Most people with the skills required would rather earn more in the private sector which is crying out for these skilled individuals and paying good wages to get top talent. Who can blame them?
If you were to look for hours teaching you will be met with no job security and temporary hours for many years, no pay during holidays, pay cuts and no prospect of change in this situation anytime soon.

I am a secondary school teacher who EIGHT YEARS AGO did a two year Graduate Diploma in Commercial Computing (programming, applications, database design, software engineering etc.)at night. In the years since I have forgotten most of what I learned as little is relevant. In my own time I built the school Moodle with over 300 users, given advice to staff on blogs and give IT courses to teachers in Education Centres. The problem is that IT is not an officail subject on the school curriculum. Perhaps the new Junior Cert could address this and make IT a compulsory short course. Most secondary schools have the hardware infrestructure in place.
Many younger teachers do use IT in their teaching but many lack confidence as students are often very accomplished in computing spending so much time at their computers and gaming consoles.

I see some people seeking to beat teachers with this issue. We cannot blame teachers if training colleges havent provided the training and the Department of Education and NCCA havent promoted certified courses in schools.

As a secondary school teacher I would agree that a percentage teachers have poor IT skills but to be fair most under 35s are very literate while an increasing number of older teachers are up skilling.

Keep in mind people the philosophy of education should be about ‘teaching’ kids to learn and develop for themselves. A person with a good computer knowledge does not a good teacher make.

There are lots of smart teachers doing lots of smart ICT stuff every day – check out the Google Group for the Computer Education Society of Ireland at https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/cesi-list

Then why are they are cutting the ICT grants for school ?

I am, for lack of a better word, the “ICT guy” in the school I work. I know enough about computers in general, and have done a number of courses about teaching through ICT. I do need to acquire more technical expertise however, as I find it’s an area that I and many other teachers fall down. To give an example, I could list hundreds of good websites to use with students or to direct students to, along with teaching strategies to maximise their use, but if the broadband in the school is down it takes me a couple of hours after school to try and sort it out. same if a computer breaks or has technical issues. After I’ve turned it off and on, I’m struggling. Perhaps, some of this basic knowledge should be taught in teacher training programs. I know the risk of the technology not working when it needs to turns a lot of teachers of trying it out.

Brendan’s post is the most informed here. There’s no point in people blaming their teacher from 10/20 years ago for not being proficient in a subject that didn’t exist, with resources he didn’t have. It has been blatantly obvious to all teachers for years that a subject status was required for the area but successive governments would not invest enough money. This is what teachers are talking about when they draw attention to the percentage of our GNP spent on education compared to other OECD countries. This report is a joke because it’s ‘findings’ are manifestly obvious to all.

BTW where did The Journal get that photograph- it must be 15 years old…

thelast thing we need is jobs being outsourced . I myself own an IT company ( Two man Operation ) , and I would love to get this opportunity , but Im sure theres loads of IT Irish people who can do this job without going abroad !

IT needs to be thought by IT qualified teachers. it’s not good enough that 25% think they have intermediate to advanced IT skills. don’t 90% of drivers think they are excenlent drivers.
teachers doing short courses and being able to use Facebook doesn’t cut it when it comes to teaching IT to our kids who’s competition is the larger world and not the next school over in ballygobackwards.
plus what is it with schools buying over expensive apple mac’s, seems fashion driven rather than requirement

ICT should be a subject in the junior/leaving cert, I’d prefer to see one of my kids learn code rather than home economics or worse still religion, if you want people to be prolific at a subject bring it in to secondary school, plus there’s only so many times you can do word and excel Microsoft basically sponsor the little bit of IT in schools

IT skills amongst teachers in schools was shocking when i went to school,

Teacher couldn’t type for crap and knew nothing about the computers yet he was our computer teacher, he used to give us stuff to type which was supposed to last us 40min but half of us would have it finished in 5min as we could type properly.

Serious computers on the picture, where did they get them from, back to the future? :-)

Teachers teaching Facebook!!!! Love it

They haven’t a clue. I worked in a school and every day teachers came to me saying their computer or printer didn’t work., 99 per cent of the time they never even bothered to plug them in. When they did they couldn’t use them.