Tim Heaton from Grendon Underwood Combined School describes how he used ICT to help deliver a local history study (QCA History SoW Unit 18), to his class of Year 6 children.

"We spotted the opportunity to apply for an Independent and State School partnership grant, when we read about it in a leaflet distributed by the DfEE. Sharing best practice was the key to the project, with the intention that each sector could learn from one another. We already had links with Beachborough School through one of our governors, so this was our obvious choice as a partner school.

Ian Elkington, our then Headteacher and myself made the initial visit to Beachborough to give us an opportunity to meet with the head teacher, staff and pupils and have a tour around the school, and find out how it worked. It proved to be an absolutely fascinating afternoon.

We all agreed that the partnership could benefit our schools and decided to submit an application. As most schools, we had already put in an enormous amount of effort, to ensure that the literacy and numeracy strategies were in place, so we decided that it was time to put some emphasis on some of the curriculum areas that had been put on to the "back burner". History and Geography were to be our focus, and the use information technology to pull the two together.

We were keen to compare and contrast the two local areas, taking into account land use, along with human and urban geography. Studying the churches in the two villages closely, relating it wherever possible to the national curriculum, would also allow us to look at the different architecture. Our intention overall, was to create a curriculum module for the schools based upon the work that we were going to carry out.

There was to be a definite emphasis on putting the "C" into ICT, by communicating with the other school via videoconferencing, e-mail and so on. Face to face exchanges between the schools of pupils, staff and volunteers would also be anticipated. Both schools were also keen to produce displays, and produce a scheme of work and web site for the benefit of other pupils, and the local and wider community".