DIY ideas for Raspberry Pi?

[jgharston]

No, word processing and spreadsheets. You don't teach somebody to drive a Ford Focus, you teach them how to drive a car.

JGH

[jgharston]

Upload it.

JGH

[Bernard Peek]

There are some people who went from the software industry into teaching but there aren't enough of them. There are far more teachers who have been handed the brown and smelly end of the stick. Pretty much without exception they would like to teach something more exciting than how to format a paragraph in Word. But we aren't suddenly going to hire another

20,000 experienced IT professionals as teachers even if there were that many able and willing to do the job.

So we have the situation that we have.

[Bernard Peek]

They are going to need it to do work in other subjects.

Most people can't learn concepts without a practical example in front of them. Some people can start from an abstract theory and apply it. By far the majority of people can't easily do that, and certainly not at the age when pupils need to learn this stuff.

[jgharston]

Unfortunately, I'm one of those IT professionals who wouldn't go back into teaching even if you threatened to shoot me.

JGH

[John Rumm]

Part of the exercise here seems to be getting an adequate platform standardised, and low enough in price. Not sure using a lower price SoC would have made it much cheaper, but it would have had a big negative impact on its high end graphics capabilities and hence potential uses.

True, but there is an element of you will want to use what you have and what you are familiar with...

In answer to the first bit, I don't think it is "mainly for kids"... and to the second, yes a fair number don't have their own.

It has gone through a number of iterations of concept as well it seems.

[John Rumm]

Six years is a long time, and I expect if you started with a spec for what it is now, and said "go build this", it would be much quicker. However part of the exercise was defining the problem they were trying to solve in the first place, not just finding the solution.

[Bernard Peek]

But could you spare a couple of hours to bring an existing teacher up to speed?

[Dave Liquorice]

True enough, but AFAIK there is no "generic" word processor or spreadsheet out there so you have to choose something and, although it pains me to say it, Word and Excel are the defacto standards out there.

Employers will ask "Can you use Word?" not "Can you use a word processor?" Indeed if I was asked the latter question I'd ask "Which one?", I use Describe 5 by preference, can get by in Word (but hate it), never got very far up the vertical learning curve of Wordperfect and quite liked Wordstar (text based under DOS).

It's down to the teaching, it should not be "to do this, click here" it should be task driven, and let the pupils find out how to achieve the end result. Followed by dicussion of the various methods found and which ones are better to use. See other comments about use of styles instead of using spaces and carriage returns to produce layout. Ideally there should be a few different programs available and the different ways of achieving the same result on those different programs also discussed.

[larkim]

My wife is one of those IT teachers. I'm sure she wouldn't mind me passing= on that she has a degree in Geography, A levels in Maths, Geography and Ec= onomics and only a passing interest in computers. She can't program a comp= uter (never been near it) and has only ended up as a teacher in the IT depa= rtment because after her various maternity leave's there were some gaps in = the IT department (but not the geography one which she left before giving b= irth).

She is a good teacher - in that she can teach well - but her expertise in I= T is limited, and when she gets stuck with aspects of Word / Excel / Access= / etc she asks me!

I'm sure several of her colleagues in the department have a similar backgro= und too.

Matt

[John Rumm]

Although, while I would not want to try and teach kids directly (unless they were a self selecting group who wanted to learn this sort of stuff), I might be prepared to teach the teachers.

[Bob Eager]

And some schools don't even use Word in the first place. There is no requirement to do so.

[Bernard Peek]

Some schools are using Open/Libre Office for word-processing and spreadsheets, but there is still no usable alternative to MS Access.

[Adrian C]

I'd dumb it down further, just have a course in using a PC keyboard, mouse and GUI. No particular application or OS.

Series of eight 1 hour lessons.

lesson #1. How to hold and move a mouse.

lesson #2 to 6, How to select something and drag it, moving it elsewhere.

lesson #7. How to Cut, Copy, Paste, Delete, Backspace, Minimise, Maximise, The Task Bar / Panels, Window Focus, Select One item, Select a choice, Select All, Esc, Ctrl-Z, F1, Ctrl-Alt-Del, Login, Start, Shutdown.

lesson #8. How to store a file in a folder so later it can be found

Someone should make an addictive 'angry birds' game where these IT life skills can be practiced.....

[BartC]

I've seen 4- and 5-year-olds learn all those on their own. In less than 6 hours too.

And I've seen adults have trouble with some of those (myself included).

[Chris J Dixon]

I year or two back I attended an evening class in digital photo processing, using Paintshop Pro. Sadly, quite a number of the participants would have benefited from first attending the course you outline above.

Chris

[Tim Streater]

Minimise, maximise, Task Bar, CTRL-Z, F1, CTRL-Alt-Del, Start, are all OS-specific.

[John Rumm]

Some years back a friend of mine ran a business teaching kids IT skills under the guise of doing fun stuff with computers. He actually found that there was a much bigger demand from the parents for basic IT literacy than there was for classes for the kids. Ended up getting into running all sorts of courses like the European computer driving license, CLAiT etc - many of which were focussed on basic use of applications etc.

[Clive George]

Does "no usable alternative" include MS Access itself?

I've been doing databasy-stuff professionally for over 20 years now and have still never had to touch access :-)

[Adrian C]

But still there, in some form across all OS's.

Is there a windowless modeless GUI OS for the desktop? Single application on the screen without other distractions? Like done on a smart mobile phone?

Ah, eldy.

Be a boon to those not wishing to play video games to write a letter.