Welcome to GTP ICT. We’ll use this blog to tell you about what’s coming up each week and to record highlights as we go.

We’re excited to be using blogs with you to collect thoughts and discoveries, and we look forward to linking to your individual blogs from here so that we can all share ideas easily.

Here are some links to get you thinking about using blogs and wikis in schools.  Mr Mitchell and Mr Avery‘s blogs are good examples.  BrainPOP made a fantastic recording of a group of Year 6 children from Heathfield School:

This week we will be looking at the course outline, thinking about recent changes to the ICT curriculum in schools, and setting up individual blog and twitter accounts. You can read about recent curriculum initiatives on Helen’s blog and explore your free blogging tool on MyPad from the tools block on your Nile homepage. You’ll get caught up browsing through the 137 edublog themes (Helen has tried them all!). It would be useful to set up a twitter account so that we can share our ideas on the School of Education screens and further afield using the hashtag #unsoe.

This week we’ll also be exploring interactive whiteboards and presentation software. We’ll have some hands-on with the whiteboard and visualiser and also think about the software and tools you can use to make the most of them. Gareth has been posting about interactive whiteboards. I have posted about presentation software, including eBook-making. I have also made some sets of bookmarks using a tool called Sqworl which will be useful in the session. There is one set of bookmarks on Interactive Whiteboards and another on Presentation software.

Your directed task this week will be to use your blog and twitter to comment and reflect on the session, making a comparison of tools.

Look forward to working with you,

Helen