I did some serious thinking on Friday afternoon.

I was having a great time , as I always do on our training days. After an excellent lunch in our new cafe, all of the staff were on a carousel of ICT training in the use of Google Docs. There I was in front of a computer, enjoying a workshop expertly led by Stephen Dodds and Matt Swain.

And suddenly I realised that a massive change has occurred at Marden, almost without us noticing.

You see, Steve and Matt were showing us how to prepare Google presentations for lessons and assemblies…

(Now before I go any further, a word to the uninitiated. The days of teachers sweeping into classrooms armed only with an armful of books and piece of chalk are long gone. Nowadays, preparing for a lesson is like setting up for a rock concert. Before you can say a word to the class, you have to make sure everything is plugged in: projector, interactive white board, computers, school website, SERCO… and all of that on top of managing 30 teenagers. Speaking as a newly fledged RE teacher, I could do with my own crew of roadies just to get my lessons started. So if you see me in the company of a long haired guy in cut off trousers and big boots mumbling, “ One two, one two” into a microphone, you’ll know what’s going on.)

…Anyway, back to Google presentations. Steve and Matt taught us how we could enliven our lessons by making slides. Very quickly, we learnt how to insert text and images, and, best of all, extracts of film. That’s pretty old technology, to be honest. Teachers have been using Powerpoint for that for years. The new dimension is that with Google Docs you can prepare the same lesson presentation simultaneously with other teachers on line. By way of practice, I was working with Lynne Wilson and some other teachers on a lesson about Liverpool – Matt’s idea, not surprisingly. They were at the other side of the room, but there was a chat box on our screens so we could talk to one another and see the changes we were making to the slides. We were in the same room but the online technology would have enabled us to do the very same at opposite ends of the planet.

Now that’s a very powerful tool for improving teaching .

Everyone agrees that collaboration and sharing of practice leads to outstanding lessons and Google Docs will enable us to do this whenever and wherever we like. Using Google, Marden staff will be able to share and collaborate on policies, schemes of work and lesson plans with much greater ease, thus lessening the risk of teachers becoming isolated and not gaining from their colleagues’ good ideas.

And that’s not all.

Since the start of term, our ICT team has established an on line learning platform customised to Marden’s way of working. We have a new website, giving students and staff full 24/7 access to Google applications. This means that an infinite amount of information can be stored on line with Google and that we have a common working environment for everything that is ICT based. All subjects will now be able to have their own mini websites which will give on demand learning support to students for independent study and exam revision.

I’d like to claim the credit for introducing such brilliant innovations to Marden, but I can’t.

The two Davids, Marshall and Bailey, have been planning these improvements for some time and the arrival of Daniel Jamieson, our new deputy head and a real expert on learning technology, has accelerated the change. It’s all happened in the past few weeks and I think that the impact has changed us profoundly. I predict that our learning platform will transform the learning process for all of us and, crucially, will give students the tools to learn independently, flexibly and in ways which are suited to young people in the 21st century. So I also predict that it will be commonplace to see our students using hand held devices – i-PODs, tablets and phones – to access the platform safely and responsibly in lessons.

So it’s a revolution – but one which has happened beneath our radar and in one half term.

Oh, and one last thing.

Another high point of the training day was an opportunity for me to spend some quality time with our Special Needs Support Assistants, also known as SSAs. What a superb team!