versus-them" attitude among social groups, now is exa...

Its a New Term....New Year....with New Goals!! We welcome all pupils in our partner schools back to the New Term.

Children's excitement about coding lesson inspired new teaching ideas for teachers The first time I introduced coding to a class, as part of a games design project with Kodu (a visual programming language for children), things did not go exactly as planned. My first mistake was underestimating just how long the students would want to spend trying out all the landscape-design tools that Kodu has to offer. I either had to abruptly end their exploration – despite it clearly leading to some interesting discoveries – or delay the content I wished to cover. Then, as the project progressed, a number of students installed Kodu at home and learned how to do more than I’d imagined they would – some of them through experimentation and some by following the video tutorials that I’d told them about. Obviously, I was over the moon that they were so into it, but it did make timings a little tricky. It meant that students were getting to grips with the tools at different rates. ...

Its a New Day - New Month - New Opportunities - New Experiences. Make them count because you may not get another CHANCE! May the New Month bring glad tidings, successes and more accomplishments. Happy New Month from us all @itgensolutions

Clearly, when it comes to technology, the knowledge gap between young and old is widening. A recent survey revealed that this gap is greatest among young parents and those whose children are still at primary school, with 69 per cent of parents between 25 and 34 years of age admitting that their child knows more about technology than they do. This has repercussions for online safety and how far parents can assist their children with school work.  Schools have to play a part in bridging the gap. Today’s primary school students have grown up surrounded by tablet computers and touch screens; they are more widely exposed to technology than any generation before them. As the  new computing curriculum  helps teachers to move with the times, it is important that schools support the parents who may be finding it hard to keep up.   The best way to do that is to invite them into school for a short demonstration. School do this regularly with parent IT classes. “Le...

Challenging students need to be understood and re-engaged to get them on track. Let’s be honest: when it happens day after day, challenging behaviour such as disobedience, backchat, anger issues or other disruption from a child can really grind us down. It can change us from being patient, compassionate people with a genuine desire to make a difference, into sleep-starved, wild-eyed desperados, convinced a student has a personal vendetta. It can make us forget that if a student has barriers that stop them learning the way they want to, it is up to us to identify how we can help them. We all have those children in our classes who “behave badly and don’t learn”. That’s what we used to say. Today, we would say that they find it challenging to focus, produce positive outcomes and demonstrate appropriate learning behaviour. This terminology, while occasionally annoying, is rightly different. Children have an inbuilt curiosity and desire to learn, whatever their background and...