A nice day at NAACE

It was over to Nottingham today for a meeting of representatives from many of the Subject Associations at the new headquarters of NAACE.

For those who don't know, NAACE is the ICT Association, and is the professional association for those concerned with advancing education through the appropriate use of ICT. It also has a key role in the ICT Mark for schools.

Quite a few familiar faces from work that I did last year to produce a booklet for the teaching of Functional Skills - you can download if from HERE by the way - it's great !

NAACE have also produced a range of FREE CPD courses which although they might sound like they are just for ICT teachers, would probably be of value to geography teachers too. They can be found by following this link: ICT CPD 4 FREE

Met Peter Twining from VITAL, who offer a range of CPD options too. Their website describes Vital as:

a professional development programme that aims to revitalise the teaching of IT and the use of ICT across the broader curriculum. It is aimed at anyone teaching or working in state-funded education in England.

Courses are delivered by the Open University, and funded by the DfE.

The day involved a series of discussions on the use of ICT to support / deliver CPD, the use that subject specialists were making of ICT to support their pedagogy, and how the impact of its use was being evaluated. I contributed some thoughts, and talked about the various projects that the GA has been involved in in this area, including the one on GEOGRAPHY AND CAREERS that has just gone live.

Coincidentally, I got back home to find details (via Twitter) of a very useful GUARDIAN article, which talked about the sad demise of BECTa, and celebrated the impact that it was having in supporting teachers. The article featured the results of a survey of teachers, and also a quote from Bernadette Brooks of NAACE:

"Technology has moved on dramatically so training has to match that pace of change. I don't see that there will be a reduction in that. ICT training isn't done. We will keep needing to invest in training for ICT teaching and learning. It is not just about using the kit but about finding innovative ways to use the technology available to us in the classroom."

The trend was towards more informal forms of training, mixing face-to-face and online. "Teachers increasingly feel more comfortable with 'bite-sized' training. They don't necessarily want something incredibly formal."