Integrating Ict Into Religion Blogeffective Curriculum Ideas

March 2002, Vol.7, No.1

Integrating ICT in to the Curriculum Slideshare uses cookies to improve functionality and performance, and to provide you with relevant advertising. If you continue browsing the site, you agree to the use of cookies on this website. ICT plays an integral part in all our lives. Today’s children are growing up surrounded by and becoming familiar with digital technology. Through play opportunities children can experience a range of resources that support their ICT knowledge and understanding as well as enhancing other key skills. A programmable toy has control technology but it may also support literacy and numeracy skills.

A Series of Brief ReportsRESEARCH IN ONTARIO
SECONDARY SCHOOLSThe Integration of ICT into Classroom TeachingBy Scott Reid

Introduction

The use of information and communication technology (ICT) such as Internet applications, CD-ROMs, video technology and various computer attachments and software programs have caused many changes in society. These changes have not just been of a technical nature but more importantly of a structural nature. Many of the major institutions of our society have changed and the way we live our daily lives have been impacted. However, the impact on education may just beginning to be felt as teachers integrate this new technology into their teaching. In the early stages of the use of ICT in teaching, looking at the experiences of teachers at a high school in the forefront provides some clues as to what possibilities and problems may be presented with this new technology. The purpose of this study is to answer the following research questions: 1) How does the use of ICT change the work of teachers?, and 2) What problems or concerns do teachers identify in relation to the introduction of ICT?

Methods

A qualitative case study research method was chosen because it would provide thick and rich descriptions of how these changes are being experienced by teachers. In the early stages of the use of a new technology it is useful to use a open ended research method which allows unexpected findings to emerge that might otherwise be missed. The school has 38 teachers and offers grade 10-12 to 650 students. With the permission of the School Board and Principal, a written request to conduct interviews were made directly to all teachers at the school. Thirteen teachers, from various subject areas, responded to the request and interviews were conducted in person at the school at a time suitable to the participants. The semi-structured interviews lasted from 45 minutes to one hour. All interviews were transcribed verbatim by the researcher, then coded by categories used in the interview protocols and other categories which were added as a result of information raised during the interviews.

Findings

Changing Teaching

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Teachers could give many different and specific examples of how technology had changed their work. A number of things were being done with Web sites, from giving students notes which one teacher described as a 'low end thing,' to getting students to create their own Web pages. One teacher was using a Web site to enhance an actual field trip. The Web site introduces students to the animals and tells them what they are going to be doing while on the field trip. It shows them techniques they can use to analyze the ecosystem and record the data. The prior preparation through the Web site helps students benefit from the actual field trip.
Several teachers mentioned that they used Power Point and other computer programs to improve their presentation of material to class. Teachers explained that technology enabled teachers to deliver more material to students and it also eliminated several basic problems such as; poor hand writing, poor artistic skill, contrast, lighting, and visibility. Another teacher makes extensive use of software programs to help teach physics. The students go into the laboratory and collect their data using the computer. Then they use word processing programs along with Excel to do graphs and presentations. The software allows the students to collect different kinds of data using various attachments that are plugged into the computer. Using computer technology, students have more time to explore beyond the mechanics of counting dots and setting up the experiment. It actually lets them look at it and understand the concepts better. Another teacher made the point that resource-based teaching or resource-based learning is almost becoming 'seamless, almost natural' in everything that teachers do because information is becoming easier to access.

Changing the Teaching / Learning Relationship

Teachers reported that the relationship between teacher and learner is sometimes reversed with regards to information technology. Many teachers mentioned that they had students show them how to use technology. One teacher commented that when students could help teachers, it gave the students a big confidence boost. Some teachers went as far as to use terms like 'co-learners' to describe the new relationship between teacher and student. Teachers also saw the potential for technology to be isolating and realized that classroom and other activities had to be arranged in a way that reduce the likelihood of isolation. Another point made, was that in some ways the use of new technology may be increasing socialization in some ways. People may be able to find someone who has interests similar to their own to converse with, through the Internet. One teacher put forth the idea that the use of technology in the classroom will mean the Arts and Music as areas where students interact, will increase in importance to increase socialization.

Administration and Expanding Professional Networks

The use of information technology has changed school administration in several ways. One teacher explained that when she started teaching six years ago, it was not expected that teachers know how to type their own test. Now teachers are expected to know how to use word processors and have their tests done in a proper format. Several teachers noted that there is a move toward recording grades and attendance electronically. Teachers are expected to check their e-mail, and a lot of things that used to be done at a staff meeting are now done via e-mail. Also, e-mail is becoming an important communication tool between parents and teachers. In addition most of the teachers use e-mail to keep in touch with other teachers and friends.

Concerns Teachers have about the use of Technology

While recognizing that there were some concerns and problems with integrating the use of information and communication technology, teachers thought it was beneficial to the educational process and should be continued. Several concerns emerged from the interviews.

Maintenance. The problem most often noted by teachers was the maintenance of the equipment needed to operate a technologically enhanced school.

Inequalities. Another frequently mentioned problem was the disparities between students who have access to computers at home and those who do not.

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Need for training. Teachers provided evidence of the importance of the efforts in-school to promote professional development in integrating information technology into classroom teaching. The professional development days held and the flexible mentor type training available at the school was viewed as being very important by the teachers interviewed.

Information Overload. Teachers recognized that sometimes students are overwhelmed with the amount of information available and with the task of filtering through the information.

Pace of Change and Stress. Tachers have a hard time keeping up with the pace of change. One teacher said , 'People are stressed. Families are stressed', and she felt this level of stress is being transferred to young students.

Plagiarism. One teacher raised the problem of increased plagiarism because technology was making it easy to reproduce and revise someone else's work. She said, 'there is a lot of cutting and pasting going on.'

Business Involvement. Another emerging issue, is the possible loss of control of the education process to business partners. Balancing the interests of these partners and that of the students might be an increasingly challenging role for administrators as business involvement in education becomes more common.

Teachers' Time. Teachers stated that information technology was placing more demands on their time. Teachers noted that extra time was needed to learn new software and also to create new things for teaching because greater expectations were being placed on them.

Discussion

The use of ICT is changing teaching in several ways. With ICT, teachers are able to create their own material and thus have more control over the material used in the classroom than they have had in the past. Rather than deskilling teachers as some scholars claim, it seems that technology is requiring teachers to be more creative in customizing their own material. Also, using Web pages to enhance an activity demonstrates that technology can be used to complement other aspects of good teaching rather than replace them. It is evident that involving students in the creation of useful material as a part of a learning exercise is a way to make school more meaningful for students. While the use of Power Point presentations have been criticized by some, teachers at this school provide examples of how it helps them with their teaching. The use of peripheral devices on computers to help with physics experiments again shows how ICT can be used to aid the learning process and help students focus on higher level concepts rather than less meaningful tasks.
The changes caused by the introduction of information technology into learning environments, are not without some potential problems which must be considered by administrators. The information from this school indicates that some fundamental rethinking of the education process may be necessary because of the use of ICT. This will also put pressure on the school system to restructure the way education is organized.

Back in 1999 computers were very different beasts. Many of us were using Windows 98 or ME; software would have been installed from CD-ROM, but we’d have still been using 3.5-inch floppy disks to transport our documents – assuming they fitted inside the 1.44 MB capacity, that is. The school I was working at back then had made the leap onto the information superhighway, with 128K ISDN, but our home Internet was still relying on dial-up.

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Moore’s Law, that computing power doubles every couple of years or so, has brought some amazing advances since then – so much so that the above description seems quaintly nostalgic. It’s perhaps something of a surprise that the current National Curriculum for primary ICT dates back to the same time; but what is more surprising is that the statutory part of the Curriculum has stood the test of time remarkably well. In terms of the ‘waterfall’ design methodology of a curriculum produced by central government, the authors did a good job of laying down functional requirements, without getting into the detail of technical specifications.

Alongside technological advances, ideas about curriculum design have moved on since then. Sir Jim Rose’s placed ICT at the heart of his proposed curriculum, recognising that the learning opportunities of those who couldn’t use a computer were severely diminished, as would be their job prospects and participation in society. Robin Alexander’s Cambridge Primary Review saw digital literacy as part of a broad definition of literacy, which undoubtedly encompasses the ‘find and present’ approach to ICT that characterises much primary practice, although this perhaps doesn’t do enough to provide an insight into how digital technology works. Other curricula such as the International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme and the International Primary Curriculum similarly focus on ICT as a tool to support pupils’ learning across the curriculum, and all but the most Luddite would have to acknowledge the transformative contribution which ICT can make here. Naace’s 3rd Millennium Learning awards (naace.co.uk/thirdmillenniumlearningaward) are ample testimony to this.

I think it’s because of the dual nature of ICT, as both a subject to study and a tool to support study across the curriculum, that the National Curriculum Expert Panel felt it (along with D&T) lacked sufficient ‘disciplinary coherence’ to be stated as a discrete and separate National Curriculum subject. But I, like 77 per cent of those responding to the consultation, feel differently.

What is ICT?

I don’t think it’s too difficult to pin down what we mean by ICT. Here’s my attempt:

ICT is the study of information, communication and technology and their inter-relationship. Information here covers creation of, management of and access to data in its digital representation. Communication covers both networks (including the Internet) and communicating and collaborating with others via these networks. Technology includes an understanding of complex systems and the principles and processes of computer science.

Whilst many schools are covering these elements incredibly well, providing pupils with a broad, rigorous and creative technological education, this is by no means the case for all. Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, speaking in Edinburgh last summer, observed, “I was flabbergasted to learn that today computer science isn’t even taught as standard in UK schools; your IT curriculum focuses on teaching how to use software, but gives no insight into how it’s made.”

Ian Livingston, life president of games company Eidos and co-author of the DCMS-commissioned NextGen report, put it even more strongly, claiming that “The narrowness of how we teach children about computers risks creating a generation of digital illiterates, and starving some of the UK’s most successful industries of the talent they need to thrive.”

They may well be right – imagine an English curriculum which included only listening and reading; if ICT is seen only in terms of using software written by others, never giving children the chance to write their own programs, then we’re unlikely to provide children with the deeper understanding of computing they deserve.

To be fair, both the ’99 National Curriculum and Rose’s proposed revision included programming, but Ofsted report that too often this is honoured more in the breach than the observance. I, like Steve Furber, who chaired the Royal Society’s investigation into computing in schools, am far from persuaded that Michael Gove’s proposal to ‘disapply’ the National Curriculum will bring about the more innovative ICT provision or the focus on computing that Schmidt, Livingstone and Furber are looking for.

Moving forward

Assuming Michael Gove’s proposals go through and the ICT programme of study and attainment
target are ‘disapplied’ from this September, what should schools do? We move from a ‘waterfall’ model to something much closer to the iterative development process that characterises real world software development, with a cycle of planning, design, implementation and evaluation.

Gove is quite clear that ICT remains part of the National Curriculum. Many schools, particularly those that have invested time or money in their scheme of work, will carry on as at present, perhaps tweaking what they do to include a little more programming and computer science, perhaps not.

For others, there’ll be a move to ‘embed’ ICT across the curriculum: this has much to recommend it, particularly with a move out of the computer room to laptops, netbooks, iPads or pupils’ own devices in the classroom. It’s not too difficult to find meaningful contexts from the Curriculum as a whole for pupils to develop and apply their ICT understanding, knowledge and skills, as QCDA did in Rose’s day, (http://bit.ly/roseict). Dangers with this approach are that it’s too easy to focus on ICT skills at the expense of knowledge and understanding, and that the use of ICT can become skewed towards researching and presenting information, instead of creative or analytical work.

The Royal Society’s report ‘Shut Down or Restart’ recommends redefining the subject as three interrelated domains, a small core of digital literacy (described, too narrowly, as the ability to use computer systems confidently and effectively) and twin domains of information technology and computer science.

Naace, the ICT association, look at things rather differently, placing ‘digital wisdom’ at the core of their framework for ICT (http://bit.ly/NaaceFramework), ensuring that learners can make decisions about using technology in interesting, creative and productive ways. Digital wisdom is built through five areas of study: ‘safe and responsible use’, ‘technologies and how they work’, ‘digital skills’, ‘technology in the world’ and ‘digital literacy’. Schools adopting this framework would do much to ensure that pupils had a broad, challenging technological education. The Naace framework also provides a great way to develop pupils’ critical digital literacy – going beyond using programs or websites to think through some of the assumptions that have underpinned their development.

Naace emphasises that its framework, like the present National Curriculum programme of study, offers schools the flexibility to develop the curriculum for their own context. Integrating Naace’s framework with the Computer Science Curriculum for Schools (tinyurl.com/tpnaace) produced by Computing at Schools (CAS) is straightforward, with CAS’s ‘range and content’ providing quite detailed coverage of the technology aspects of Naace’s framework, so pupils acquire some understanding of the principles of computer science and develop the skills of computational thinking. CAS map knowledge of computer science into five areas – algorithms, programs, data, computers and communication, and the Internet – emphasising that there’s much more to computing than coding.

Greater freedoms

“Disapplying the ICT programme of study is about freedom. It will mean that, for the first time, teachers will be allowed to cover truly innovative, specialist and challenging topics.” So says Michael Gove, and his proposals do provide us with a great opportunity to do things differently, to do things better.

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We’re being offered the chance to move to a far more agile approach to learning than any starting with a pre-determined curriculum. Agile methods for software development are based on responding to change, collaborating with customers, focusing on developing working code and looking at individuals and interactions rather than processes and tools. In the context of the classroom, this echoes Plowden’s notion from 1967 of building on and strengthening children’s intrinsic interest in learning and leading them to learn for themselves, and of ideas of genuinely personalised learning, with the learner at the heart of the educational system.

It’s now possible for any literate, connected and motivated person to teach herself almost anything. Without a statutory programme of study, schools and teachers can provide the space for this within school: to go into an ICT lesson and ask pupils what they’d like to learn about, working with each to support and challenge them as they do so. Collaborative projects, communities of enquiry and challenge-based learning fit in well here. Assessment can focus on what learners have achieved and contributed, and what challenges they might tackle next, rather than ticking off level descriptors. There’s now the chance to make ICT in primary schools much more about exploring a landscape than completing a journey, with the ICT suite much closer to a design studio than a typing pool or call centre.

Freedom brings responsibility. Let’s make the most of the opportunities for a fresh, innovative approach to both curriculum and pedagogy that the secretary of state is offering us.

Get with the program

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Much of the joy of computing comes through direct experience of writing programs, persevering to overcome problems encountered en route and finally producing code that works as intended. There are some great tools around for primary pupils to get this experience. Top of my list is MIT’s Scratch (free from http://scratch.mit.edu), which provides a drag-and-drop interface for building anything from animations and turtle graphics to sophisticated games and simulations. Scratch is easy enough for Y2 to get started with programming, but modifications can provide a basis for undergraduate computer science courses (BYOB), or be used for ‘control’ applications, using Wedo, Arduino (S4A) or Mindstorms (Enchanting). You can even use an Xbox Kinect as a controller. Kodu, from Microsoft Research, and also free, has a beautiful, game-like interface and provides a nice way in to creating 3D computer games, which is likely to be appealing to many primary pupils.

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Scratch, Kodu and other tools like App Inventor aren’t just about pupils learning to program; they also have wide applications across the curriculum, and work on game or app development could lie at the heart of, or be integrated into, many creative, cross-curricular topics. This way, pupils see that computational thinking provides some unique insights far beyond ICT.

Integrating Ict Into Religion Blogeffective Curriculum Ideas Examples

Main Subject: CPD
Subject: ICT
Date Posted: 24 August 2012