A wide range of Primary classroom activities, reviews and resources has been developed and published over the years originally by MAPE and, more recently since the merger in 2004, by Naace.

The Direct2U service was a weekly email service produced by Becta in partnership with Naace. The service was for primary teachers and offered lesson plans featuring ICT in activities based on six subject strands. The service is discontinued but you can view the lesson plans in this archive.

Focus: ICT Coordinator

In this jam-packed issue, the lead article looks at the use of Windows Movie maker to develop ICT and geography skills and on page 3 Jackie Lester offers advice on preparing for an Ofsted inspection. On page 4 Rhona Dick introduces two pieces of software for exploring moral dilemmas and finally we have a Top Tip for maths teaching.
For comment or contributions please contact me at h.govier@btopenworld.com

Lydia Johnson describes how she used Windows Movie Maker with her Year 5 pupils to motivate learning across the curriculum.

A teacher in an English schol abroad describes two activities which use ICT to make cross-curricular links.

This article describes an activity used with a Year 4 class when studying a contrasting locality. The school is located in a suburb of Swansea. The locality used as a comparison is the rural and coastal village of Oxwich, located some10 miles to the west of the school on the Gower Peninsula. The activity gave the opportunity to develop the children's geographical skills and knowledge whilst developing their use of ICT. As well as the use of the Internet, the activity integrated other ICT applications into the work, including a spreadsheet and wordprocessing/desktop-publishing package.

This article won the Chris Robson Memorial Prize 2000, and was first published in MAPE Focus on Science Pack, Autumn 2000. Roy outlines how children took part in the weather reports project and made use of software applications including data-handling, word-processing as well as weather-monitoring equipment.

Kar2ouche is a commercially produced program that allows students to create imaginative animations with a full range of templates. Students can to add backgrounds, characters, voices and objects to support their multimedia projects.

In this Article, Christy outlines how ICT may be used to help teachers ensure that lessons on 'world writing' are successful. It provides a review of the range of resources available from BBC Active designed for use on a whiteboard, supporting whole-class teaching.