Broadgreen are one of the few high schools across the country that run a baccalaureate programme. The programme is highly successful one for their students and are Becta's ICT Excellence Awards 2008 - joint runner-up award winners for the Best whole school in the North West category.

Crossley Heath have used their Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) in so many ways to improve teaching, the delivery of the curriculum as well as the enjoyment of learning taking place. The following description highlights the way the schools secure email system is being used to help students make dramatic improvements in the quantity and quality of assignments set.

In 1988, while teaching a professional development course for teachers concerning the use of telecommunications in education, I had an experience that changed me irrevocably. I had just finished describing the expectations for the final project, when a student raised her hand and asked if she could produce a video instead of writing a paper. The question caught me totally off guard. As I paused, mouth agape, I could feel old thinking and new paradigms chafing against each other like psychic tectonic plates. Watching a video was easy enough - but evaluating it as a school assignment? In the end, I told her that I would be happy to accept a video. In reality I was troubled by the fact that my print-based education had not prepared me for that moment or for the many moments like it that were sure to come.

When a student is caught red-handed in school for 'tagging' his own graffiti work around Honywood School he is automatically excluded. For one teacher, however, it was the starting point of encouraging students to develop e-facilitation skills and higher order reading and writing skills.

James Canton in the English department has been particularly keen to develop different styles of teaching and learning. He has found using Frog has allowed him to begin to embed the facilities that will hopefully become the norm within each subject area. James has set up several forums using Frog which have explored a range of strategies to elicit students' views on different subjects whilst also encouraging them to read and respond both synchronously and asynchronously (ie. live and responding immediately to posts and also having time to think carefully about responding). One project involved picking up on a real incident in school where a student had been caught and consequently excluded for writing graffiti around the school and 'tagging' his work. Tagging is a fairly recent 'cult' activity grown out of using graffiti to mark gang territory and is often, but not exclusively, associated with deprived areas and issues relating to abuse of drugs and alcohol as well as bullying, racism and homophobia.