ICT Inspirations

I have been a primary school teacher for 19 years, of which the last 14, have involved the teaching, learning or leadership of ICT as a subject in one guise or another. During the 2006-07 academic year I was afforded, the fantastic opportunity of teaching ICT as a subject specialism, while supporting PPA within my current school, to all students  from Y1 to Y6 (5-11 yrs) and the occasional opportunity work with student in the foundation stage (3-5). As a practitioner committed to research informed practice, this lead to my developing a blog.  A place where I could share my developing thoughts and ideas with others.

I have maintained a number of websites over this time, that have enabled me to explore technologies available as they emerge, while supporting my understanding of the potential for these tools, while setting out to share resources and ideas with colleagues. My first site "Learning Links," was published humbly to the web in 1998, as a theme based set of bookmarks. Initially developed to support use of the web by colleagues in topic work, and this went through various incarnations, before being refined to become part of my school's website.

This was only the beginning of a learning journey which has lead me to begin seeing the effective use of ICTs, in teaching and learning, as part of a "tool box" approach. One which has involved me not only in classroom based work and colleague support but also in engagement, in practice informed research activities.

In establishing this web space I am not creating a how to site, but a space where I can pull together some of the resources, techniques and strategies I have developed for use in class, including those random thoughts which leap out as I play with and explore ICT tools available for myself and use them in the classroom, while exploring my developing thoughts about practice and pedagogy using ICTs as tools for teaching and learning. I hope that visitors will see it as stopping off point, somewhere for those to visit who are interested in joining me on an ongoing journey through the exploration of ICTs as generic as cross curricular tools.

The site is currently divided into several broad areas

• A Resource Bank: Where I am beginning to include, web links, classroom developed, tried and tested tools and where eventually I may include unit plans linking generic ICT tools to cross curricular activity.
• A Bright Ideas Area. That will be formulated and published over time, from blog entries and those random thoughts and possibilities that come to mind, when helping colleagues play with and embed software environments, as I work towards the development of a generic Scheme of work for Primary ICT
• Teaching and Learning With ICT: Reflections on and links to my ongoing practice informed research work.
• My Blog: A web journal, reflecting on day today practice as a classroom teacher using ICTs to support teaching and learning.
• My Podcast:  an experimental platform I am using to explore and develop ideas around how this new medium might be used to support teaching and learning.
• A link to our School Website: that will allow you to see examples of the work we are doing with our students as examples of activities developed here.

As I am a practicing classroom teacher, please bear with me, finding time to keep these pages up to date, can be a challenge, My blog and del.icio.us bookmarks are more frequently updated and the content they contain feed into the more static content you will find here. I hope that in visiting these pages, my blog and podcast you will find germs and some gems that will inspire or support your planning, management and organisation of ICT, as we seek to embed these exciting tools in meaningful learning activities that enhance the experiences of our students.
 

Thank you for Visiting
Simon Mills
 

Introducing Blogs and blogging  (Audience: Primary ICT Subject Leaders Meeting Bristol  March 2007)