freeg131: Philip Gamble

Following a link from Mr Needlestone’s blog I came across the blog of Drew Buddie, head of ICT at the Royal Masonic school. The latest post contained some facts about children’s usage of technology in the UK that are certainly believable but I actually found quite scary.

• 93% of all children have their own PC

I do, but it is about 8 years old and doesn’t have Internet access.

• 8 is the average age for a child to have their first mobile phone

Not sure why, but I find this a bit sad. I am now 18 and have never had a mobile phone. Go me!

• 1.4 million children own their own webspace

Not surprising at all. Especially with the rise of social networking sites in recent years.

• 2.7 billion searches are carried out on Google every month - so are children now asking Google instead of their parents?

Yes, for sure. There are lots of things I either Google purely out of curiosity, I tend to use Google as my first port of call when looking for any kind of information. But much of the material we would have simply not found in the past or would have had to ask our parents for even though they are unlikely to be specialists on solutions to take multiple deprivation in MEDCs…

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Yesterday lunchtime I was invited along with Jon to attend Mr Needlestone’s first student e-council meeting to discuss the use of technology in school and in particular our school’s e-learning resource, Rickypedia. Most years were represented and I was surprised to see that I actually knew a couple of the lower school members.

I couldn’t stay for the full meeting as I then had to demonstrate my computing coursework to Mr Cruse. And yes, it went wrong. This was followed by a discussion about GameMaker - Mr Cruse is considering teaching in it to Year 9 (but couldn’t complete the 1945 tutorial!), and my websites - primarily GameMaker Blog but also some general talk about SEO (mainly how I ‘hijacked’ 3rd place in a search for “Rickmansworth School“).

This was followed by Computing in which we undertook a field-trip. To the room next door, the library and LI6 to inspect hubs and the server. What fun! Still it made a change from the normal lesson format.

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