An interesting article http://www.thethinkingstick.com/?p=614 show some questions that should be asked during interviews for teachers interested in teaching at a 21 centaury school that has some focus on teaching technology to their K-12 students.
Each question goes into detail on why the question is being asked. The first few questions are just to get a ball park area of knowing what experience the teacher has using a computer. Have they used a program on a computer before? Have they use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, e-mail, etc....
Other questions basically look to see if they know how to do research on the Internet, if they read blogs, belong to online communities, etc...
I'm glad to see that technology is playing more of a role in the school.
What about Computer Science in the Classroom?
At my schools K-12 the computer was hardly ever used as a teaching instrument, but this was before the popularity of the Internet. I was unfortunate to go to a school where they did not teach any programming classes in the high school, so about time I started programming in college I had no experience compared to others. This at the time made me a little jealous, since I had to start from scratch.
The thing is I became the best in the class real fast and ended up help the professors in giving more complex examples of programs. Before becoming a computer science major I was a math major; which at first did not have much in common other then some discrete/finite math. The thing is many computer science professors believe the use of a computer to teach computer science is actually a hindrance.
I believe that computer science should be a new curriculum in K-12 school. Computer science is an excellent example on how math and physics are used in the every day real world, and should be taught without using computers.
The students can learn how binary, cryptography, sorting, etc.. works without a computer. Here is a video showing how this might be done.
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