Perhaps, the future role of a ‘computing teacher’ is to act as a consultant or team-teacher with other subjects. I would much rather teach about Wikipedia’s structure, history and reverting alongside an English teacher who’s teaching about sourcing and bias in writing than in some dry, contrived example lesson of my own.
I’d love to teach about universal computer accessibility alongside the drama teacher who’s teaching about how disabled people experience the world.
I’d rather teach about spreadsheets alongside a science teacher who’s trying to explain how to capture data from experiments than in some “let’s pretend we’re running a shop” Computing lesson.
”Fraser Speirs, The Invisible Computer Teacher
I like the notion here of the computer teacher working alongside other teachers instead of teaching a “computers” class by itself.
Last year I spent the afternoon in Erin’s classroom in Detroit. I got to see the kid’s time in the computer lab which involved opening MS Word and typing some sentences in. These kids all seemed to already know how to work a computer, so I’m not sure what they really gained from this time. I could see where they would benefit more if they were using the computers as a means to help learn some other topic instead of being the topic they were learning.
