Focus on Scotland
I became the ICT person in my school almost by accident. I worked in a small school in South Lanarkshire and when the ICT coordinator retired, I agreed to take over. At the time we had a mixed economy and a lot of the role involved solving problems such as, 'I can't get onto the Internet' or 'My screen's not working'. Shortly after I started, the ICT coordinator network was shown what Microsoft and Google could offer and asked to decide at school level which provider we would go with.
I decided to choose Google because we were keen to move online and we wanted something which would work well in our school with our staff and our learners. At the same time, our central team invested in Chromebooks, which then made that transition even easier.
Then it was up to me to make sure our staff could use the new tools. It would have been easy to approach this by offering a session on word processing or making a PowerPoint but I came from a sports coaching background so I wanted to start with what people were confident doing and then take them to the next step in using the technology. I realised I had gaps in my knowledge so I sought out Google Training courses and then tried out different things with my class before showing it to other teachers.
Keeping abreast of change
At first, it was hard to overcome the lack of confidence from individual staff. Some seemed reluctant to engage because they had been introduced to so many innovations, worked on doing things in a different way and then it was all change. There was a sense of 'Why invest all this time and energy developing the skills when in a few months something new will come along?'