Being an AST and SSAT Lead Practitioner in ICT sounds impressive! However, in reality it means that I borrow ideas from anyone I meet and try them out on my long suffering students! If any of them work, I then share them with as many other teachers as I can.

ICT is still only a baby subject, but it is growing rapidly. The majority of ICT teachers still don’t have any qualifications in this core subject (me included). Meanwhile, our students are rapidly becoming more advanced in using ICT effectively than we are.

I’m interested in finding out what skills and understanding we should actually be teaching our students. How should we prepare them for living in the real and the virtual world?

Alot of my work is focussed on ways to bring the real world into the curriculum, especially through the use of web based technology.

I strongly believe that our curriculum should be more about discovering the real world and learning about how to communicate with real people. ICT has the potential to empower students to do both these things. However, far too often students are asked to anaylse fake data, research imaginary places and create documents for audiences that do not exist.

For me, there are two main ways of enhancing the curriculum with a global dimension:
1. Providing students with real life issues and real people for them to gather information from
2. Giving students’ work a real purpose by communicating their ideas to a real audience

By enabling students to engage more with the real world through their learning, they see a clearer purpose to what they are doing. This leads to greater motivation and better results.

Our current students will become global citizens in ways that we cannot begin to imagine. All we can do as educators is guide them along the first few steps of their journey.