Upgrading IT Systems

This week, some of the Governors met to continue our improvements being made in IT across the school. The project of upgrading all of the school's IT systems which has been underway for some time is now moving towards the final implementation stages.

The Governor's have been working with staff and pupils, and with outside professional agencies to decide how to best upgrade the systems in a forward thinking and future proofing way. We have also visited other school's (some similar and some vastly different) to learn from them and to see how they are making the use of IT in the classroom exciting for the pupils.

The addition of the school blogs and the IPad's have transformed learning considerably this year, and there are further plans in place to improve the provision of IT across the school for staff and pupils.

With the national implementation of the new primary curriculum starting in Sept 2014, including a new computing curriculum, the governors hope that the introduction of a new School IT system will help to meet the needs which the new modules of work require. The new primary computing curriculum is far more exciting than the limited use of computers I personally remember from primary school (wheeling the one old clunky BBC computer around the school from classroom to classroom and waiting half an hour for it boot up in order to play a 5 minute game!). The learning planned still includes the traditional proficiency in creating documents and spreadsheets, but also explores more interesting aspects of online IT which will hopefully be more exciting to the pupils. There will be units across the curriculum which include coding, programming adventure games, creating digital music, movies, and photography, creating ebooks, and cyber safety.

With these units in mind, it is essential to have the right equipment to be able to make learning innovative and productive, and so along with a new school server, we hope to provide some new IT equipment for the children to use in their learning going forward into the new school year to provide them with an interesting and valuable experience with using IT.

Watch this space for developments coming in the summer term!

Written by Clare Rudd