Going into this session, I thought i was going to have the same difficulty as my primary school teachers did when it was first introduced… The endless re-calibration (that we turned into a game), the difficulty of pressing on and off are just a couple of the issues that put me off, ten years ago, the lack of knowledge and use meant it was just a glorified television and maybe a whiteboard- if the teacher hadn’t given up and headed back to the actual whiteboard. I don’t think I valued the interactive whiteboard until this session, when it and I developed a new understanding for the uses of it and i discovered that technical difficulties aside, this whiteboard is going to be my teaching tool, in lots of different ways… I think we should be grateful that SMART have given us a shortcut with interactive activities, for example, match pairs.. I won’t need to go onto powerpoint and put individual animations on everything! It is quick and convenient to use and can be used across all different subjects.

As far as i remember, ICT was introduced to me in year 5, 11 years ago. Prior to this, i had to memory of using ICT or even a computer, maybe using paint at home on my dad’s computer before he got home from work as a little game, nonetheless, very limited. Typing for the first time was very slow and one of the very first lessons was the teaching of underlining and putting titles in bold on Microsoft word. Simple as it may be, I feel that teachers knew that back then, our abilities for using a computer were very limited and it had to start slow, nowadays you can see 4 years olds learning to type before they can write- times have changed indeed. Our ICT curriculum at primary school consisted a lot of typing up short pieces of writing, using clipart to add pictures to it and printing ourselves to stick into books. We probably moved onto using google by the time we reached year 6, by this time we had discovered games on windows and that had taken over the majority of our ICT lessons and when our teacher walked past, we would quickly minimise the window and open up word- which I suppose actually deserved some praise for discovering another use of the computer and learning the controls of pinball on our own? Primary ICT for me was not so much about learning about ICT as a whole but more about using the applications that was most useful to us at the time, namely, word.