Today we had a teacher training day and the morning was given up to ICT. My plan was to show staff our ICT vision, how to use Google Apps and then give them time to play. My worry is that teachers never get play time and that they are expected to use new equipment, software and initiatives with little training.

Oh….7 children came in to help me too.

So we talked about Google Apps and the email and calendar environment. The calender is a little confusing as you need to add the ones you want rather than me deploying them all from the admin console. However children were on hand to help out with little problems. We also had a few issue slogging in to Google in the first place due to the ‘squashed letters’ captcha. As one of the children said, why don’t they just ask you what 2+2 is? That would do the ‘are you human?’ check easily enough!

After the playing with email and receiving invites to birthday parties, we moved on to the workshops and the children were fantastic. Unfortunately not many staff attended the child-led workshops but the children seemed to do well if they did have any customers. A lot of teachers stayed in the hall for my blogging talk and a few people went and loaded the whiteboards to play with ActivInspire on their own.

The children ran three workshops. One on Brainpop, another on Photopeach and one on flip cameras and visualisers. They seemed to do well and a few members of staff commented on how well the children had done.

All in all I am fairly pleased with the day. If I was going to change it, I wouldn’t have ran anything in the second workshop, it was a bit much, I should have given even more play time to teachers to let them blog and/or check Google Apps. But we shall see how it goes.

Two things that went well? Teachers enjoyed exploring. One was very happy with ActivInspire and another said she loved seeing Brainpop and having chance to fiddle. The other thing was the children. They worked well and I hope it is something I can do more of in the future. I think a couple of them could definitely come with me on training sessions elsewhere!