Mr Webber’s post, ‘How I Came To Teach ICT‘, set me wondering about how I ended up teaching ICT.  The subject didn’t exist when I was at school, or when I was training as a teacher, so what happened?

The vague notion of a career in teaching started to linger in my head when I was at school.  I’ve always loved learning new stuff, and I enjoy showing new stuff to other people even more than I enjoy learning it myself.  It wasn’t the only career path I could have gone down.  A degree in History was just as likely until GCSE coursework finished off my chances of studying History at A-level.  This was a great shame, as I think the subject is great, but my ability to organise coursework only developed once I started to use a computer for that sort of thing.  I remember pottering round Maths departments at university open days. Though at some point in the middle of A-level Maths I realised that I was working really hard to keep up with people who were finding it all really easy (a shock, having not had to work at all in Maths before that).  So, I reluctantly concluded that a degree in Maths might be a bad move.  A-level Physics didn’t excite me – I still enjoy Physics but as A-level went on, the content became less exciting for me.

Meanwhile, A-level Computing really got my interest.  Programming is great fun – for both the problem-solving ideas and the thought that by issuing commands on my computer I can make another computer in the next room do stuff.  Learning proper programming (as opposed to copying chunks of BASIC from magazines into my ZX Spectrum and tweaking it) was a joy.  The Borland Turbo Pascal compiler, without a GUI in sight was great (well, it was 1992).  Equally great was a wonderful book by Elliot B Koffman, simply called ‘Pascal’. It did what the magazines didn’t do – simple examples and extension exercises.  The extension exercises made you think.  Sadly, this was in the days before it was reasonable to expect students to have PCs at home (hence, my opportunities for doing any of this outside of school were limited).  There was also Ray Bradley’s brilliant textbook, which teachers of the subject still regard with awe.  I’d love to meet him one day, to say “Thank you”.

I still have fond memories of finding holes in my school’s network security and getting away with it (the teacher reckoning that curiosity did not need to be punished).  I also remember someone in our A-level class asking “What’s the point?” of some piece of abstract theory  – a question which caught the teacher off-guard, as he had no ‘real’ experience in Computing or IT.  The last major program he had written was a massive piece of COBOL for his dissertation. He did show us this one day – a hundred dot-matrix pages of listing, all nicely joined together.  After his degree, he went directly to teaching.

So, somewhere in all of this I figured if I was ever going to teach this stuff I would have to immerse myself in it, and work in industry for a while.  I never wanted to be the teacher who was left looking stupid with a “What’s the point” question.  At around this time, I discovered the now defunct Byte magazine, two months old by the time it arrived from the States.  I do wish it was still published.  Unlike a lot of PC magazines, it wasn’t full of reviews of stuff to buy, it was all about how things worked, future trends, how to program and so on.

So, imagine how odd it felt when I arrived at university to find out we’d be learning…. Borland Turbo Pascal with a book by Elliot Koffman.  It turned out that at least half the class did not have a background in any sort of programming.  Back then, the problem was schools not having the money to buy computers for A-level Computing classes.  Today, we have computers but for some reason lots of schools don’t offer Computing.  The people who had done A-level Computing (or BTEC) relaxed a bit.  I discovered the Internet and read lots and lots of wonderful stuff, including an early version of the Cathedral and the Bazaar.  I wondered at the ethical implications of lifting an installed version of Word 6 or a Borland IDE off the PC and onto floppy disks.  I got a little giddy and excited when I realised I was issuing commands to a machine in USA that was responding as if I was beside it.  I bought a second-hand PC and spent the holidays teaching myself C.  At some point languages such as Ada, C++ and Prolog came along. In the middle of all of that, I did a placement that mostly involved Solaris (a UNIX implementation that, unlike Windows, never seemed to crash) and Oracle Databases (plus Perl, Bash scripting, Pascal, C, learning how to be a network admin, opening PCs up, etc., etc).  Then it was back to uni, more Oracle, Linux, C++, etc., etc.  Oh, and I spent a lot of time on text-based chatrooms (the Facebook of the day).

Eventually, I graduated with a degree in Computing and spent some time in a meat plant (how I got there is a long story, but feel free to ask me anything you like about killing, slicing and packing beef).  Reprogramming factory machinery was interesting.  Automating manual tasks of exporting data from control systems to CSV files, to keep accountants happy, was a nice challenge.  However, writing programs in QBasic was not fun.  When your ‘expert’ boss recommends QBasic above all other programming tools, and shouts at you for asking if there were any books on how to use it, you know it’s time to look elsewhere.  When you realise this ‘expert’ knows nothing about decent programming, you know it’s time to move on.  When you are called stupid for having an issue with Windows always crashing, you know it’s time to look elsewhere.  So I did (writing telecoms stuff in C – very enjoyable indeed).

In all of this, thoughts of teaching were still lingering in my head.  This was a by-product of a few things:

• I still enjoyed explaining stuff to people. At Uni, I had spent a reasonable amount of time helping people in the year below me, and had enjoyed it.
• I had done a fair bit of youth work, which I enjoyed.
• I had (and still have) an overwhelming sense of gratitude to the teachers who influenced my life.  We weren’t a well-off family, and from childhood I remember being taken to libraries and museums and told to work hard at school to improve my chances in life.  I still remember the great teachers who helped me on my way (I also remember the not-so-great teachers!).

So I did my PGCE in Computing.  The primary school placement was fun – classroom-assisting and teaching HTML to P6 students (who loved it).  My first secondary placement (inner-city comp) started well: the teacher who I should have been observing for a week was absent, so with 10 minutes’ warning I was asked to teach her class (GCSE Information Systems).  Later in the day I was teaching Pascal via Apple computers of some description (having only ever used Apple products for word-processing and propping doors open).  A week later, she returned from having flu and let me continue.  She was also fantastic at sharing resources with me, unlike the HoD in my Grammar placement, who was extremely gruff when I asked if I could borrow some of his notes.

Then it was a wee bit of subbing, and off to a full-time job to teach Computing (to A-level).  Within a year, the landscape would start to shift.  A new subject of Information and Communication Technology was invented by the Blair government, with emphasis on the ‘Communication’ part of it, rather than the ‘Technology’.  This replaced Information Systems and Information Technology (which emphasised how to use computers and an understanding of how they functioned and how new systems were developed).  ICT took over completely at GCSE (IT/IS were both scrapped), and was offered alongside A-level Computing.  I had a lot of sympathy for teachers whose students struggled with the big GCSE Information Systems database project, but I don’t know if any of us expected what replaced it: six pieces of work whose assessment depended on how much you could write, and very little on how much you had achieved.  A writeup of how to use a search engine and how you sent an e-mail was among them.  Programming vanished from A-level, with Computing giving way to ICT (“more relevant” said the marketing blurb).  Any schools who resisted found out that the new C2k managed service didn’t support A-level Computing (so that was that).  A-level ICT coursework was a very large database project at AS… and another at A2.  Or you could use Excel instead.  I knew only the basics of Excel at that point (Why would I know it in depth? I had trained as a Computer Scientist, not an accountant or statistician).

This is where my industrial experience, and own personal interests, started to break down.  I could explain the point of knowing how to hack open source projects (having done so myself).  I could was lyrical about the merits of being a beta-tester for commercial products.  I could explain the point of star and bus networks, and even know where ring networks are used.  I could explain why more RAM, and not a better processor, will speed up your PC.  I could get excited about new tech and lament not having the money to buy it.  I could not, ever, explain the point of Microsoft Access or Excel projects as a preparation for a degree in Computing.

A lot of people think I hate ICT.  I don’t. My problem is with ICT courses that are very shallow in their content, with an emphasis on mundane and repetitive skills (NB not all ICT courses are like this!).  I become infuriated when someone suggests we should spend hours teaching the finer points of PowerPoint or emphasising how to send messages via social media.  This infuriates me because (a) students get bored quickly; (b) this is lowest-common-denominator teaching; and (c), this is not teaching transferable skills.  However, if we teach the underlying principles (i.e. programming and problem-solving), students develop transferable skills and enough problem-solving ability to figure out PowerPoint.  Nobody ever spend more than half an hour teaching me how to send an e-mail, use a word-processor or use PowerPoint.  I figured it out as I needed (i.e. once I saw the relevance).  I survived.  It might be different if I was an accountant who used all the lovely features of Excel that cannot be picked up in an afternoon – but, honestly, how many 14 year-olds care about pivot tables and vlookups?  OK, maybe a period should be spend getting the first-form to send emails, if they haven’t already done so.  Then, move on.

Well-structured ICT courses are great.  ICT courses that allow teachers and students flexibility are great.  Courses that allow me to teach what interests me are great (because I cannot excite students unless I am excited, and believe me, I can get stupidly excited sometimes).  Courses that remember that ICT has Information and Technology, as well as Communication are great.  Courses that reduce the teacher to a bored robot who cannot wait for 1st July, are very, very bad.  That’s why I changed our A-level provider.  Access bores me (I know some teachers enjoy it, that’s fine, if they can pass enthusiasm on to students then they should do so).  On the other hand, giving students the chance to build games, mobile apps or search engines, is far from boring (but is a bit more challenging than building a query in Access).  When you have an A-level ICT specification that expects students to know the difference between open and closed-source, without ever writing a line of source code, you know it’s time to move, on.   CCEA’s revised GCSE in ICT has me breathing a sigh of relief – I can teach some programming again! (however, the look of sheer pain on the faces of my current 4th year, when I told them they’d also have Controlled Assessment in PowerPoint, will stay with me for a long time).

As a school, we have offered GCSE and A-level Computing from next September.  This is a big thing, for me.  I trained to teach Computer Science, not the secretarial skills some courses emphasise.  Bizarrely, I have spent a fair bit of my ICT career teaching Computer Science ideas, inside ICT classes. Sometimes, this is useful material that is related to the course, at other times it is simply a diversion to keep the students interested!.  Oddly, I hope to keep teaching ICT also.  Not the PowerPoint(less) stuff, but the interesting problem-solving stuff.  Students can get excited about cool stuff in MS Office, or building robots, or making silly little games – but some specifications don’t reward cool stuff, instead they suck the life out of the subject in order to create an ‘accessible’ mark scheme.    Students get excited about the Gadget Show or Click.  So do I.  Students get excited about command-line interfaces (because it’s different and interesting).  They get excited about the time I had to install OpenOffice on a hundred machines, so wrote a batch file for it (so I wouldn’t have to click next-next… on all those machines).  They get excited at my demo of this, they get excited when I tell them to open Command Prompt…. they chant “Epic fail” when a C2k-generated message stops them.

I get excited when a non-ICT/Computing specialist wants to learn about the subject.  I get excited when ICT teachers come to Greenfoot courses I have run, to learn how to teach programming.  I get excited when I meet past-students who are doing great things in the software industry. I get excited about useful new tech in the classroom.  I get excited about making tablet PCs talk to the network and access data.  I get excited when someone shows me something I don’t know – whether that is a new gadget, an animation they made or a more efficient way of making something run about the screen.  I get excited about students teaching themselves interesting stuff, whether it is in programming or multimedia.  Actually, I get excited about any student who realises he doesn’t need me (or any other teacher) – all he needs is willingness and a tutorial or book.  I will never forget the student who showed my his jerky clay-animations (jerky because his camera kept falling off the book it was propped on), and the look on his face when I gave him a retort-stand and clamp for the summer (borrowed from Chemistry, or was it Physics? I wonder if they ever got it back?!).

I know I am not as good a programmer as I would have been if I had stayed in industry.  If I had stayed there, I’d have C# coming out my ears by now and might even have spent the past three years making nothing but iPad apps (instead of the one that I once made, via a tutorial).  I enjoy Java, but am far from an expert.  Instead, I currently spend a lot of time flitting between Greenfoot, Scratch and learning Python.  I use Linux for most of my work at home (because I want to know it properly, but know I’ll never be at sysadmin standard, because I still have to write tutorials for classes).  My to-do list, of C#, Haskell, Ruby, Alice, AppInventor, Objective-C, etc., just gets longer.  So, I’m an average hacker, maybe.  I might even be below-average, compared to someone graduating today (but don’t tell my students that!).

But in my classroom, I am having bags of fun, learning with great students.