What is more important? Cross-Curricular or Discreet ICT

That is a HUGE point. We have too many departments that use ICT for typewriting and that is it. I feel that is a complete waste of a resource when others are desperate to use resources. I think the best way I have seen it written is the Moodle teacher usage story. I will try and dig it up but it goes along the lines of teacher discovers moodle and all excited but kids are non plussed when using it. When the teacher asks the person who got them onto it what gives they are told that it is because they just used a tool badly and with no structure. That is very badly put so I will find the article but it really is the usage that affects the students then the actual use.

Comes down to teachers need more time to do training and planning for this stuff and find people who are good at teaching the teachers. Ohh and the teachers to realise that they need to learn it and that it isn't just another thing being dumped on them.

EDIT: The article I lamely put across

On the issue of small clusters VS resource rooms, I have a personal dislike of clusters as they become very selective on who gets to use them or badly looked after so abused by the kids (and staff!). We have just closed down 3 clusters for various subjects parlty becuase the space and PC's were needed but also because the rooms were generally badly looked after. Students would be put in there with out supervision, or sent there to get them out of the room or just end up in there because they had wandered around and decided it was a quiet out the way place to play games and look at football sites. Seemed to be no real ownership as they were put there by ICT so must be their problem, however much we tried to change that attitude.

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Originally Posted by TechMonkey

Comes down to teachers need more time to do training and planning for this stuff and find people who are good at teaching the teachers. Ohh and the teachers to realise that they need to learn it and that it isn't just another thing being dumped on them.

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I'm a bit hard on Teachers about this, but ICT has been part and parcel of a Teachers job now, and has been for near on ten years. We had a large sum of money injected into training via the lottery fund under the guise of NOF, (most of this was wasted on poor training programmes). And we are still getting NQTs in school who were part of a generation that were taught IT while at Secondary school, still not able to complete simple tasks on a PC.

I normally am on teachers who say they haven't enough time but it has got to that point in the majority of schools that they need time to change resources, adjust schemes and all that kind of thing with qualified people to help out and give guidance. Also the problem is many of them don't do computer tasks repetivly enough to remember them. Ok they should, but it's that first step that they need to overcome to get going. I hate the excuse more than anyother but if a teacher is teaching and isn't confident on something they are going to either ignore it or not bother as they want to get on and teach.

I managed to join just as NOF was finishing and found it mildly amusing. Looking back now I'm a bit miffed that more wasn't made of it and the training wasn't made better, rather than how to open a file and this is a folder type stuff.

Thanks to everyone who has taken part in this thread ... it will remain open until Saturday when I will summarise and then give a week for responses.

If people can give examples of when they have felt that any of the options have made a measurable difference to the students it would be appreciated.