bbcmicro
April 20th, 2006, 01:41 PM
has anybody hear heard of ICT GNVQ?
Its a qualification that we have been working towards since year 8 and finish in year 11. Im in year 10 now and its is a load of @#~!?%&*£"$&.
We get around four assignments per academic year. And they are not to do with ICT, that is, Information and Communication Technology, they are to do with scaring children away from computing and thinking that microsoft rules the world!
Example, this term we had to make a powerpoint slideshow and storyboard each individual step in microsoft word and explain what we are doin as if to a moron. E.g. we had to do a storyboard of changing the font...4 TIMES! each one showing you going to the font menu, choosing a different colour, etc etc. We have to do around 34 storyboards for this presentation (Snappily entitled :How to Make a Trifle), each a seperate word document consisting of 2-4 screen shots and half a page+ of writing. We do something like this every term. Last term it was an Excel Spreadsheet, the one before that an Access Database.
We have 4 lessons a week, totalling 3 hours of staring at a flickering CRT per week learning about how great microsoft is for everything. We dont learn anything about the basic use of a computer in general, about hardware, the structure of a computer, communications, uses, etc. etc., Just how to use Microsoft Office 2000. And Most pupils will do for 4 academic years. At the end we get a qualification which we are told is equivalent to 4 GCSE's, but it is generally acknowledged that they arepretty meaningless. What annoys me even more is out High School has Technology College status, and we are using old flaky computers with windows 2000 on a slow network with aroun 100mb ram.
The whole point of this is WHY?? Its boring and useless!
Of course I know why really. The school only teaches this subject (introduced 5 years ago) to bump its place up on the school league tables. It just makes me so angry!
Its a qualification that we have been working towards since year 8 and finish in year 11. Im in year 10 now and its is a load of @#~!?%&*£"$&.
We get around four assignments per academic year. And they are not to do with ICT, that is, Information and Communication Technology, they are to do with scaring children away from computing and thinking that microsoft rules the world!
Example, this term we had to make a powerpoint slideshow and storyboard each individual step in microsoft word and explain what we are doin as if to a moron. E.g. we had to do a storyboard of changing the font...4 TIMES! each one showing you going to the font menu, choosing a different colour, etc etc. We have to do around 34 storyboards for this presentation (Snappily entitled :How to Make a Trifle), each a seperate word document consisting of 2-4 screen shots and half a page+ of writing. We do something like this every term. Last term it was an Excel Spreadsheet, the one before that an Access Database.
We have 4 lessons a week, totalling 3 hours of staring at a flickering CRT per week learning about how great microsoft is for everything. We dont learn anything about the basic use of a computer in general, about hardware, the structure of a computer, communications, uses, etc. etc., Just how to use Microsoft Office 2000. And Most pupils will do for 4 academic years. At the end we get a qualification which we are told is equivalent to 4 GCSE's, but it is generally acknowledged that they arepretty meaningless. What annoys me even more is out High School has Technology College status, and we are using old flaky computers with windows 2000 on a slow network with aroun 100mb ram.
The whole point of this is WHY?? Its boring and useless!
Of course I know why really. The school only teaches this subject (introduced 5 years ago) to bump its place up on the school league tables. It just makes me so angry!