Fall 2014 the Irish secondary school system will introduce the availability of a short course in programming. This new course will be available to those schools who elect to offer it to their students. This is an excellent opportunity and a challenge. As of January 2014 there is only a draft curriculum. There are no lesson plans, professional development courses, or teacher resources.
In order to be prepared to offer this new course, and introduce hundreds if not thousands of students to coding, schools need our help. Let’s crowdsource the best minds; and the best course materials; and volunteer to assist with implementing digital technologies in the classroom. Let’s make it an “open” process. Together we can build high-quality lessons with pedagogically sound underpinnings. We can aggregate the best on-line training resources into a world-class teaching guide. We can use the power of the Internet to connect school teachers to the vast experience of the community. Together this course can be the vanguard for open teacher resource. Introducing a level of collaboration to enhance and ease the way our teachers source material. Opening the process to allow for constant improvement. On 22 February, in conjunction with Open Data Ireland, Code For Ireland, and International Open Data Day, we will be gathering to build open educational resource, freely accessible, openly licensed resources to support this new course. This is your invitation, through collaboration with school teachers and industry experts can we build a truly useful resource. The community needs your help in ensuring that your local school is prepared to offer these new technologies. This is your chance to help.
Your are needed to source the best on-line resources. This include many successful introductory courses from around the world. We’ll be building from the best examples and utilizing state-of-the-art collaboration software, hosted by Open Knowledge Foundation. School teachers and industry professionals have been invited to ensure practicality and flexibility are built-in.
We’re calling it a Booksprint. But, it is a book unlike any textbook seen in school today. Built using collaboration software, using open source tools, in order to crowdsource from an unlimited pool of resources. We’ll be using a number of very cool technologies to facilitate real-time collaboration. Many of these tools have been used successfully to engage children and adults. You’ll walk away knowing how to engage a large audience, where to find help, and to quickly build teaching materials.
Please join us at the Februrary meetup being hosted by Facebook and organized in conjunction with Code for Ireland and Open Data Ireland.
In the meantime stay up to date and share ideas by tweeting:
Tweets about “#OpenEdIRL OR #okfIRL OR #opendataIRL OR from:@OKFirl”