mike.coyne

Out of interest, as soon as I saw that photograph I instantly thought it didn't look natural. If you look at it, JK has been taken from a photo where the lighting conditions were different - the light is brighter and comes from a different angle, which you can see from where the shadows are cast on his face and body. Also, he looks a bit big in comparison to the other speaker.

I think ICT is quite a preoccupation with many schools and is either used just for the sake of it being there, or just so a school can improve it's reputation by showing off the amount of computers it has managed to blag the funds for and apparantly make a school better. ICT is not that important. However, it is an excellent side tool for students' quick and easy access to various online resources, but that should be for the more willing students to take a look at outside of lessons to improve their studies. Otherwise, the only case in which ICT should be at the centre of a lesson is actually in ICT lessons. The time when I took my GCSE's and the like is still very fresh in my mind. I got very good grades in pretty much all subjects, without the need for ICT - for example, the only time I used a computer in English was to type up essays, but I did that at lunch time or at home. During lessons there was not a computer in sight, quite rightly. I got an A in that subject and that was from good old-fashioned reading books and analysing and anotating them. I didn't need a computer, and I think if computers were around at that time they would have been a distraction.

Maybe get your students to compose all of their stuff first on keyboard and get the composition's structure sorted out. Then let them get on the computer to record and "produce" their piece - all the fancy stuff is just secondary as you know, so just make sure your students don't look at their composing the wrong way round

I think people are becoming to preoccupied with meaningless gadgetry. At my school there has been an interactive whiteboard that was installed about three years ago and as far as I know it's never been used - just as a surface for an LCD projector. So in fact, it's more impeding because you can't write on it - and teachers don't want to have to go on a training course to learn how to draw a diagram or write up some notes for their students. I'm sorry, it's just not practical. Any good teacher will do just as well with the good old fashioned black board (oh sorry, political correctness, I meant to say "chalk board"). Who says you need to have "the latest products"? - just get out there and teach!

When you talk about "Internet Radio" do you mean an actual live radio station or just streaming material that students and/or parents can listen to at their leasure? M