Summer holidays...

...are close upon us, and they can't come a day too soon! It's not that I don't love teaching - I really do. It's simply that it's been an incredibly busy year, and this last term has seemed to be the busiest by far. But we finish on a high. Three members of my team have been given new roles of responsibility within ICT & Business, the NQT we appointed for last January is progressing really well, and we appointed additionally a further NQT and a Lead Practitioner. What a strong team this is! I am looking forward enormously to next school year, working with this lot.

Following my workshops at the E2BN Conference a few weeks ago, I have now been invited by Capita Conferences to speak at their ICT in Schools Conference on 12th October in central London. My talk is to be Embracing Cloud Technologies for Learning, and addresses

• Supplying Key Stage 3 curriculum needs for students via web-based applications
• Realising efficiency savings
• Vision for future roll-out of ‘in the cloud’ learning

I'm very much looking forward to the event.

I close the year planning ICT provision for the new Academy Building, due to be opened fully in 2012. Mercifully, we are not one of the academies whose building projects have been stopped by the government in one of their money-saving drives, and my fellow Heads of Learning and I can confidently plan for the kind of ICT provision throughout the establishment which will be the envy of most. It will not be a surprise to regular readers to learn that the netbook/cloud computing model is one which I am exploring in some depth with my colleagues. It has certainly caught the imagination of a large number of staff who have attended workshops of mine.  I was delighted to hear a couple of delegates at the E2BN Conference tell that they use class sets of the mini netbooks like mine, very successfully, and without loss or damage. It's all very promising.

The problem is, what technologies will be available in eighteen or so months' time when we come to order the hardware? What will have superceded my netbook?