What advice is there to help our primary school use ICT well across all subject areas?
The government's ICT in education agency, Becta, has just launched two new CD-roms for primary and secondary teachers called Effective Use of ICT Subject Teaching. Each contains 101 lesson ideas using ICT in subject teaching plus lots of advice and guidance. The ideas and lesson activities are cross-referenced to the national curriculum and QCA schemes of work and include the lesson structure and supporting materials for the lesson. A third CD-rom, called Digital Alchemy, shows how to use digital video resources in learning and teaching, and comes laced with case studies and lesson ideas. All discs can be ordered free via Becta's new online ordering system at www.becta.org.uk/corporate/publications/.
What's the best way to get colour handouts?
Colour matters more than we think, and costs of colour printing are dropping. Colour inkjet printers have made dramatic inroads in schools, but high running and maintenance costs have proved crippling at times. But now colour laser printers are becoming affordable and I looked recently at the new Lexmark C510. At around £500, this compact and easily managed unit is typical of the new breed of low-cost, high-quality colour lasers. The results were impressive in terms of speed of printing and colour quality. Over eight pages per minute in full colour from a Mac or PC. Colour acetates also worked well - a good way of injecting new life into the overhead projector. www.lexmark.com
We seem to have thousands of useful pictures stored on the school network but can't search them and find the ones we want next year...
Encourage staff to save all photos in a "central pot" - an images folder on the school network. Also consider using an image database that allows you to index and organise pictures and to search them via keywords. If you have an Apple Mac, the iPhoto program, which is now part of the basic computer software, fulfils all these functions and allows you to store and instantly search up to 10,000 pictures. For the PC, the company that developed the Google search engine has recently launched some free image-organising software called Picasa. The software combines an image database with cropping and other image-editing tools, and it's all free. Once installed, Picasa automatically finds and organises all your pictures including: jpegs, tiffs, bmps, psds, and standard camera movie files. Just plug in your digital camera and it seems to do the rest - you can also make slide shows. www.picasa.com
I'm an NQT and it's taking me hours to sort out my lesson plans. Can ICT help me make it more manageable?
The Standards Site (www.standards.dfes.gov.uk ) has complete schemes of work available in webpage and Word format - you can use these with your own template lesson plan in Word and just copy and paste the text from website to worksheet. Also, try looking at the Skills Factory Curriculum Complete - it can help you create weekly plans by referencing the QCA objectives and national curriculum for all subjects. It includes individual learning-objective lists that you can cut and paste into your own plans. Subject coordinators can also use it to organise whole year plans. www.skillsfactory.com
How can I make a presentation for parents' evening that will run as a carousel display throughout the event?
Put together the text and pictures you want as a series of PowerPoint slides. Then select the "slide transition" choice from the slide show menu and choose the "advance automatically after" option. You will need to type into the box the number of seconds you want each slide displayed for - 20 is a good starting point. Next select the "set up show" choice from the main slide show menu. Click in the box that says "loop continuously". Now play your slide show in the normal way - it will keep replaying throughout the evening until you hit the escape key.
Email your questions to John Davitt, an ICT trainer, at john@aardvarkwisdom.com
One afternoon a week, children at St Anne's primary school in south Gloucestershire get a chance to show what they can do across a range of curriculum areas, in time reserved for creativity. In mixed age groups, students from years 3 to 6 work in the ICT area, which is rebranded as a "film studio" for the occasion. Guided by the ICT coordinator Janet Dickson, the teams face a different challenge each week. Last week it was to make a film trailer for the sequel to Shrek. The group is responsible for ensuring the whole team is involved regardless of age. "The children take a real delight in showing what they can do in a limited amount of time," says Dickson. To make managing the activity easier, the space is zoned and labelled so students can move between areas called the animation alley, the video zone and the sound studio, depending on the task at hand. Video clips are recorded and animations made separately. These are then linked together using MovieMaker 2, which comes with all Windows XP operating systems. The children can decide on running order and content, making changes in the timeline up until the last minute. If there is time they can also make a soundtrack using Music Box software, and this can be synchronised to the final trailer as backing music. A poster is also produced to publicise the first performance. After the premiere, at the end of the afternoon, the group compares their work with the actual Shrek trailer downloaded from the website at: www.apple.com/quicktime.
This was an article recently written in the Guardian.
