Well, in the best traditions in a geek experiment, here is my "Hello World" activity. This blog is my method of sharing experiences of teaching ICT and computing.
I suppose most people will come here to download the resources, lesson plans, schemes of work and other classroom ready tools for secondary teachers in the UK. I may also post some ideas that may trigger debate and can be developed into something useful.
First, a bit about me.
I started using computers was back in 1979 when a window salesman (as in the things you look out of) called at our house and mentioned that he had a Sinclair ZX80 that he wasn't happy with. My dad bought it from him for £30 and we set it up on our TV.
The ZX80 had a built in BASIC interpreter, ran with 1k of RAM and the hardware was so limited that it couldn't run the display at the same time as processing a program! The screen would go blank and then return when the program either ended or hit a PAUSE instruction (in capitals because the keywords were all entered by pressing a key)
I was hooked! I spent any nights staying up all night to enter or debug something that I was developing. Clearly my dad was also hooked because he bought a 16k Tandy TRS80 L2 system, complete with green screen monitor and cassette storage. On the Tandy, I could delve into machine code and had to learn a whole load of theory including how to poke the hand crafted machine code into memory byte by byte.
I may say a bit more about my computing journey later, but you may notice how closely the skills I was learning fit the GCSE Computing specification. They are either key skills, or hopelessly outdated!
