Hi - just wanted to get your opinion on this! Generally I am pleased with what my son learns at school but it is very old fashioned. There is one computer - but it is old and not really any good. There are no whiteboards or any other "gadgets". He doesn't use the computer much at home. Do you think it is an important skill to learn at his age (he is almost 8)? If so, I don't really know how to go about helping him learn? I have just realised recently that he is not as tech-savvy as his younger cousins in the UK but wonder what (if anything) I should do about it. Opinions gratefully received.

In the primary school here in France where I work the children have a one hour session once a week on the computers rom the age about nine and a half. They have to work two to a computer and I gather they just do on line grammar exercises and the like. However I feel it is important for children to have some basics. I think they get assessed at the end of the primary school years and they go on to more difficult work at secondary school. One of our classrooms has an interactive whiteboard but I don't think the class teacher uses it very much. The problelm is that there is never any time to learn how to use the thing and you can't learn with a clamouring class around you - I know, I've tried, so I don't use it either which is probably a shame.

I think if I had a child of primary school age who wasn't getting any computer experience at school I would do a bit myself - just simple things like how to use Word or a similar program, how to search for and sift information. but I don't think I would let them loose on the net alone.

Both mine (now 13 and 10) have been using computers since toddlers as we've always had a PC or two in the house and a lot of my work is computer based.

Schools in my area in the UK use computers, white boards and laptops all the time. The children have access to laptops to use in class and also for clubs - my older one was doing html coding and designing his own website in his last year at primary at a computer club, but that's probably because he's a bit of a maths/computer geek so certainly not every child does this! My 10 year has been on sites such as Club Penguin for a year or two, under supervision and uses Microsoft Word, Excel and the Microsoft Paint programme.

I would certainly make sure your son learns how to navigate the internet (under supervision of course) and use common programmes like Word and Excel.

This is my personal view as the parent of two teenage children. I am probably swimming against the tide here so I am prepared to be shot down in flames!

From my perspective I would say your son is probably not missing very much. Clearly computers are an important tool, (not a toy), but they can also be extremely distracting to children and teenagers, especially once they discover MSN, Facebook, Twitter and so forth. Computer games can also absorb a lot of valuable time that could and should be spent on more productive pursuits, or simply being with family and friends, which I know the Mediterraneans do such much better than we do here in the UK; hence the comparative lack of social problems in Mediterranean countries.

If your son is already learning well at school I would say don't worry about his computing skills. I didn't use a computer until I was 35, simply because I couldn't see any point in using one until that point, as I could do everything I wanted with tools that I already owned and understood, (slide rule, calculator, Log tables and so forth), and could generally get the answers I needed much quicker than those who were playing around with spreadsheets. Better still, I knew how I arrived at my answers, so I had a good idea whether they were right or not!

However, it would help your son to learn the basics of spreadsheets, word processing and the internet, so he has some idea of what is involved; but I would leave it to him to find his own interest in other, less productive aspects of computing as and when he wants to.

As I said before, I had no interest in computers until I was 35, and it has done me no harm. Furthermore, now that I have a real need to use computers I probably know more about them than most people, so I your son doesn't have to lose out by waiting until he is older before spending his valuable younger years online. Spending an evening on Facebook or Need for Speed teaches you very little about real world computing.

SB

Thanks for your replies! I am a little surprised that Excel/spreadsheets are considered basics. I have no idea how to use/do them! Will probably wait a while and when he shows an interest (at the moment too interested in rugby!) look into explaining things a bit. I am a bit surprised that they don't do anything much at school. On the other hand a LOT of time is spent on dictation and improving handwriting!

At that age I had a speccy and was hacking things around badly in BASIC.

I would have thought it would be reasonable to have supervised looking things up on the internet for homework projects. Or just get a slightly out of date encyclopedia programme from some computer magazine cover disk and stick to that.

But I don't think there should be too much emphasis, from the odd bit of undergraduate marking I get to do standards of English are generally appalling and work on such basics seems rather lacking in the schools.

Frankly, I would think that rugby is a healthier and far more beneficial pastime than spending valuable time on a computer. I may be a Luddite but it hasn't done me any harm.

Spreadsheets are actually quite simple once you know how to use them. Modern spreadsheets also make life very much easier than when I started in the early 1990's using SmartWare and Lotus 123.

Basically, all you do is enter a formula into a cell, such as " =SUM(B2:B25) " and it will add up the values in the cells listed. However, there are many other functions such as Average, Minimum, Maximum, Standard Deviation and hundreds more. Then of course you can cross calculate the results of other calculations, and the spreadsheet recalculates whenever you change a number. Simples!


SB

I'm not entirely at odds with swellbox as I think things should be kept in proportion and I don't think sufing alone on the net is on at your son's age. However your remark about a lot of time being spent on dication and handwriting leads me to suspect that the Italian system is rather like the French one. The children here also spend hours doing dication and they hate it. It doesn't help with their spelling as their written work shows. It may have been a useful tool in the past but it is not much use now. They also spend hours doing caligraphy style hand writing practice. So that when I am faced with a class of seven year olds who should be over the stage of forming letters and on to the stage of understanding the sense of what they wirite hands go up asking "How do you write a capital H?" and "I can't remember how you do a Y" This is because from the nursery class they are faced with four ( and sometimes more) examples of every letter of the alphabet - print and joined up script and the joined up script is of a complicated kind. This nodoubt was useful in the days of hand written ledgers etc. The argument that it forms the basis of beautiful and legible handwriting for life goes out of the window as soon as they get to secondary school. The vast majority of the secondary school children I taught here had appalling handwriting and great difficulty in spelling.

So in this day and age I think these things should be dropped in favour of a simple clear and quick style of handwriting and a knowledge of how to use a basic computer programs - as mentioned above. These skills are what the 21st century child needs. We are still, in many ways, teaching for the 19th centtury.

Yes, Aquarelle - it sounds similar! My son asks me "How do you do a capital F?" or whatever and is amazed I don't know! Of course I can do a capital F but not exactly as it is meant to be.....

We need an agree / like button!

I agree, and I design computer systems for a living.

Hmm, well I think there is a generational thing here.

At university, we were increasingly doing all our note taking directly onto netbooks. Digital notes are much easier to archive, tag, convert into pdfs, share, and so on. In my working life I am rarely called on to write more than a few words at a time. Compared to having decent writing, having a decent touch typing speed is far more useful! I've learnt quite a lot about where I misuse grammar, and what words I can't spell thanks to error checking tools...

That said, children do need to be able to write well, as the ability to write by hand is always going to come along sometime (exams, job applications, etc).

In the future digital, literacy is going to be increasingly important. I was lucky enough to have a computer in my home from when I was 4, and although I'm no leet hacker, the fact that I am regularly using the programming and computer skills that I've picked up over the years, despite not having any formal training or qualifications relating to computers, IT, or programming.

One thing I would observe, though, is that using a computer requires skills, rather than education. A solid grounding in logic, maths, and an inclination to play or experiment will take you a long way with everything from setting up a spreadsheet, to coding your own GUI.

What's a GUI?

Sorry... its an acronym for Graphical User Interface. Most computer users, these days, work entirely via a GUI that allows them to tell a computer what to do, without needing to type out intructions, or write their own programs or short bits of code. Someone, at some point, has to create all the graphics and images for the buttons etc, and write code to link them with actions the computer then performs "behind the scenes". I don't know very much about it (and couldn't do it), I was simply using it as an example as "something-comparitively-advanced-that-most-computer-users-won't-ever-do".

My programming ability ends at writing simple code to do nasty maths for me!