I spent the afternoon at Pukehou School again today.

I had the pleasure of working with AJ’s class, where we installed Picasa on all the class laptops. I demonstrated how it worked and the class had a great time experimenting with all the options.

A number of things struck me about the afternoon:

• although some of the class were more computer literate than others, there was no one who was hopelessly lost
• each and every child was keen to load in a picture and get going
• there is no fear about pushing all the buttons
• some of these kids have more computer skills than some of their teachers

Friends and colleagues have been saying for a long time in tertiary that students would come through with computer skills so we wouldn’t need to teach them. But year on year we have been finding that although they knew how to “play” with computers they didn’t know how to “work” with them.

Well, I think the tide is turning. At Pukehou they are learning computers skills in authentic situations. The kids are going to take a picture of their own piece of art, edit it in Picasa, record themselves talking about it with Audacity and the whole show will be displayed at parents’ evening.

Right on.

I’ll be writing up how to do the same in your class. So watch this space.

Image: rosefirerising