ICT Innovation Award

sponsored by Hue Animation
Awarded to the educational establishment that can demonstrate the most innovative use of ICT in order to further the learning experience of pupils and help improve results in curriculum based subjects.

2011 Winner: Costello Technology College, Basingstoke

Costello College has developed an online curriculum with learning content created using screen recording software. This enables pupils to access learning resources outside of lessons, both in and outside school, and provides consistency of learning. Teachers use the Virtual Learning Environment to give pupils access to materials ‘on-demand’. Teachers create screencasts by recording activity on their computer screens,  simultaneously recording their voice explaining what is happening on screen. Pupils can review lessons that took place months previously with exam and test advantages. Screencast videos are made available online for pupils to review during the lesson or as part of homework assignments.

Commended

Marlborough School Science College, Herts
From ground-breaking use of blogs and Google Docs as a learning aid for primary pupils, to the creation of an innovative games-based learning website, invention and creativity are at the heart of Marlborough School’s innovative capabilities. Its technology ingenuity received a major fillip with their teacher Joan Rutherford becoming Learning Technologist of the Year 2011, presented at the Association for Learning Technology annual conference in Leeds. That extraordinary achievement is based on creating the What2Learn games-based learning website, on which teachers from around the world have created over 70,000 learning games, and which receives up to 50,000 page views per day.

Egglescliffe School, Cleveland
Egglescliffe School, which has an outstanding management and leadership system empowering staff to deliver innovative use of ICT, won the national award for best whole school UK secondary in the Becta ICT Excellence Awards 2010. Ofsted, in fact, considered the school ‘outstanding’ in its last two inspections. Students are all confident and competent ICT users, developing personalised and independent learning abilities. The impact of these developments are carefully measured to ensure that value for money is achieved; and is supported by the technical team providing excellent standards of service for all users across multiple technology platforms.

Frank Wise School, Oxfordshire
Frank Wise School’s exceptional leadership team is implementing a lucid vision for the continued development of the school; and is extremely proactive in a number of ways to support schools both locally and regionally. As a result, at least 80 percent of pupils have met their achievement targets. What they are gaining with iWise, for instance, is at least on par with their mainstream peers, and in some cases they exceed them. The practical impact of the school’s strategy was to develop the iWise media centre that enhances classroom activity and augments the school’s ICT learning. The iWise centre also focuses on community and partnership work. Every pupil can now access the technology they need at the same time.

Penpol School, Cornwall
Penpol School is situated in what was known as the ‘silicon valley’ of Victorian industrial times, and today the school aims to regain the reputation for innovation that made Hayle great then by achieving cutting-edge technology success for tomorrow. There have already been innovative outcomes from pupils who are being set for an IT-based future and, hopefully, to become those new inventors of the post-modern era. Children’s stories and illustrations are turned into books with students using new book producing websites. Books, films, animations – some shown on BBC nationally – all prompted Ofsted’s view that with ICT highly accomplished throughout the school, content was ‘stunning’.