On 8 Sep, 18:59, Bob Eager wrote:
On Tue, 08 Sep 2009 10:14:18 -0700, David wrote:
On 8 Sep, 17:47, Bob Eager wrote:
On Tue, 08 Sep 2009 18:25:01 +0200, David in Normandy wrote:
OK, so it was a combination of factors. However, the first thing that
struck me was his computer illiteracy in general. He was supposedly
doing an ICT course at school and all he seemed capable of doing was
turning the power switch on and guessing usernames / passwords.
Beyond that he was clueless. I expect school ICT courses to impart a
certain basic level of computer literacy about computers, files,
folders and programs and to include a generalised knowledge of word
processing and at the very least what a spreadsheet is - whoever the
vendor.

My son has just gone back to school in year 9. They've just started the
OCR National (GCSE equivalent which a lot of schools are moving over
to) ICT course. First lesson yesterday was files and folders, and they
were expected to go through the steps, do screenshots of each stage,
and make a commented Word document out of them.

Urgh, I am on that course, we have done two units in year 9 and we are
still doing it this year, it's easy yet annoying.

Depends on the number of units actually done. My son expects to do the
lot! Mind, SWMBO is an OCR moderator and knows it inside out (when she's
not teaching Java and databases elsewhere).

The problem is still the expectation (that I see) that an ICT course is
any preparation at all for doing something like computer science -
whereas in reality they are two different subjects!

--
Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
*http://www.mirrorservice.org

Interesting. Apparently the whole course can be equivalent to 4
GCSE's. The whole class failed Unit 1, some with very minor errors and
some with major errors so we are busy correcting Unit 1 at the moment.