Mary Rebelo Adventures of an ICT trainer

Hi
Welcome to the Blog of Mary Rebelo. This will share with you some of the ups and downs of trying to bring the excitement of ICT into teachers lives - for themselves and for the kids they teach.

Having trained as a middle school teacher over the years I have taught every age group from nursery to KS3.

About 10 years ago I scratched my head in a staff meeting when they were looking for an ICT curriculum leader and the rest as they say is history. I knew nothing about computers but soon learned- went on courses, played about, and slowly learned how to do it.

I'm not a techie type at all - honestly I can't programme the video to record (but now have Sky plus- how good is that?!) Once I realised I could, I started making my own resources which for me is the beauty of this whole thing. Added to that now so many generous teachers are sharing their resources on the web for you to download, once I knew how I could tweak them to suit what I wanted to teach. So began a whole part time new career for me - delivering INSET and training sessions for teachers - not techie filled scary sessions but showing teachers really relevant achieveable ideas, giving away my things I've made for them to adapt and make their own, and most of all putting the fun back into something that is, quite frankly, terrifying for some teachers.

My big thing is that ICT should not be a separate subject , particularly in Primary and Lower secondary, but should be a tool, just like a pencil or a ruler.

As time goes on I will be adding lots of ideas and tips, especially about my current passion, Interactive Whiteboards, but also about ways to use things like your digital blue camera, put some great ICT ideas into your Literacy teaching (not just typing up their poem in the suite) using a webquest to research a history topic...

Lots of amusing things happen on my training sessions so will be sharing some of those too - although of course the names will be changed to protect the innocent!

Much of my work is undertaken with another 2 ladies - also called Mary- which causes confusion but is somehow comforting to delegates when they are concentrating on which button to press!