Twitter is put on new primary school curriculum | Hacker News Reader

Twitter is put on new primary school curriculum

telegraph.co.uk

5 pointswalidghaleb7 comments

Considering that most users of Twitter, and the creators of Twitter, still have no idea "how to use the social networking website Twitter", I think this is extremely premature.

Perhaps it would be wiser to wait until people actually figure out how the hell to use the damn thing before appointing people who likely haven't even heard of it to teach it to children.

Chances are the average kid will know more about Twitter than the average school teacher soon enough, anyway.

I agree, just teaching a child how to use twitter or a blog is not that relevant unless it can be tied to instruction. The proposal seems rather vague on how this will be implemented in the classroom.

Unfortunately, it is rare that teachers are ever trained properly and provided with curriculum ideas for using technology, but rather have to figure out how to do use it themselves. Work has been done on using the different online aspects and cell phones in the classroom to teach about various subjects, but without a teacher getting this instruction they fall back to the simplest activity possible and lose the educational value.

Agreed. This might be premature for sites like Twitter. Integrating lessons with Wikipedia, blogs etc... could be quite useful, however. Chances are that children already use all these tools to complete their homework assignments, so "teaching them" technology probably shows how out of touch education authorities are with the average primary school child. Children certainly don't need to be taught how to use a spell checker!

I don’t think anyone reasonable can argue the merits of integrating computers and technology into school curriculums, however this plan by the schools inspection authority in England has the potential for parents to incorrectly point the finger at technology as the main reason why kids won’t be taught traditional subjects:

“One curriculum theme - "human, social and environmental understanding" - combines history, geography and religious education. Schools can decide which two periods of British history children study, allowing them to drop traditional features such as the Victorians and the Second World War.”

The proposal to lump subjects into themes, giving schools leeway to choose what subjects or topics within those subjects to drop, has nothing to do with the integration of technology into the curriculum. The backlash will undoubtedly link the two and say that children in schools are not learning WWII history in favour of learning how to blog or use Twitter.

Not sure about Twitter (I love it, but I don't think its necessarily useful to students), but I'm glad they're rethinking computers in schools. You shouldn't leave school at 16 with pretty advanced knowledge on maths and physics, but not how to use a computer further than powerpoint…not in this day and age!

I suspect the addition of twitter to the proposal was purely to ensure it recieved the attention it's now getting.

Also, primary school is equivalent to elementary school is in the states, so this doesn't mean that pupils will never be taught about some of things that have been made non-compulsory. In particular, as the article points out, the second world war is covered extensively during secondary school (i.e. high school). And it's also worth mentioning that this probably only applies to the english curriculum.

Marketing techniques to have your company on the buzz is to post a couple of odd articles per week, but this is just ridiculous. Facebook does it, craigslist does it. This is not news, this is pay per post!

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