Continue reading »]]> Apple aims to drive the use of electronic textbooks in the classroom by making it easier for publishers to create interactive titles.

The company has announced a range of new tools and services which it claims will “reinvent the textbook”.

Leading names in educational resources are involved, including the world’s biggest, UK-based Pearson Publishing.

Apple will compete with existing offerings from Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes and Noble’s Nook device.

Roger Rosner, Apple’s vice president of productivity applications, demonstrated the books, some of which are now available to download, at an event in New York.

Also on display was iBooks Author, a free program that will allow educators and authors to make their own interactive books for the iPad.

Apple has also said it has enhanced iTunes U – the educational section of its iTunes store – to allow a wider breadth of university level resources.

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Continue reading »]]> Hackers are increasingly targeting child-focused gaming websites, according to a leading anti-virus firm.

Avast says it detected malware threats at more than 60 sites that contained “game” or “arcade” in their title, in the 30 days running up to 12 January.

It says the pages tried to download Javascript infections, redirectors and potentially unwanted software.

The Czech company says that young children are often less careful than adults about what they click on.

“These are sites with mini-games, including flash applications and simple online apps – one example is software that allows girls to dress and change the clothes of characters,” Ondrej Vlcek, the firm’s chief technical officer, told the BBC.

Avast says the most visited site affected – cutearcade.com – had generated more than 12,600 infection reports from its protection software as of last week.

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Continue reading »]]> The Royal Society has suggested ways the government can overhaul information and communications technology (ICT) teaching in schools.

It follows promises from Education Secretary Michael Gove to scrap the way the subject is taught currently.

The body, which oversees UK sciences, recommends dividing computing into distinct subjects such as computer science and digital literacy.

It said the government must do more to recruit specialist ICT teachers.

Poorly conceived

The report was led by Prof Steve Furber, the designer of the BBC Micro, widely acknowledged as one of the first educational computers.

He was commissioned to investigate why there has been a chronic decline in the numbers of students studying ICT and computing.

The publication of his report is timely, following just days after Mr Gove’s speech to educationalists in which he said current ICT lessons were “demotivating and dull”.

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Continue reading »]]> The current information and communications technology (ICT) curriculum in England’s schools is a “mess” and must be radically revamped, the education secretary has announced.

From September it will be replaced by a flexible curriculum in computer science and programming, designed with the help of universities and industry.

Michael Gove called the current ICT curriculum “demotivating and dull”.

He will begin a consultation next week on the new computing curriculum.

He said this would create young people “able to work at the forefront of technological change”.

Speaking at the BETT show for educational technology in London, Mr Gove announced plans to free up schools to use curricula and teaching resources that properly equip pupils for the 21st Century.

He said that resources, developed by experts, were already available online to help schools teach computer science and he wants universities and businesses to devise new courses and exams, particularly a new computing GCSE.

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Continue reading »]]> Education Secretary Michael Gove has said he wants to scrap the way information technology is taught in schools in England because it is “dull and harmful”.

Ian Livingstone of computer games company Eidos told the Today programme that the current style of teaching would inhibit innovation in the future.

“They are bored to death with it, and they are actually turned off technology,” he said. “The knock-on effect is that they don’t go on to university to study computer science.”

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Continue reading »]]> A test version of the Raspberry Pi computer has attracted bids of more than £3,000 in a fund-raising auction on eBay. With the machine about to start its first major production run, could it be the right tool to revitalise computer science in schools?

“Consider our gast well and truly flabbered,” blogged Liz Upton of the Raspberry Pi team in response to news that an auction of 10 trial versions of the computers had attracted offers worth thousands of pounds.

The highest bid for one of the beta versions is over £3,000, more than a hundred times the planned asking price for the most expensive model of £22.

The uncased, credit-card sized, 700MHz machines are an unlikely gadget must-have.

But with a mailing list of more than 50,000 members, Raspberry Pi have found that plenty of people think they’re a good thing.

The Pi’s creators hope the bare-bones computers will play an important part in encouraging children to code

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Continue reading »]]> The eagerly anticipated Raspberry Pi home computer is about to go into production.

The $25 (£16) machine is being created in the hope that it will inspire a new generation of technology whizz kids.

The Pi uses an Arm chip similar to that found in mobile phones and is intended to run a version of the Linux open source operating system.

Test versions of finished devices are being checked and if all is well volume production will start in January.

The idea for Raspberry Pi came from video game veteran David Braben who was searching for a way to inspire young people to start a career in technology.

Mr Braben got his start in games thanks to the BBC Micro on which he, and school friend Ian Bell, created pioneering computer game Elite.

Raspberry Pi is being developed in Cambridgeshire and every update has been watched closely by those keen to get working with the gadget. Raspberry Pi took to its blog on 23 December to report that the first finished circuit boards had arrived.

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Continue reading »]]> In July 2010, Ed Vaizey, the Minister for Culture, Communications & the Creative Industries asked Alex Hope and me to undertake a review of the skills needs of the UK’s video games and visual effects industries.

Our industries are big business. With global software revenues exceeding $50bn (£32bn) per annum, the video games industry is the largest entertainment industry in the world.

Visual effects is the fastest growing component of the UK’s film industry.

High-tech, high-growth, and knowledge-based, these industries have all the characteristics the UK needs to succeed in the future.

But all is not well, and in a growing market, the UK is slipping down the global games development league table and the UK’s visual effects industry is turning down millions of pounds in business each year.

A very big part of the problem, common to both industries, lies in their skills gaps and shortages.

We simply cannot hire enough computer scientists and this seems madness at a time of such high youth unemployment

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Continue reading »]]> The teaching of computer science must become more relevant to modern needs, said the government.

The government said the current teaching of IT was “insufficiently rigorous and in need of reform”.

The call for change came in a response to an industry report which looked at technology teaching in the UK.

Without reform future UK workers would lack key skills and the nation would lose its standing as a video games and visual arts hub, said the report

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Continue reading »]]> Almost 650 schools across Northern Ireland are to explore the impact of cyberbullying this week.

It is part of this year’s anti-bullying week which begins on Monday.

According to Department of Education research in Northern Ireland, 15.5% of Year 6 pupils and 17% of Year 9 pupils surveyed have experienced cyberbullying in recent months.

Three-quarters of teachers in post-primary schools surveyed said cyberbullying was more prevalent.

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