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"It's a noble aspiration: being truly digital means no trees die, your information is searchable, sortable, and safely stored in the cloud. We now have access to great tools such as Evernote, Dropbox, and Google's suite of applications, which means that stuff you care about can accessible to you on almost any device and location; on your phone, tablet, and desktop, at home, at the office, and on the move. Yet paper survives."

I was invited to speak on a topic near and dear to me during a session titled "Automate the mundane so you can focus on the impactful." During that session, I discussed ways that IT departments might streamline their services to provide more time to focus on business-leading initiatives as opposed to simply keeping the lights on.

"Scratch takes all of the essential programming constructs like sequencing, conditional branching, control structures, data manipulations, etc, and wraps them in a very friendly, very easy to use environment that even the youngest students can use with just a little knowledge.  It's quite intuitive to learn and you can do simple things fairly easily, yet there is really no limit as to how far you take it."  

"Scott McLeod, in his blog, Dangerously Irrelevant, recently reminded us of a line from Mission Impossible, and we must apply that challenge to all of society. "Your assignment, should you choose to accept it" is to take education truly into the 21st century. It is not enough to say that we are already living there. Technically it is the 21st century, but our schools are not there, and our challenge now is to reinvent schools for the 21st century - for the sake of our children, our students and the welfare of our world. Making such a paradigm shift is not easy. After all, when any of us thinks of education, we usually think of what we knew as school - the way it has always been. That is how parents, policy makers, politicians and many students think of school. But we have to make the paradigm shift to 21st century education. So what is 21st century education? It is bold. It breaks the mold. It is flexible, creative, challenging, and complex. It addresses a rapidly changing world filled with fantastic new problems as well as exciting new possibilities. Fortunately, there is a growing body of research supporting an increasing number of 21st century schools. We have living proof, inspiring examples to follow, in schools across the United States. These schools vary, but are united in the fundamentals of 21st century education - see Critical Attributes of 21st Century Education and Multiple Literacies for the 21st Century. Scott McLeod has issued the challenge of creating a plan to get us from "here" to "there"."

Home> ICT Week> Primary ICT Trails The following activities take place at Federation Square and surrounding organisations. Attendees require registration. Entry is free. To register click on Tickets link and state the number of tickets you require. The following program also indicates where student places are limited.