{fb1000000As an IT coordinator, the IT National Curriculum is always at the forefront of my thoughts. But being an IT coordinator, I need to have a good understanding of other subjects Orders. This is now much easier as the Orders for all subjects have been slimmed down considerably. When they first arrived, each subject had its own A4 folder which contained over a inch of solid paper. Gradually this has been reduced to an A4 booklet of about a dozen pages and the IT coordinator's job is a lot easier. Apart from teaching, the IT coordinator has two main roles.
One of the tasks is to keep track of students' IT achieve- ments and grade all of their work according to the guidelines set out in the National Curriculum. I'll look at assessment, recording and reporting in a future issue.
I believe the key to being a good IT coordinator is to be able to advise on software and schemes of work for other departments. This is a tricky task because not only must the IT person produce work to satisfy the IT curriculum, but also engineer the work so as to make some in-roads into the Orders of the subject which is using IT. (Or vice-versa)
As this is a PD magazine, I thought I'd look at some PD programs that can be used to teach the National Curric- ulum. So, if anyone has anything out there they think would be of use in a classroom, send it to me via the mag and I'll have a look at it.
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{fb1C00000Networking
{fb1000000One area of PD software which is conspicuous by its absence is network software. Acorn now has a viable networking system in Ethernet. It is a system that is supported by a great many companies including Atom- wide, Cumana and XOB. There is a some really good software for the network, but not enough and almost none in the Public Domain.
The reason, I suppose, is partly due to the amount of kit a programmer must own in order to develop network software. Presumably s/he will need more than one computer, at least two network interface cards and software to build a mini- network. Assuming current retail prices, that's going to set a would-be network software developer back almost £2000 for a 1 station network with file-server. Quite an outlay for little or no income. But it can be done if you set your mind to it.
Sanjay Pattni is a classic case. He is a student at Imperial College and has developed a great network application called NetView. This is NOT a Public Domain program, but it was developed on a shoestring budget, mainly at school. Indeed many schools up and down the country have AUN (Acorn Universal Networks) in place and a quick letter or phone call to the Head of IT might well get you some network time to try out some software (in exchange for the program when it's finished).
If you need some pointers as to the software which needs developing, here is my top ten wants:
1) A utility which would set the CMOS clocks on all stations by copying the time from the file-server.
2) A utility which would allow the manager to remotely set CMOS RAMs on a selection of other stations.
3) A utility that I can load up on my computer and which will send an instruction to a selection of computers to load a particular program or programs. For example, if I know that after break I've got a class which will be drawing graphs, I could enter an instruction so that all the computers would load !Graphbox during break while I'm having a cup of tea.
4) A development of that idea could be based on !Alarm and which would load particular programs automatically at particular times of the day. Going on from that, you could almost have a 'timetable' which would load up programs for each lesson during the week.
5) Yet a further development would be to send a message to all stations at predetermined times (eg 5 minutes before the end of the lesson) to save the document(s) currently being worked on and automatically log off the computers.
6) Send a message to all stations that the file-server(s) are going to be closed down.
7) A development of that theme could be a countdown clock displayed on the stations.
8) A further development could be to force clients' documents to be saved if they contain a full pathname.
