Come on... through the Wardrobe!

So my blog has been slightly neglected of late, I've been out of the country, out of the world in fact! We're currently immersed in what seemed like a great idea a couple of years ago - a stage production of the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Clive Staples Lewis' classic childrens book has thrilled and fascinated generations of children since 1950 when it was first published. It tells the story of the discovery of the fantastic world of Narnia by four evacuee children in 1940.

For us it is a huge project. We are a small school of 100 children, about 60 of which are in the cast, and we've taken the town hall where we live for two nights, printing 700 tickets for each. The production kicks off next Thursday and Friday with dress rehearsals on Monday and Wednesday night.

So my head at the moment is full of fawns, dryads, dwarfs and talking lions, not so much different there then!

In the midst of all that we have two delegations of visitors to the school today and tomorrow, one from Greece and Turkey and one from the north of England. They're coming to see our 1:1 iPad deployment.

It strikes me that, like the many from all over the globe who have dropped in on us this crazy year, they're really coming through the wardrobe.

It looks like any other ordinary wardrobe door but the world we've found beyond is unlike anything we imagined. In this world, information is available in seconds to every child. Individual children can create amazing content on their own device, share and connect with staff and their world, and learn in glorious technicolour through thousands of apps for everything from learning letter formation to advanced science concepts.

It's a world from the slightly dreary, tired place the other side. A place so different from the one we imagined and still changing every day, as new software updates and fresh apps make iOS more and more of a serious platform for creative teaching and learning.

The only difference I suppose is that this is the real world.