The last Computers in Classrooms of the school year has now been published. The main items in it are:

 
• News
 
• Using computers to raise standards in mathematics
 
• The White Paper: your child, your schools, our future: building a 21st century school system
 
• Amazing Greats

Find out more by clicking on the title.

Rather than respond immediately to the publication of the Rose Review of the Primary Curriculum, I have looked at the report and some additional documentation, and produced a Computers in Classrooms Briefing as a result.

In the briefing, I have summarised the main points of the documentation in terms of information and communications technology (ICT), and added my own comments. I hope that this will prove to be useful for colleagues as a basis for discussion and as a handy summary of the proposed changes.

The briefing also includes a comparison of the current Level Descriptors for ICT and the proposed changes to them. I find it inconvenient to keep flipping from one document to another in order to compare the two versions of each statement, and if you have a similar opinion then you should find this combination of the two sets quite useful – I know I do!

• Computing at school, by Roger Davies
  
  
• Behind the masks of social networks, by Miller Singleton
  
  
• Is social networking all bad?, by Terry Freedman
  
  
• Facebook's flawed photo privacy, by Dai Barnes, with additional reporting by Lois Whitehead
  
  
• The Facebook party-pooper: tips for protecting your privacy on Facebook, by Scott N Wright
  
  
• Meet Henri: a novel approach to raising personal safety awareness in the primary school, by Dughall McCormick
  
  
• New technology to protect pupils against email abuse from sexual predators, by John McLear
  
  
• What is Twitter, and why is it so important?, by Tom Barrett

In this issue we have a couple of great previews, including an advance publication of a podcast of an interview with a high school student about digital citizenship. The full list is given in the article.

This is a shortish newsletter; the next one, which I am aiming to publish after the Easter break, will be much bigger. There's plenty in that to look forward to, as described further on. It has a social networking focus. If you'd like to contribute to that, there is still time.

In this issue...

• Adventures in Podcasting -- venturing out no more
• Forthcoming issues
• 31 ways of making a contribution
• Prize draw: good news for educational games-creators enthusiasts
• How to make exercises more interesting
• Getting through to parents
• The social networking issue
• The games issue
• Review of the Game-Based Learning Conference 09 (with link to presentations)