Went to a good lecture on using ICT In Education by Niel McLean from Becta. Some of the memorable points Niel made included:
- a good ICT programme has been measured to increase student performance by 5% (I thought that was rather small)
- the adoption models were all pretty obvious and no surprises
- ICT should not be used to just deliver information passively; it's a personal interactive and exploratory learning tool
- ICT should never replace real experiences; it should supplement them
- the real power of ICT is when you start changing the processes and organisation of learning
- unfortunately, once students are at a computer, many teachers stop intervening and correcting the learning process
- there's lots of work needed to be done teaching teachers how to use ICT in the classroom and to get software companies to create the right kind of software
- schools don't have the capacity to deliver all the learning that's now expected and needed in just the school day
I think one way schools greatly underuse ICT is in reaching out to the parent community and beyond: using ICT as a communication medium. Through a good website, a school could become much more transparent to the parents and involve them more. It could foster better communication both teacher-teacher, teacher-parent and parent-parent. Parents should be absolutely integral to the learning process and not abdicate education to a school. However, it needs co-ordination without burdening the teacher and ICT should be able to foster this.