The clue's in the slogan. BECTA have done more to set back the teaching of IT in the UK than all the other bodies combined - they wouldn't know innovation if it fell out of the sky onto them.

Asking a bunch of technology enthusiasts with some actual *experience* will throw up more answers than BECTA could ever do.

I'm not going to offer advice about the technology because I've got no experience in an educational setting - other than to plead for a more imaginative approach than just loading Windows + Office bloatware onto bog-standard PCs. If you've got to invest, at least free up the cash you would have spent on licenses by using the freely-available open source options.

As for the curriculum side of things, you could do a lot worse than taking a look at what David Smith (www.preoccupations.org) does at St Paul's School in London. Even allowing for the fact that he's working in the private sector where resources are less of an issue, the curriculum he's come up with is light years ahead of anything my kids have been subjected to.

It sounds like you've got a golden opportunity to do something different for a change - so here's a chance to break free from the usual "teach 'em to mailmerge" approach, surely?