Information and Communications Technology in Primary Schools

Children or Computers in Control?

Richard Ager

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136778544
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This new edition takes into account advances in software and technology such as interactive whiteboards and digital cameras, focusing upon how these new resources can be most effectively used to enhance teaching and learning in the classroom. Providing the fundamental background information to put ICT develpoments into a classroom context, the book looks at at what can be learned from the latest national research into ICT use in the classroom and provides a wide range of classroom activities. The book should be of particular interest to undergraduate and postgraduates Primary education students, INSET participants, ICT coordinators and senior managers.

CHAPTER

1

Why All This Concern about ICT?

In his book Visions, Michio Kaku (1998) quotes Mark Weiser from Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in Silicon Valley as saying, ‘Long-term, the PC and workstation will wither because computing access will be everywhere: in the walls, on wrists, and in “scrap computers” (like scrap paper) lying about to be grabbed as needed.’ As it was at this research centre that the modern PC was virtually invented, together with the laser printer and the program that was the foundation for all subsequent graphical user interfaces (such as Windows), a vision such as Weiser’s should not be lightly dismissed.

We have seen rapid developments in the status of information and communications technology (ICT) in primary schools over the past ten years and we are also witnessing the birth of some new terminology, that of e-learning. Charles Clarke, Secretary of State for Education, stated in July 2003:

A great deal of progress has been made so far, but there is much more to do. E-learning can take us a further step forward. This is about embedding and exploiting technologies in everything we do, and getting ICT embedded across the curriculum for all subjects and in all pedagogues. E-learning has the power to transform the way we learn, and to bring high quality accessible learning to everyone – so that every learner can achieve his or her potential.

(DfES 2003a)

A definition of this new term is also provided in the same document. ‘If someone is learning in a way that uses information and communication technologies, they are using e-learning.’ So after six years there is no lessening of government will to embed ICT into all aspects of education.

Excellence in Schools, the first White Paper of the new Labour government (or should this be the New Labour government?) stated, ‘We are determined to create a society where, within ten years, information and communications technology (ICT) has permeated every aspect of education’ (DfEE 1997).

In a speech to the annual National Union of Teachers conference a year later, the then Secretary of State for Education, David Blunkett, said, ‘Optional ready-made schemes of work are being produced that will ensure that each year teachers do not have to “reinvent the wheel” as they prepare their classwork.’ And we are now all very familiar with the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) Schemes of Work and all the other optional materials that have been produced for both the numeracy and literacy strategies and that will undoubtedly be produced by the newly coordinated Primary Strategy.

And the Labour government has ensured that ICT in education has remained high on the DfES’s agenda. There is a renewed emphasis on using ICT to enhance the quality of children’s teaching and learning experiences in schools, building upon children’s ability to use the ICT tools effectively. So why are developments in schools still happening rather slowly?

What is preventing the rapid effective development of ICT in primary schools?

During the 1980s and 1990s computers arrived in schools because they were seen to be ‘a good thing’. In the same way that the invention of a material which could be used to produce small, lightweight, high-quality headphones led to the development of the Sony Walkman, the development of computers led us to think about the ways in which their power could be used in the educational environment. It was not a case of teachers saying ‘What we really need to enhance children’s teaching and learning is a piece of equipment that will do this’, it was politicians wanting to be seen to be enhancing educational facilities who provided funding for computers that went into schools. We have done our bit – now see how they can be used to enhance your teaching. Although funding was provided for much development work, and a great deal was done, the fact that it was done the wrong way round is perhaps the reason why it took so long to integrate ICT work into all schools. Neither were developments helped when much of the LEA support structure was removed in the early 1990s due to further government directives. So by the end of the 1990s training was needed, but unfortunately, for many teachers, what they got was not the training they wanted.

The New Opportunities Fund (NOF) ICT Training programme was developed to equip all teachers with the knowledge, skills and understanding to make sound decisions about when, when not and how to use ICT effectively in teaching particular subjects. It was attempting to respond to a need that teachers had for relevant training in the use of ICT. There were concerns that the training money would get into the hands of the traditional ICT training companies, so that everyone would know how to do a mail merge and how to manipulate some graphics, but they would not be able to use ICT to enhance children’s teaching and learning experience in the classroom. For this reason, in their contract, the training providers had to concentrate on how ICT could be used to enhance teaching and learning and were prohibited from teaching basic ICT software skills as part of a NOF-funded package. To avoid large sums of money being used to cover staff absence on these courses it was also decided that no NOF funds could be used to release teachers for the training. So although some schools successfully built the ICT training into their continuing professional development (CPD) programmes using training days to cover some of the training, the message in other schools was that all the training had to be done in teachers’ own time.

For teachers who needed basic ICT skills, discussions about how to use software to enhance children’s learning were a little abstract. And in schools where the ICT software and hardware was very limited, these same teachers found that they did not have time to work with their children on computers anyway. It is unsurprising that a major initiative costing £230 million pounds failed to achieve all that it might have done when it took little account of the lessons of successful CPD over the past twenty years. Most significant among these would be that the training should be immediately relevant to teachers, that they should have some ownership over it and that it should be perceived as important by senior management as an integral part of the school’s development plan. NOF training was generally successful only in schools where senior managers acted in a positive way to make it work.

In 2003 we have substantial funding for the hardware, software and network infrastructure, a fully trained workforce with opportunities through a number of initiatives to develop their ICT skills further, the support of an advisory teacher or consultant team in all LEAs as part of the Primary Strategy (where ICT is now a major focus together with literacy and numeracy), leadership training that focuses upon the importance of ICT to improve both administration and teaching and learning, and a government that is fully committed to the transformational role that, it is believed, ICT can have in primary schools. As Charles Clarke says, ‘My vision is one where schools are confidently, successfully and routinely exploiting ICT alongside other transformational measures. By doing so they will be delivering an education that equips learners for life in the Information Age of the 21st century’ (DfES 2003b). So what are we waiting for?

What features of ICT support teaching and learning in subjects?

The Teacher Training Agency documentation (TTA 1998) relating to the needs analysis for NOF training identifies four functions of ICT that can be used by teachers to achieve subject teaching and learning objectives. Although NOF training has now finished, the features are still relevant and important. These are the speed and automatic functions of ICT, the capacity and range of ICT, the provisional nature of information when stored and presented using ICT and the interactive way in which information can be used when using ICT. Let us look at these features a little more closely.

Speed and automatic functions of ICT

In a primary classroom it would be difficult to record the outside temperature over a period of 24 hours. This would be logistically problematic, and discussions about the graph and the size of the axes would then confuse many younger children. But the concept of temperature, and the idea that it changes as the day goes by, is one that is relevant to everyday life, and has lots of uses.

By using a remote sensor attached to a computer, it is possible to collect the data, and to allow children to manipulate it using different chart styles and then to be given opportunities to analyse it. In this way we are developing some analytical skills, with children relating their real-life experiences about temperature to a graphical representation, when previously the actual physical construction of the graph would have been time-consuming, and very much of a ‘following instructions’ type activity, and one that would have got in the way of the actual understanding.

The fact that routine tasks can now be completed and repeated quickly allows children to concentrate on higher-order thinking and tasks. This means that interpretation skills must be taught and developed at much earlier ages than previously.

Capacity and range

Suppose you were to hold a competition between two pairs of children in the classroom. One pair has access to the school library’s encyclopaedia, while the others are sitting in front of a computer loaded with a CD-ROM based encyclopaedia. If you ask them to find out a piece of factual information, and provided that both pairs are competent in the appropriate skills of using either a paper based or a CD-ROM based encyclopaedia, then you will not be surprised that the ICT group find the answer first.

Speech coming out of a computer is now commonplace, and words can be spoken and highlighted in a way that previously could have been done only with one-to-one teaching between an adult and a child.

Powerful computers are now able to produce very lifelike simulations, the most well known of which simulate flying and landing aircraft at a range of international airports. Here children are able to undertake a range of manoeuvres in a context that they would be extremely unlikely ever to be in, but they do it in complete safety. While this particular example has limited direct educational benefit, other simulations do exist.

Difficult ideas are made more understandable when ICT makes them visible. Consider how you might explain electric current flow in a simple circuit. You might draw a diagram on the whiteboard, or show a diagram in a book, but an animation on the computer screen or interactive whiteboard, which can be quickly transformed to a second and third circuit, can clearly help children, and adults, to understand quite difficult concepts.

One of the enormous advantages that ICT now has is the way in which it can incorporate so many different media in one machine. A typical multimedia application will include voices, text, drawing and photographic images, music, sound effects and video. This immediately provides teachers with an extremely powerful teaching tool.

The use of the Internet in primary schools brings with it a whole series of challenges. There is more information on the Internet than anyone can possibly cope with. Anyone can set up a website, and there is no requirement that the information on it is true or even legal. In reading a book, you are at least fairly sure that the material will have been read by a number of editors, and that the publishers would be responsible for gross factual errors and would therefore remove them. When children start to use websites, they need to be aware that just because it says so on the screen, it is not necessarily true. The idea that facts need to be checked, and to come from two or three different sources, is an idea that some primary school children will need to be introduced to. They need to be able to think about the credibility of the information, and what quality control there is over it.

It will be increasingly possible to link up with ‘experts’ using e-mail communication or video-conferencing, so that children can experience some personalised feedback to queries they have. Again, care must be taken to weigh up the practicalities against the hyperbole of such approaches. While it is easy to envisage how children may access a website on a particular topic that has been specially designed for children, and to gain answers to their questions from there, the enormity of a structure that would have an ‘expert’ at the end of an e-mail line to answer, on an individual basis, queries that children may have is difficult to envisage. The possibility that another ‘expert’ would be permanently available ‘on tap’ via a video-conference link is even more unlikely.

Provisionality

The provisional nature of much of work using ICT has to be one of its strengths. There is no pressure to get things right the first time. You are able to put your thoughts down as they arrive and then to ‘cut and paste’ them into an appropriate order after reflection. If you are satisfied with a particular section of written work you do not have to copy it again and again as you move towards your finished product. I was reminded of how much I had become accustomed to using ICT in this way at a job interview at which I was asked to provide briefing papers for what would have been my line manager. On seeing the pen and paper before me I was not too concerned, but by the end of the hour I realised how the initial brainstorm of ideas on one sheet of paper, the draft structure on a second and the final response on a third contained so many sections that were similar, but in the wrong order. I did not get the job!

I am sure children feel more inclined to draft, redraft and redraft again if each time it does not mean starting with another fresh sheet of paper. And certainly this book would never have been written if I did not have access to a powerful word processor that allowed me to change, change and change again! And you will never see where I made the typing errors or where I made glaring mistakes when I first put ‘finger to key’.

But the teacher must also be sensitive to the child’s individual strengths, feelings and motivation. There may be times when children do not produce a perfect piece of work, but it is clear they have achieved a much higher standard than they had done previously. You must use your professional judgement to decide that a further request to redraft might well demotivate and diminish the obvious success and pride that the child has.

Interactivity

There is evidence that the interactive nature of computer technology motivates and stimulates learning. In particular, the immediate feedback that can be provided in response to questions when given by a computer is perceived by the child to lack the value judgements that may be present when a teacher marks some work. The work can be seen to be right or wrong, not good or bad!

Using a CD-ROM encyclopaedia to find some information can be a very interactive experience. Starting with one word, the children are provided with too many articles, and this then leads them to look for other strategies. They can choose to select a particular area of knowledge (literature or science), a particular period of time (seventeenth or twentieth century) or a particular medium (sound or video clips), and on each selection they see the range of articles changing. Similarly with a spreadsheet, a change in a single value, over which the child can have control, can cause huge knock-on changes throughout the spreadsheet.

How should I decide whether to use an ICT approach or an alternative?

Effective evaluation skills are vital for teachers. On a daily basis teachers make split second decisions, which need to be based on evidence. This they evaluate and then come to a conclusion as to the next form of action. A vital part of the education of trainee teachers is assisting them to develop these evaluative skills – clearly an educative activity rather than a training one.

Let us explore a few aspects of evaluation in the field of ICT. A teacher has a wide range of technology that could be used, e.g. television and radio, tape recorders, video, computers, e-mail, the Internet, digital cameras, digital video cameras and scanners. In order to make an appropriate selection the teacher needs to think very carefully about the possibilities. Some obviously have practical implications: ‘The tape recorder has broken’, ‘We haven’t got a scanner’ and ‘The television is booked at the time I want to use it’ are typical examples. But then consider the content. You have a video and a CD-ROM on the same basic topic. The video can be shown to the whole class at once. If you use the CD-ROM the children will need to work in pairs on the two computers in the classroom. The implication...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Why All This Concern about ICT?
• 2 Teaching and Learning with ICT
• 3 The Management of ICT in the Primary School
• 4 Assessment and Reporting of ICT
• 5 Children in Control of the Computer
• 6 The Computer in Control of the Child
• 7 ICT and the Core Subjects of the National Curriculum
• 8 ICT and the Foundation Subjects of the National Curriculum
• 9 ICT and the Foundation Stage
• 10 ICT and Inclusion
• References
• Index