In our course we talked about the skills students should have after a certain school year.  We made lists with skills that the children should have after year 5, 9 and 12.

As I have already mentioned in my report about the JIM Study pupils are faced with new media at all times; playing with the computer, surfing on the web or simply listening to music. Therefore it’s important that we as teachers have the responsibility to educate the students, not only in the subjects but also about new media and the use of new media for school.

In groups we then made lists with competences the pupils shall have at a certain age.
The list for year 5 looks like this:

It’s obvious that after year 5 the main goal is that the students have a basic knowledge of the computer and how it works. They also get to know other types of media, like a digital camera or the whiteboard because these items are around them all the time and they need to know how it works and how they can use it for themselves.  Some of the students might have already a greater knowledge than others, but that’s just helpful for the teacher because the students who have already more knowledge than others can help them.

I also want to mention the skills we have set up for students after grade 12.  When the students have finished school they shall have a wide knowledge of new media in general. 

Take a look at our lists and see what we thought would be important:

After we have created our own skills and competences about new media for students I took a look at the hessian curriculum and found a very helpful page where you will find the new media skills for every subject, every grade and every kind of school. I took a closer look at the competences for English. The skills in this document are more narrowed down to each subject itself. It’s not like in our lists that there are general formulations about the abilities students should have in using a computer but only how they can use the computer in English or any other subject you will find in the curriculum.

So what I found about the competences pupils should have in English is that in the curriculum students shall only know how to work with a computer and the internet after grade 7. We thought that the students should make an internet license after 5th grade and I think that this is really important since we have seen in the JIM Study and the regular use of computers and Internet. Besides of this striking difference most of our ideas match the expectations of the curriculum.

I think that there should be more information for teachers what students should know and there also should be stated criteria on which teachers can inform themselves what they should teach their students and what they already know from previous grades. 

If you want to know more about the new media competences in the hessian curriculum take a look at this link:
http://www.schulserver.hessen.de/hungen/gs/mbk/nmhesslehrplan.pdf