After a year of being in schools, a semester of ICT lectures and tutorials, numerous conversations with fellow Mteachers, i have come to the conclusions that ICT, although offers an amazing array of opportunities for students and teachers to expand their learning, is a confused mess.
After completing our group project on the availablity and application of ICT in schools, it became clar although that there is an acceptance that ICT is an integral part of the future of education, that in its current state it is misused, inefficiant and poorly implemented.
The school i was placed at was inundated with ICT facilities, it had numerous computer rooms, smart boards, data projectors but they were all underused and undervalued. teachers knew that ICT was of growing importance, but they didn't see the value or the significance in changing their ways to include ICT. Just like their students, teachers will struggle to engage with ICT if they don't see the relevance and meaning in what they are using. For these teachers there should less of a focus on actual ICT skills, but a focus on why and how ICT can be used in the classroom and its importance. Furthermore they would benefit in subject specific Professional Development, rather than just generic on class fits all approach. Teachers accept the fact that ICT is important, they just need to be shown why.
On the flipside, there are school that are chomping at the bit to utilize ICT facilities, but they are either plagued with poor quality facilities, poor organisation or a combination of the two. These are the teachers that see the value of ICT and want to implement and try out ideas in the classroom but are hamstrung by the lack of quality facilites, which boils down to a lack of funding.
How do we reconcile the gap between the haves and the have nots, the wants and the want nots? A start would be to actually to open up a dialogue with the teachers that are going to be the ones using the facilties and determine what is actually needed. So that a school wont go and spend hundreds of thousands of cold hard cash on facilities that are just going to sit unused in the classrooms, or go and buy smartboards when laptops are what was wanted. There needs to be more discussion between the people that control the money and the people that will reap the benefits (or consequences) of the spending.
ICT is being touted as the way forward, so lets just stop spinning in circles with our fingers up our noses waiting to arrive in the fabled ICT land, and actually start pushing things forward.
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