I.C.T Professional Development for our Staff

We came to a realisation that in order to move forward with ICT in our school, we needed to have regular scheduled times to upskill our staff. Firstly, we developed a survey to find focus areas for all our staff, including our Teacher Aides to ascertain what gaps they had in their own knowledge and confidence in implementing effective ICT in the classrooms. From this survey we have developed a long term professional development plan and are currently meeting once a week with all teachers to continue upskilling and empowering them. Initially we were having constant problems with the 'basics' e.g accessing the Internet, printing to the photocopier etc. Now that all of these problems have been ironed out, we feel that we are in a position to increase our momentum with ICT. We have decided to focus on developing our skills with using existing programmes that we have readily available e.g Powerpoint, ensuring that the programme's potential is maximised for student learning.