Seems New Zealand teachers aren’t the only ones coping with the introduction of a new curriculum – here’s an interesting story from the UK (courtesy of the Guardian) titled Pupils to study Twitter and blogs in primary schools shake-up sent to me today by my ever-vigilent friend Douglas at the Ministry of Education.

Seems in the UK they’re taking the challenge of linking ICT to the curriculum very seriously, to the extent that their draft plans will require children to master Twitter and Wikipedia and give teachers far more freedom to decide what students should be concentrating on in classes.

Included in the proposal is the requirement for those leaving primary school to be familiar with blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter as sources of information and forms of communication. They must also gain “fluency” in handwriting and keyboard skills, and learn how to use a spell-checker alongside how to spell.

Although only a brief report, the article contains a range of responses from teacher unions, literacy groups and the like, all of which illustrate the wide range of opinions and ideas that exist out there about what we should and shouldn’t be teaching in our schools. Kind of makes me pleased that our curriculum has taken a bigger picture view by starting with ideas about what we want for our learners, and providing a focus on key competencies alongside the learning areas!