Back to the streets

Spent Saturday working but the campaign trail went back to the streets. Delivering this weekend in Chessington and now starting to build towards the General Election.

Spent time on Sunday with the children trying to get my son to read and work with numbers. Really frustrating as a parent as not really sure what they should be capable of and how you get what you take for granted over to them in a simple way.

I have a real passion about IT in education. I believe that the current IT strategy in schools is flawed and the Government cannot afford the cost of sustaining what they have spent to date. It concentrates on IT suites and lots of PC's when it really should be thinking about integrating IT into every lesson and classroom by using cheaper methods of IT such as thin client. It's complicated but it means you don't have expensive PC's but inexpensive "dumb" terminals that are low cost and only work when attached to the server, which could be held in a data centre that could be miles away. It will run word etc but it is held in the data centre. Anyway, the interesting question for education is this. Whenever Government talks about IT they tell us that it must demonstarte its effectiveness in raising standards but they never ask us to justify the use of books in the same way, why do they do this when clearly IT can have as big an effect on learning as the book does?

Sunday morning and evening spent at church.