Well today our ICT committee meet to review our 5 year strategic plan for ICT across the college. It has been a year since we developed the plan and I cannot believe the incredible learning curve that I have been on. The college too has seen some great changes we have Interactive Whiteboards, teachers and students using a variety of blogs, staff increasing their ICT skills, Photo story being used, teachers who had never used technology starting to use technology and think about it, we have networked the college and have a very high uptake on staff laptops. It has been great. But there is still some areas that I would like to see change in. Number one is staff looking at teaching and learning in a 21st century context, and a movement from such a didactic model of teaching and learning to a more project based way of teaching or a constructivist approach where appropriate. The other area is the skill development of students. I am currently working on my thinking in this area. What is the best way for students to learn ICT? Is it by integrating it into the curriculum solely or do we still need specific, directed, targeted skills development? Or do we need a mix of the two? At this moment I am leaning towards having a mix of the two. I liken it to my ability to play basketball. I love playing the game but I took it up as an adult (therefore I am a basketball immigrant) so I missed out on all the skill development that I would’ve recieved as a child learning the game. I played netball as a child and therefore some of the skills are quite transferable however I find that my dribbling is well below average as are some of my understanding about the strategies of the game. I really need some serious skill development if I am ever going to play the game well. I suspect that is the same with ICT it is good to intgrate the skill developlement into projects and lessons but I wonder how much more effective student would be in their ICT use with periods of concentrated  skill development. SO we do we achieve this without teachers then falling back into old ways by saying ‘well the kids are getting their ICT in that subject so I don’t have to bother with it?’ How do we develop skills and change thinking. Most importantly how do we paln for this? So what I am looking for is students who have a great foundation of transferable ICT skills that arfe further enhanced and developed by what they are doing in their individual subjects. not asking much really! Hope my ICT committee has the answers!