UK curriculum review: social media to be taught in primary schools

Whilst we are in the throes of determining our own national curriculum, it's interesting to note some of the findings from the recent overhaul of the UK primary school curriculum:

Children to leave primary school familiar with blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter as sources of information and forms of communication. They must gain "fluency" in handwriting and keyboard skills, and learn how to use a spellchecker alongside how to spell.

Children to be able to place historical events within a chronology. "By the end of the primary phase, children should have gained an overview which enables them to place the periods, events and changes they have studied within a chronological framework, and to understand some of the links between them." Every child would learn two key periods of British history but it would be up to the school to decide which ones. Schools would still be able to opt to teach Victorian history or the second world war, but they would not be required to. The move is designed to prevent duplication with the secondary curriculum, which covers the second world war extensively.

Reference: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/mar/25/primary-schools-twitter-curriculum

The Independent Review of the Primary Curriculum: Final Report is available from http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/primarycurriculumreview/

Distributing digitised Museum content into schools

The following paper was recently presented at Museums on the Web 2009: Building Digital Distribution Systems For School-Based Users Of Museum Content: New initiatives in Australia and Canada.

It features Scootle, a pilot project which the National Museum contributed to last year, and the Canadian Virtual Museum which brings together learning resources from across the cultural sector on a Teacher's centre web 2.0 platform.

National curriculum foundational documents

The National Curriculum Board has completed the key foundational documents that will shape the national curriculum: http://www.ncb.org.au/communications/publications.html