Over the last six months NoTosh has been leading the development of a community site to complement the ICT scheme, Switched on ICT from the award winning educational publishers Rising Stars:

“…Our experience of working with NoTosh on this project has been a real success. From the initial development stage of the project, through the planning and delivery and up to launch NoTosh has worked as part of the team. Tom and Ewan quickly understood our needs and company values and Tom has helped to produce a site that has exceeded all our expectations!” Andrea Carr, MD, Rising Stars

http://www.switchedonict.co.uk

Switched on ICT is an innovative and creative new scheme of work from Rising Stars which enables teachers, regardless of their confidence and experience, to really put ICT at the heart of their teaching. Find out more about the Switched on ICT scheme and download a free sample unit.

Launching at the BETT educational technology trade show the Switched On Community site supports new and existing users of the Rising Stars scheme by providing a:

• Platform for contributing new ideas and examples of work from the classroom.
• An opportunity to connect easily with fellow teachers from around the world who are using the scheme in their schools.
• A space for anyone to share great ideas and resources for the teaching of primary ICT.

NoTosh’s Tom Barrett led a partnership once again with the talented design company Telaco who handled the development of the ITU Metaconference site which proved so successful in October of 2011. The Switched On community site was built around the community and ideas at it’s heart. Clearly tagged and categorised ideas are easily accessible and the author profile for teachers sharing contributions clearly displays further links to social media contacts, websites and blogs.

Although primarily designed for the Switched On ICT user the site will be an excellent resource for anyone to find and contribute ideas of great primary ICT going on in their classroom. The Rising Stars team will be choosing STAR posts every two weeks to be featured throughout the company’s blogs and social media and the school involved will receive a small prize as well.

The site was developed rapidly in under 3 months and already has some excellent examples from teachers using the scheme in their schools. For example Jack Sloan from Ferry Lane Primary School has shared some of the work his Year 6 pupils have completed from unit 6.4 – ‘We are web developers’. Here is a snippet from Jack’s post on the community site:

“…we created websites which linked with our topic on Ancient Egypt. The kids began using Weebly, which was new to me, and were very quickly exremely adept users. They considered audience, content, design and copyright; they peer-reviewed their websites; they thought about how to promote their websites and how to add the basic html coding that they brought with them from blogging; they discussed media, scanning and uploading artwork; they thought about how to write for the web; they looked at other websites and analysed their content. They did some of this at school, but their work was largely done at home, undirected.”

Andrea Carr the Managing Director of Rising Stars shares some of her thoughts about the community site and working with NoTosh:

“Working with external consultants can be a bit hit and miss, but our experience of working with NoTosh on this project has been a real success. From the initial development stage of the project, through the planning and delivery and up to launch NoTosh has worked as part of the team. Tom and Ewan quickly understood our needs and company values and Tom has helped to produce a site that has exceeded all our expectations!”

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We’ve also had some early feedback from teachers using the community site:

“After finding out about this community where it is possible to share examples etc may be this will be the most powerful feature of the Switched On ICT Schemes.”
David Mitchell, Deputy Headteacher, Heathfield Primary School

“Love the site – really professional and easy to access stuff.”
Jack Sloan, ICT Lead teacher and Year 6 classteacher, Ferry Lane Primary School