Teachers at Forest Hill, an 11-18 boys' school in Lewisham, London, are just getting to grips with what it means for their school to receive f £1.4m of ICT infrastructure under Building Schools for the Future (BSF).
Every classroom now has an interactive whiteboard and laptop docking station; the computer-pupil ratio is better than two to one; the managed learning environment gives staff and students access to resources and their own work online from virtually anywhere; and the wireless network is vast and robust enough to let 400 students be logged on simultaneously.
ICT training for staff to use this state-of the-art kit is part of the local authority BSF package and the school has had a stream of subject-specific consultants in to work with departments, provided by the educational consutlancy, VT Four S.
Elspeth Law, head of art, who has been teaching since 1979, had seen past ICT innovation come and go without great impact in her field. Painting and drawing software, in particular, had not moved on, she says, and the department seldom used it.
But this time she was clear that technology had to match the department's schemes of work if staff were to maximise its benefits, and she also wanted training to reflect that need.
"I asked the consultant to give us ideas of what other schools were already doing," she says. "He had lots of examples for us of digital photography, fi lm animation, sound- and music-scapes and typography linked to art — and the good thing was that it was based around concepts we work with. So for composition, for example, which some children find difficult, he showed us you could set up and photograph something in diff erent ways and do it very fast. That was good because we find boys like quick results."
Colin Wagstaff, head of the school's liberal studies department and a history teacher for 33 years, had virtually no experience of teaching with ICT. He has been pleasantly surprised by his introduction to Microsoft's PowerPoint on the interactive whiteboard, and by finding ways to use the interactive Who Wants to be a Millionaire? game in history.
He sees project work as the area where technology will come into its own as an information-gathering tool, but disagrees with some technology enthusiasts who say ICT will turn teachers into "facilitators" rather than classroom experts.
"I might use technology to support, for example, research for a debate with my A-level history class on the first world war. But to say that the teacher will ever become just a facilitator is wrong."
One useful but indirect consequence of the introduction of ICT on a large scale has been the role played by younger and more IT-literate staff in teaching their colleagues, he adds.
"It has created a lot of ideas of sharing and unwittingly has created nice opportunities for teamwork within the department. That's already a positive spin-off ."
For Mariela Klingler, who teaches German and Spanish, the expansion in ICT has brought a significant career opportunity. Twelve months after completing her newly qualified teacher (NQT) year, and following training with a consultant, she is one of a team showing colleagues how to use interactive whiteboards.
"I was already relatively IT-literate, though I was using PowerPoint rather than the interactive whiteboard," she says. "In the whiteboard training we learned how to create flip charts for our subjects, how to layer things and take snapshots from webpages and insert them in charts. I am now passing that on to others, so it's great professional development for me."
Weblinks
Forest Hill school: foresthill.lewisham.sch.uk
VT Four S: www.fours.co.uk
