Exciting things.

We have whole school enrichment days at our main schools, normally it means all IT is booked out, and the network is just creaking. We don’t always have a direct input – but this is good – staff are confident to use the technology and plan with it themselves.

However, the upcoming enrichment day is one we are heavily involved in – and I am looking forward to it because we are doing some exciting things with IT kit to enhance the day. The theme is communication.

So we start off with a whole school radio station  – beamed lived from our office, on a MAC running NiceCast – and with staff tuning in around the school with VLC player – pupils will have access to Spotify and an expensive Snowball microphone to create 15 minute shows throughout the day, with a lunch time request show played live to the field and into the hall.

And secondly, we are rolling out skype and webcams into every classrooms – we have recently been linking up with some partner schools abroad via skype, and want to showcase this way of communication to pupils.

Both are exciting use of technology to enhance the day and I know my team and I are really excited to work on it, so much so, that we set up skype between our school ICT support offices, and then wondered why we even had our weekly meetings, when we could be online and connected all day!