![]() But I am proud to have in my acquaintance, the great Mike Ive, dad of Sir Jonathan Ive. I am beginning to tell stories about some of the great things that have happened that you might otherwise had kept to tell your grandchildren. On my way to where I am now, I have had fun and had my moments. Fail to change and be swallowed up before breakfast. We are forever learning to change our teaching styles as we have children who now access a different world than those of just a few years back. I was going to remain purely local and doing what I still do now - teach and continue to evolve to learn how to teach again. The Internet was in its infancy, but not going to profile me or launch me into the stratosphere. Technology enjoyed the status of English, Mathematics and Science and I was making waves in the subject. This group of many were training to become teachers and were riding the crest of the wave where Technology was one of the Kenneth Baker big four core subjects. Teaching a cohort of Mechanical Engineers was daunting. The AnDi Oddule was a gamble, but paid off and after a few months I was proud to be running a Computer Aided Design and Computer Aided Manufacturing course including control technology for the Smallpeice Trust. Technology Supplies are now a massive company and a global influence in schools all around the world. More used to supplying Acrylic sheet at the time, this company sourced a device called an AnDi Oddule from Baildon Electronics. I asked a local company called Technology Supplies to source me a device to interface the Acorn computer more successfully. I still work in the family of schools and could well do so for the whole of my professional career yet. ![]() ![]() There were no graphic packages available to me then and knowing your coordinates was all you needed to design and realise the latest buggy to follow a black path around the workshop floor.Īs an aside to this story, I picked up a post at the now famous Thomas Telford School in Shropshire as it opened its doors in 1991. With the support of my mentors at Sheffield Polytechnic in the late 80's I was conversant with using the analogue port of the Acorn computer and sensors were attached for model car racing, buggy vehicles and even relays so that I did not draw too much power from the Acorn and send its very small processing capability beyond the Milky Way in a puff of capacitance! Even the buggy vehicles were made from scratch and tirelessly programmed using computer numerical control on the Boxford Vertical Machining Centres. After I had mastered the unparalleled impact of Bubble font using the blistering pace of a dot matrix printer, I was ready to move on. The 'productivity' turning point was when I was asked as a trainee teacher on my first practise in Rotherham, England to take a look at the new Acorn Computer that had been bought (but no one had a clue how to use including myself). As an enthusiast of computers since my my introduction to a Commodore PET at school and then a Commodore 64 at home, I am one of millions, (in their prime) where the assistance of computer technology is a natural way of working rather than having been imposed on me. ![]()
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