By Andy McCue, 13 September 2005 12:50
NEWS Schools are failing to take advantage of IT in the classroom as teachers worry computers will interfere with traditional book-based learning, according to a new academic study.
The four-year University of Bristol study, InterActive Education: Teaching and Learning in the Information Age, backs recent reports by Ofsted and the OECD, which found the use of IT in schools was "sporadic" and "disappointing" in the UK.
Humanities and creative subjects suffer worst from a lack of IT-based teaching and, as a result, IT is used mainly for administrative and routine tasks in schools despite the government's £1bn commitment to increase the use of technology in the classroom.
The ESRC funded study focused on 10 institutions and explored ways in which IT could be used in English, history, geography, modern languages, science, music and mathematics lessons.
Professor Rosamund Sutherland, who led the research, said many teachers simply lack the confidence to take the risk of using technology in their subject areas despite having the facilities available at school and being familiar with using a computer at home.
In the report Sutherland said: "After working with our researchers they generally had a more positive view of technology and said that it enhanced their role as a teacher and had a beneficial impact on the learning environment."
She said the government needs to set up networks where teachers and researchers can work together to design and evaluate projects that use IT as a tool for learning.
She added: "If these resources are made available, teachers will start to embed ICT into classroom practices."
The study found a positive impact on learning from the use of search engines on language investigation in English, and the experience of spreadsheets influencing primary school pupils' learning of data handling.
But not all methods worked and the findings show that using computer game-style science simulations has a negative effect and makes pupils take the class less seriously because of their experience of playing computer and video games at home.
There are also wider benefits to society from the increased use of IT in lessons and the study highlighted the two-way traffic between home and school in which young people pass on IT skills such as PowerPoint to their parents.
Comments
There are 12 comments. Join the discussion
1. Roger Huffadine
Oh shit - they really think that being able to use powerpoint is a skill?
Being able to talk for 20 minutes engaging your audience with facts, wit, and a fluent use of English is a skill.
Talking about a PP slide is an inane way of using a not very capable display program as a prop and is not a skill.
Preparing PP slides is very interesting but useless if you don't have the skill of engaging an audience.
Like many who will read this comment I have seen so many crap presentations using PP that I wonder why it continues to exist.
2. Stephen
Roger,
My wife is a teacher. There is a lot more to using IT in the class room than simply using a PP presentation. In a growing number of class rooms they have interactive white boards with more functionality than simple presentation.
These things plug into a computer giving access to your standard presentation tools, internet resources, other devices that can attach to a computer, such as Intel microscopes, as well as providing interactive resources via mouse and interactive pens for the teacher and students to work with.
From what I understand some of the teachers have a great deal of difficulty getting the hang of this much technology for several reasons, including insufficient funding to be able to train teachers to use the IT, insufficient time to be able to get hands on (PPA time looks to be a bit of a joke - it takes more time to prepare for someone else to take a half day, than it does for the teacher to teach for that half day) and practice using these tools outside of the class and/or simply IT literateracy and confidence.
Also, if you read that last sentence correctly, its the _children_ teaching their _parents_ how to use IT skills, such as using powerpoint, and is nothing to do with how a teacher teaches in the classroom.
It has to be said that IT in the classroom is not the be all and end all. People of all ages learn in different ways, the Interactive Whiteboards certainly help to provide a variety of learning types, but it doesn't work for all pupils and other methods of teaching, not involving IT, need to be employed.
I can understand the pressure to use IT in the classroom more, but sometime I think that it is being over emphasised.
3. John H Woods
I agree with Roger. There was a great little short on R4 sometime ago called "Microsoft PowerPoint and the Decline of Civilisation".
For my money, the best critique of it is: http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg
Thinking is a skill, analysis is a skill, maybe even typing is a skill (though Dvorak would be best for kids).
But how relevant was our School IT to us? Apple II? BBC B? RM380Z? Do we really think the pace of change has slowed down, so that MS Office represents the pinaccle of IT achievement, and the kids will be using it in 10 years time?
Leave the education to teachers, I say. If they think too much IT is interfering with learning, why wouldn't we believe them?
4. Keith Armstrong
Two primary elements that work against the use of IT in education must be the lack of Academic standard within the web-based community. A printed work has undergone stringent critical process prior to its publication - at least it is perceived as having done so.
A second element will be the impermanence of the medium. A statement of fact found on the internet must either be laboriously annotated or printed. Add to this the lack of reception to screen held information as opposed to printed material and we begin to see the reason for such prejudice.
From the breif article it would appear that being shown particular ways in which electronic media could be used to enhance the teaching experience these were readily embraced. An obvious example might be the uyse of DVD media to show screenings of classic material such as Shakespeare and Jane Austin.
A more detailed study of the use of language could well require use of printed material but the broad sweep of the material is ably represented.
5. Dharmendra Misra
I personally think that in early days one should not use computer or calculator. It may create problem in internal skills development. It is always advisable that after a certain level of growth one should be allowed to use any intelligent system eg computer.
Nature has enough to nourish us, we need to be closer to it and freedom to learn with nature and natural objects including humans is necessary for long term emotional, technical and internal growth.
Its like the difference between Mother's milk and artificial milk. I hope in this age of technical dependency, we may protect natural skills gifted by nature and developed by ancestors
6. Steve Berry
I think this issue is way more complex than what has already been talked about.
Teachers are paid to teach - if they perceive that technology can't help them deliver their objectives they'll become sceptical about its use.
Technology companies - MS/Sun/Oracle etc.. employ people fundamentally to "free-think" and look at things from the perspective of "Where are we now" ? "What can we do to make it better" ?
In between you primarily have the service providers EDS/CSC ( in the case of teachers - RM ) etc.. etc..
Govts are decision makers NOT implementors. What needs to happen is that Govt/private companies need to shoulder the burden for educating the teaching community and try to understand how tech can be applied to what the teaching community needs it to do. Tech is advancing way too fast to expect teachers to do it all. That's what System Architects should be paid for.
Unless the "lack of synergy" issue is addressed our grandchildren will still be talking about this decades from now.
7. John Butler
As a teacher, who is nearing retirement, I have read the comments on this subject with interest. Many of the comments have been applied to other audio visual means of presentation in the classroom in the past 30 years. Many of these are now museum pieces, we are still managing to teach without them.
I do agree that it is important that a balance is achieved between the use of IT and the skill of the teacher in the classroom. I have just recived my interactive whiteboard this term. Already I am using it to add a further dimension to my teaching. It has given me, as a teacher, a new outlook on teaching. I am still using my interpersonal skills - but aided by technology.
8. Iain B
What a surprise! New technology, introduced in a hurry with totally inadequate initial or follow-up training, and little thought to how best to deploy it or even what its objective is ... A recipe for failure in any organisation!
My wife teaches in a Primary School which had Beacon status before that initiative ended. They were pilot users of electronic whiteboards and struggled with poor quality software (which made PPT look like a pretty neat tool), equipment failures, poor support and are now onto their second laptop scheme. They have now partly mastered these, and she tells me they do contribute much to ‘the classroom experience’.
Anyone with a teacher for a partner will know that normal life goes on hold during term time – they have no time for new initiatives because of the marking, recording, assessment and planning workloads. These do not seem to have diminished despite recent DfE protestations to the contrary and the introduction of PPA time. So when do they get a chance to get to grips with new technology? Vacations, do I hear you suggest? Yeah, right – with Schools locked up for security and to save Caretaker expense? And in my (OK, sample of 1) experience it takes most of the Xmas and Easter vacations to recover their energy levels!
So until the nation decides it’s prepared to pay for 50% extra teachers to allow all of them to keep up to date, practice with new technology and work out how best to deploy it to educational advantage, I think this strapline will continue to run …
9. Peter Anders
I didn't touch a calculator until I was 12 and I never laid hand on a computer until I was 14. I wrote all my first programs on a typewriter and dry ran them to see if they worked. I was doing this for two years before I eventually got my hands on a micro to try them out. To my surprise my programs were full of syntax errors which were frustrating and annoyng to fix. How lucky I was to be able to experiment in a purely mathematical way with programming before suffering the irritation of real coding. It gave me the chance to build a solid understanding of the realtionship between maths, logic and programming and to develop an enthusiasm for computer science such that I ended up studying it at Cambridge University. I'm sure if I had used a real computer earlier I may well have got bored by the whole thing and not gone nearly as far. My own children will not be touching a keyboard until they are at least 10 years old.
10. harry a mazurek
Teachers haven't been properly familiarized with internet multimedia capabilities. There are research papers showing that the interactive learning applets (Javas & Shockwave)
especially increase learning. Science, Journal of Chemical Education, Cell Biology Education.
Besides, new technology gets criticized at the beginning. Innovaters just keep working at making it better.
It took Lister ten years to get the medical establishment of his day properly straightened out on antiseptic
procedures in the operating rooms. I wonder how many people died because
of lack of proper procedure.
11. Vinh Nguyen
I've read all the posts above and appreciate the different perspectives. I want to add that technology is very open-ended and is not limited by time. There has always been technology because by definition, anything new is technology. My point is that it would've been absurd to think that anyone a hundred years ago would question the use of the blackboard and chalk in the classrom, yesterday's technology. And I'm sure there were skeptics back then. A hundred years from now, our great-grandkids would look back and laugh at the fact that some of us had questioned the need for computers in the classroom, today's technology. Technology is here to stay. Either we provide for it's use by teachers and students in the classroom, or we get left by the wayside. Children are already using technology at home and see it being used everywhere around them in the world, therefore integrating tech in the classroom helps students to connect better with learning.
12. harry a mazurek
Teachers haven't been properly familiarized with internet multimedia capabilities. There are research papers showing that the interactive learning applets (Javas & Shockwave)
especially increase learning. Science, Journal of Chemical Education, Cell Biology Education.
Besides, new technology gets criticized at the beginning. Innovaters just keep working at making it better.
It took Lister ten years to get the medical establishment of his day properly straightened out on antiseptic
procedures in the operating rooms. I wonder how many people died because
of lack of proper procedure.