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.

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.

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

Doug Dickinson explains how modern technology can transform the perennial favourite - keeping weather records - into a dynamic and multi modal activity.

This article describes how the school environment is used to develop science, geography, ICT and maths skills within the context of a 'weather' topic.

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.