We are here
This is a summary of the current situation as I see it with particular regard to Carmarthenshire County Council..ICT Embedded
The trends in education that I have identified are that there is the expectation of ICT being embedded into the curriculum. A couple of theoretical underpinning for this current direction can be ascribed to Papert and Gardener's work amongst others. Another thing is the increasing emphasis on "learning to learn" and the notion of Key Skills.Old kit in schools
Although there is a high degree of variation in schools across the county there are a *lot* of really old PCs in schools. On a corporate level we decommissioning Pentium 3 800s and we will become a native 2003 domain very shortly. This will render the last of the Windows 9x PC redundant on the corporate domain. In schools, there are still huge numbers of Windows 9x PCs and in some cases the majority of PCs in some of the schools is lower than the PCs that we are corporately sending for recycling.Although useful for many older programs and activities, these older PC really do need replacing as they are not powerful enough to cope with modern multimedia sites and are uneconomic to repair if anything fails. We need to be moving towards having all PCs in schools networked which allows for remote support and updates.
Most teachers not "e-confident"
In this society the image of ICT and the culture surrounding it is gendered, and that gender is overwhelmingly male pursuit. I have lost count of how many teachers have said things like 'I hate technology/computers','I don't understand technology/computers','I don't like using technology/computers' to me during the past 3 years. This is clearly not a problem of individual teachers but a more widespread cultural issue. My experience formal computer training was that it focused on how to accomplish certain tasks. This rather than enabling the learner, has made the learners fear 'wandering off the beaten track' and experimenting, it encourages a culture of 'learned helplessness' and seems particularly dis-empowering. This in a classrom context creates the danger that a childes first as 'official' experience of ICT, in a educational context, from a teacher (of either gender), un-confident in the use of ICT is that it will re-enforce the image of ICT being 'difficult'.This year the training of teachers at Trinity college in Carmarthen in the use of ICT has changed radically from this old model to a more empowering project based model. However, It also widens the skills gap between teachers who are currently being trained to use ICT in these project based learning contexts and teachers who may have, some years back, been given training on office programs and a couple of sessions more recently on Interactive Whiteboards and who have become entrenched in their dislike/fear of ICT.
ICT stands for Information and Communications Technology. Traditionally, the Technology has been the most visible and concrete element of the trio. This needs to undergo a paradigm change. We need to foreground the information and the communication opportunities that the broadband networks presents to learners of all ages.
As the Internet grows there is also a danger that we lose site of why it came about in the first place. It came about for the explicit purpose of communicating, collaborating and sharing information., not primarily as yet another channel for global capitalism. There are pretty scary implications for everyone's digital citizenship if we groom the next generation to become passive consumers of content. Creating content is a immensely valuable learning activity but one which teachers are currently not equipped to take advantage of but they could be. The growing profusion of user friendly web 2.0 tools and sites, such as blogs, wikis, flickr, rss feeds, social bookmarking, sites as well as cheap digital cameras, and microphone headsets etc and the availability of much free or low cost software makes content creation and publishing as easy as word processing and printing, but it is a question of training and needs a change of culture..
Enquire: A portal to a world of information.
We want to be here.
Decent kit in schools.
This almost goes without saying. Vince James, The Schools ICT advisory that the most important thing for teachers was that the kit 'Just worked'. I would add to this, that if the kit didn't work, the teachers need to feel confident that it could be fixed quickly and easily.This is soon to become the responsibility of ICT infrastructure. There may be a culture clash between Corporate ICT's culture and the greater autonomy that schools have. The increasing customer focus of the department will be helpful, but it will be a great challenge if insufficient resources are allocated to the task.