ICT in Education - A Rant! :-)

I attended a meeting yesterday where a colleague (from a social studies background but with long experience in ICT) described a paper he has submitted to a conference. He admitted himself it was "a bit of a rant". However, I agreed with many of his points and some of his suggestions for a way ahead... and decided to add a bit of my own rant here in my blog.

Sunlit classroom
Originally uploaded by Ben Cooper

The main thrust of his paper was that ICT has been in classrooms since the 1980s. Large sums of money have been invested over a sustained period of time and yet ICT is not really embedded effectively in many (most?) teachers' practice. Clearly, there are examples of good, even excellent, practice - some teachers and pupils are doing exceptionally good stuff. However, the impression is that learning and teaching in many classrooms remains untouched by ICT.

In the discussion that followed, it was acknowledged that Higher Education in general and Teacher Education programmes in particular have to take some responsibility for this. For example, there are academic tutors who never use ICT in their own teaching and the colleague who started the rant noted that he could not remember ever watching a student teach lesson that used any ICT other than a teacher led, Powerpoint introduction.

We raised the problems but were short on solutions. I would suggest here therefore that we need both a top down and bottom up attack to deal with the problems. (And possibly sideways approaches too from pupils, parents and other interested parties!)

Top down: To be fair, a great deal of money has been spent on hardware and software over the years. However, as I've argued before, there should be similarly large sums spent on giving teachers the time, not only to go on training courses, but time to play with the technology too. To explore, investigate and discover. I suspect this is why Interactive Whiteboards are so rarely used interactively - hundreds of thousands of pounds spent putting the hardware in; significantly less giving teachers time to play.

Similarly, the development of the networking infrastructure that allows every school in Scotland (I think) to connect to the Internet, and soon to Glow, is to be commended. The decision to hobble these connections with excessively rigid and over zealous blocking filters is to be condemned. Why put the resource in if you are not going to trust the professional teachers in the schools to use it responsibly? We need to see more boldness from those in authority. It is good therefore to see developments such as those in East Lothian where they unblocked YouTube without causing the downfall of western civilisation and where senior officers lead by example when encouraging the use of tools such as blogs, podcasts and wikis.

Bottom up: Teachers can bring change when they see the benefits and are given the opportunity to use them. Given the ideas and freedom to try, good teachers will make good uses of the technology. For example, this year, at least one student teacher was inspired to try Poll Everywhere with a class after seeing it in action in a tutorial - making his own mobile available to pupils without a phone and to those with no free texts. Another student was inspired after being shown the potential of games and wikis and has now set up a wiki for the classes in her placement school.

Another excellent example of bottom up developments is TeachMeet where teachers get together to share their enthusiasm. They are teacher organised and teacher led. If you can make it to TeachMeet XI on 20 February 2009, I am sure you will be made very welcome and that you will go away inspired.

Rant over. :-) What do you think? Are we overly pessimistic? Do you have other good examples of either top down or bottom up initiatives making a difference?