Making ICT Lessons Exciting, Inspiring and Engaging!

The Royal Society reported last year that many ICT lessons in schools were a ‘turn off’ for many students, stating; “We need school curricula to engage them better if the next generation are to engineer technology and not just consume it.”

While the Royal Society has commissioned further research that will report back in Autumn 2011 there is a growing number of both primary and secondary ICT teachers across the UK who are already breaking new ground with more exciting and creative schemes of work for ICT. Word of mouth and collaboration through social networking such as twitter underpins this movement with best practice being exchanged on a day-by-day basis.

However, an enterprising teacher, Zoe Ross, has taken the bold step of setting up her own company, DoDigital, which seeks to give teachers the opportunity to learn to use exciting, relevant and easily accessible software which can be used in the classroom to encourage creative and logical thinking while engaging and challenging students.

More Information

DoDigital’s summer workshop program features topics such as Creative ICT for KS3, featuring a choice of 8 hour-long workshops on a variety of innovative and exciting topics, such as App Inventor, Alice, Google Sketchup and Kodu, led by 5 experienced and inspiring teachers of ICT. Other workshops include using web 2.0 tools to inspire literacy and raise standards and a Google Apps for Education workshop, the first of it’s kind in the UK, in which Google Certified teachers and trainers will share how they use Google’s free, innovative collaboration and communication suite with staff and students. DoDigital was founded by Zoe Ross, Head of ICT until August 2010, who was frustrated at the lack of high-quality CPD for ICT teachers. As an experienced teacher and now one of only two Google Apps for Education trainers in the UK, Zoe is equally passionate about the role technology can play in education and that high-quality CPD which has been tried and tested in the classroom is essential for teachers.

Alongside the workshops, DoDigital, as a social enterprise, is involved in a number of projects to help schools and organisations to help them to use technology more creatively. Current projects include helping schools to use Google Apps for Education as an innovative, low-cost VLE and intranet alternative, using web 2.0 technologies to interact with hard-to-reach students and using Social Media as a marketing tool.

Further details can be found at www.dodigital.co.uk

Contact: [email protected]

Phone: 0161 408 2456

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Quotes

“CPD is so important to ensure teachers have time to update their skills, gain new ideas and find out what is going on in other classrooms. It’s imperative that time spent out of the classroom is productive, inspiring and makes a real difference to teaching and learning and our unique workshops do just that. They are the courses I wish I could have attended as a teacher.”

Zoe Ross (founder)