I want to write about what implications information and communication technologies has on education. I will focus on the information we gather from the Internet, and how this affects students in an educational environment. I will also discuss what challenges the teachers face regarding to this topic, and how the society relate to this.
I´m a frequent user of the Internet at my work as a teacher, my studies and in my freetime. I consider myself to be normally updated in ICT, but I also know that ICT evolves rapidly. We need to update ourselves, especially if we are going to use it in our work in education. ICT is so easy to use when you know how, but not if you don´t.
I think young students habits are very similar to ours, and to find out more about students use of the Internet I have studied some of the results of the PISA program of 2000 and 2006. Research showed that the use of search engines increased from 27 percent in 2000 to 42 percent in 2006. This confirms that students use of the Internet is increasing quickly, and 6 years after this study I´m sure that the percentage is a lot higher than 42 percent.
This means that the students need new skills to assess the information they gather from the Internet, and they need to learn how to find the "good" ones, and how to neglect the "bad" ones. From my school practice during my own study in Tromsø, I got a good insight into how hard this could be for some students. When they were working on school tasks, some of them read text at too high a level and some spent lots of time on pages that were unreliable. Another thing that surprised me was how much the students were dependent on the Internet. The students started to work on a project while I was there. For the first hour they were without Internet access and this frustrated some of the groups a lot. They said they could not only use their textbooks.
During another practice at primary school I was lucky to be able to teach in a class where they used a high level of ICT in the classroom. It was very easy to see how much the children enjoyed playing games whilst learning on the whiteboard , learning new letters on it, reading a digital version of a textbook or use their own computer. You could tell how it caught their attention straight away. At my curent workplace we don´t have all this tools to use in the classroom, and I can clearly see a big difference in the technology skills among the students.
Several key people talks about how ICT
can benefit our teaching and improve schools by learning the pupils to be critical to ICT.
The video above show us something very important. The digital technology hits home before school, it's everywhere and we have to keep up with it as teachers. Like Peter Rudd says in the video, the new technology is involving and engaging students. When young people go online they are met by an information stream that tries to reach them through videos, animations, chat, illustrations, music and photos. We need to get through to the students in the same way, we need to reach out to their world as best we can. Another topic they talk about is the benefits we can have in our work around each pupil using technology to gather information in one place.
I now work in a school that have several teachers who is soon to be retired. One of them is working under me at the moment, and I observe every day how he struggles to keep up with the technology surrounding him. He often have troubles with different tasks at his computer, and this week we got new Ipads for the students to use in our education. This is something he probably never´s going to learn. It´s a problem for all the other teachers in his team because we need to do work he´s not able to, or use our time trying to teach him how.
I think it´s a huge challenge for the society to regularly educate teachers so they´re updated enough to deal with the "ICT world" as it´s evolves. How can we expect the students to use and gather information from ICT, if we can´t use it properly? And is it right that "everything" they do needs to be on a computer?
Personally I think the information and communication technology is a good tool in education, but I also think that both students and teachers need to learn how to use it. As I observed in my practice, the internet can be a real challenge instead of the solution for some students.
