The computer to which these Liberal Democrat councillor blogs have been transferred has behaved impeccably so far (unlike its predecessor, which was overloaded and tended to switch itself off gratuitously), so I am seriously applying myself to writing up the backlog of items to be noted here.

“Catching up” was an apt description of what I was doing at Catwg school recently. Under a new initiative, governors are ‘linked’ to particular responsibilities or subject areas. The linked governor takes an interest in and gains more detailed knowledge of their area, getting the body of governors more involved in the school without all of us having to know everything about every subject. When subjects were being allocated, IT was a natural for me as it has been my speciality for most of my working life. (It also avoided me having to take on a subject in which my formal education had finished over a generation ago!) However, I was aware that my own specialisation had become narrower and narrower, and that the world of information technology had moved on since my last proper programming course.

So it was with some trepidation that I went to the school last week to be briefed by Mrs Maunder, the school’s information technology specialist. I need not have worried, as Mrs Maunder gave me a very clear and thorough exposition of the application of IT in the school. The first thing to be remarked on was the way that IT was integrated virtually seamlessly into every other subject, and taken on board by the other teachers.

However, there was one constant from twenty years ago: LOGO. Those of us who bought Amstrad PCWs with their green screens and 3″ exchangeable disks all those years ago, mainly to do basic word-processing,  will remember the bonus of a simple programming language which moved a “turtle” round the screen. As an introduction to the concept of programming, it has proved very hardy, especially when married to a real object to be manoeuvred round its little corral. I could even remember some of the instructions after all this time!

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