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.

What does globalisation mean?

Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects relating to Globalisation is that means different things to different people. The DCSF aims to focus on the new curriculum for ICT and across all subjects and dimensions. However, Globalisation infers the 'bigger picture' and the use, development or acceptance of ideas, Web 2.0 technology as well as communicating and sharing information globally. Put more simply Globalisation refers to using ICT to help schools prepare children to take their place in the world/become global citizens.

Bowes children aged 9-10, in supportive pairs, created short PowerPoint presentations with a focus on the use of ICT, showing what they had learnt from their topic work on Ancient Greece.

Arnaud Mandan livens up MFL by inviting famous French and German guests from the past onto their VLE forums. Dave Calver came up with the idea of getting his students to write questions to a virtual World War I veteran in order to get an idea of what life was like living in the trenches before writing their own assignment on what life was like.

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.

The target for the project was the setting up 200 children with their own interactive web-sites in 4 weeks! The idea was to set up safe on-line web accounts using www.think.com with primary children and their teachers and to help them appreciate the potential that Web 2.0 technologies have to enhance teaching and learning.

The project ran for 4 weeks and was a joint venture sponsored by The Oracle Education Foundation and MirandaNet abased at the Institute of Education in London. The project sponsored several other schools and culminated in a meeting to share work and achievements on July 10th 2008 at the MirandaNet's 'WLE centre'(World e-Citizens) based at the Institute of Education in London.

Naace have been successful in securing a TDA bid won by Steven Coombes based at Bath Spa University and being delivered as a 'Visual Learning Course' by Christina Preston and John Cuthell at MirandaNet (based at The Institute of Education, London).

As part of a longer article to published in the next edition of Primary Focus, Jim Fanning provides his blog of a two-day flexible learning course. Is this the way of the future?

This article explains how children can develop a sense of chronology and an awareness of the work of archaeologists by studying the contents of a bin!