Welcome to week one. Well, as you know from the course description, we built this course around the two books the team developed with the UNESCO Institute for IT in Education. The books are important. But we also wanted to gauge. Directly with the wide community of teachers and head teachers and also with the for the policy makers responsible for ICT in education. Because the opportunities for using ICT in primary education are changing all the time. And this MOOC is meant to be a way of enabling the community of teachers to learn from each other. So this is a professional development course. It's telling you about what's going on in some primary classrooms, about many different ways in which ICT can be used, and the different kinds of tools and resources that are out there on the web to make teaching and learning so much more interesting and rewarding for teachers and children. But this is not a static body of knowledge that we can just hand over, it's changing all the time and not least because, technology changes all the time and teachers all over the world are constantly discovering new ways of using technology, there'll be a primary teacher somewhere in the world right now. Who's using some digital technology in a new way to improve their student's learning. Among the things we hope you'll get from the course, is an idea of the huge range of free digital tools and resources which are now available on the web for use in any curriculum area, as well as in the computing curriculum for primary schools. Well, obviously, this can't be a one-way process. We'll be asking all participants to contribute your ideas and experiences about how best to integrate ICT into primary schools. In week one, we'll be looking at the 21st century primary school and asking. Why should we consider using ICT at all? What does the ICT-enabled environment look like? Where does technology succeed? And why does it sometimes fail? And what can you do in your particular role to make it work effectively? Well, you'll want to take something away from the course, to plan how you're going to use what you get out of it. So from the very earliest activities, we'll be asking you to collect ideas in a course journal, precisely what form that takes is up to you, and we'll give you some advice on it. And that way, you'll be ale to build up ideas or action plans or tentative lesson plans, school strategies or even national policies depending on your particular interest. So by the end, we hope you'll have put together something which is useful to you, which you can then take further in whatever context you're working. So, please join us in this spirit of exploration of what's possible for ICT in primary education. In week one, we'll share some of the findings from the UNESCO IITE research, and I propose some activities and discussion points for you to engage in, and then, invite you to contribute some ideas and suggestions to the other participants. And then to record your private reflections for your own later use. And you'll find a similar pattern throughout the course in all the weeks. And hopefully that way the time you spend here will continue to be of value as you'll have something to feed into your own work. And with that. I welcome you to week one on ICT and the 21st century primary school. [BLANK_AUDIO]
