It’s become an annual tradition to run a survey of Raspberry Pi Certified Educators- a good one as we learn so much from them. Certified Educators are people who have been through the face to face Picademy training. There’s over 1000 of them now, about two thirds school teachers as well a librarians, teacher educators, youth workers and museum educators. They all went to Picademy to learn about digital making, computing and Raspberry Pi, and we ask them each year how they’ve been able to use what they learned, the impact they are having and the challenges they are facing.
It was really encouraging to see even more educators than last year reporting that they make good use of what they learn at Picademy. On average, each RCE is also reaching more young people than they were last year. Many educators are sharing what they learn from our training and our community, and interestingly, they share with colleagues outside their organisation more often than with those within it. Hence, we see an opportunity to encourage RCEs to share with colleagues in their immediate work environment more frequently in the future.
This report is packed full of findings, and we wanted to share it as it’s important that everyone involved in the digital skills field can learn as much from each other as possible. There’s some interesting implications of what educators are telling us about the challenges of implementing open ended and problem solving approaches in traditional settings like schools that we all need to take heed of. It’s easy to say that schools should be doing more for digital skills. It’s much harder to unpick how they adapt the vastly different approaches and skills that people value in this area alongside everything else they are required to do.
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