Why and how are teachers integrating ICT (Information and Communication Technology) into primary education? In this course we analyse examples from schools in different parts of the world, and bring professional teachers, headteachers and policymakers together to share their best ideas and inspiring stories. The materials in the course are based on studies carried out for the UNESCO Institute of IT in Education, Moscow. Learning Outcomes: to be aware of the range of reasons for using ICT to critique the strategies for developing ICT over time to analyse the strengths and weakness of different decision-making mechanisms to become familiar with a wider range of useful tools and resources for integrating ICT
The 21st Century School Environment
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ICT in Primary Education: Transforming children's learning across the curriculum
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University of London
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ICT and the 21st Century Primary School
This week will enable you to be aware of the range of reasons for using ICT and to critique the strategies for developing ICT over time. You will also analyse the strengths and weakness of different decision-making mechanismsand become familiar with a wider range of useful tools and resources for integrating ICT
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Professor Diana LaurillardProfessor of Learning with Digital Technologies
London Knowledge Lab, UCL Institute of Education, University of London
This is a recording of the lecture on
the 21st century school environment by Diana Laurillard.
Now Unesco IIT survey we looked at the
experiences about partner schools as they've been integrating ICT.
So what does the 21st century classroom look like now?
How much is primary education really changing?
Here we look at some of the data on what schools
are doing and how they're developing their capacity to use ICT.
The 19th century classroom.
Well, when we see a picture like this of a classroom from
150 years ago it's clear that primary education has changed a lot.
Politicians and leaders are fond of saying that little has changed
in schools since this period, what we call the Victorian Age.
Here's one recent quote, a Victorian school teacher could
enter a 21st century classroom, and feel completely at home.
White boards may have eliminated chalk dust,
chairs may have migrated from rows to
groups, but a teacher still stands in
front of the class talking, testing, and questioning.
Well, I think this picture of a 21st classroom in the U.K.
suggests that the Victorian school teacher would not feel at all at home.
The model now is more often group work with one or
more teachers and assistants moving around to help children with their work.
The same is true many different countries across the world.
Of course, the teacher still sometimes stands
at the front to demonstrate and explain.
But what is the teacher demonstrating?
The demonstration here is the use of a tool and with the right guidance,
the students will be able to use it to take forward their own learning.
They learn literacy skills so they can learn from books for themselves.
They learn digital literacy so they can learn from computers for themselves.
But as we've already seen, the computer is a much
richer and more powerful tool for learning than a book.
So yes, schools have changed a lot.
But the change is not uniform, not even within one country.
There is never enough investment to enable every school to change at the same pace.
Teachers vary in their interests and capacity to change.
So it's important in every context, local, national or international,
to look at how we can make sure all children benefit from what ICT can offer.
One way to track the development of ICT integration is
to run an annual survey across a representative sample of schools.
In the U.K. one of our government agencies Becta, used to be responsible for
this although it could be a government
department or research institute or professional organization.
The important point is that we need to know
how the capacity of the school system is developing.
The survey called this an analysis of e-maturity.
They defined e-maturity in terms of three main topics,
infrastructure and resources, organizational
coordination, and engaging the learner.
We'll look each of these in tern because they're universally useful indicators
of how mature a school is or a school system is in terms of its use of ICT.
But look at the difference in progress here.
In the U.K., by 2008, there had been nearly
10 years of government investment in ICT for education.
But the primary sector was only just catching up with the secondary schools.
Primary schools in particular have made good recent progress in developing this
e-maturity and have to a large extent caught up with secondary schools.
And then again the use of learning platforms or VLEs was still in
its infancy for many schools in the UK and that was in 2009.
So without the explicit support and action from government, the
use of ICT in schools does not just happen by itself.
Another survey, the European Schoolnet Survey, was published
in 2013, and was the first for many years
to take a snapshot across countries in the EU
to find out the position of ICT in education.
The data here derives from 27 countries and although they're all in
Europe, the survey covers a wide and diverse range of educational systems.
We look at infrastructure first, at the ICT
equipment and connectivity because without this nothing can happen.
This data compares three grades, grade four, the upper end of primary school
and grades eight and 11, the lower and upper ends of secondary school.
And again we see the same pattern of difference.
The primary schools are still a long way behind secondary schools with less
than 35% being well equipped, against 50% in secondary schools.
Is there a good reason for that?
Is ICT less valuable to primary children?
Are they less capable of using it?
Good questions to bear in mind as we work through the rest of this week.
But now, look at the difference across Europe in the provision of ICT.
In some countries such as, Norway and Portugal at the left hand end of that
graph, are very high percentage of primary schools
are well equipped with a virtual learning environment.
This is a good measure of infrastructure because it's
a network and that implies there's internet access and
there are lots of computers attached to it in
the school, and it's a technology designed for education.
So if a school has a VLE system, we can guess that
there's a fair amount of ICT being used for teaching and learning.
But look at the range.
From nearly 100% of schools with this access at the
left hand end to almost none at the right hand end.
Even within the western industrialized countries of Europe with
a degree of political and economic similarity after all.
There's this full range, from total provision
to no provision of ICT in primary schools.
It's a remarkable indicator of the
difference in government thinking about this issue.
Our own survey questions our schools to reflect
on their journey towards developing their current infrastructure.
These are the lessons they learned.
Put ICT devices in the library and access
halls so everyone see children working on computers.
Provide more mobile devices with wifi to allow more flexible use of ICT.
Give teachers and students one-to-one access as soon as possible.
And that's because one-to-one teacher access
makes an enormous difference because the
teacher feels ownership of the computer and what we can do with it.
And it's just the same for the student, of course.
So one-to-one access for teachers and students is extremely important.
And finally technical support which ensures
proper functioning of any electronic device,
connectivity, and access to the school learning management system or VLE system.
And technical support is so important because the
teacher has to be sure that everything will work.
If the network crashes, it's as if the blackboard has suddenly disappeared.
That would be absurd.
And yet teachers are frequently asked to work
with IT systems that are not fully robust.
That's not right.
The technical quality is crucial.
So, the infrastructure of a 21st century school is technologically complex now.
Not at all like the 19th century school.
And it's a mix of old and new, of teacher talking to the whole class, small group
work, and a lot of it is paper based and a lot of it is ICT based.
Here's an example of how students are using the internet to
do an inquiry learning investigation into the lives of Victorian children.
The teacher puts the learning objective on the
whiteboard to remind them of what they're learning.
They're asked to work collaboratively, to share the resources they find, but also
to work on their own to edit the text and select good images.
And when you look at it, that's quite a range
of skills the students are using in that one class.
There's teamwork, operating a computer, information skills, media skills, literacy
skills, and the judgment to put all that together to answer the overall question.
In the same class here, the teacher is orchestrating the work of the students.
They're working here both individually and in pairs.
She occasionally reminds the whole class of what they have to do.
She checks on their progress and she
offers guidance to them on an individual basis.
So in this way, each child can work at their own pace and level.
They can get on with the activity learning independently, but they
also have some support from the teacher when they need it.
Here's a different classroom working via video link with another school.
When a classroom has an interactive whiteboard as well as internet access they
can link to online resources, but also as in this case, to other schools.
This is wonderful because it gives the children the chance
to see what a primary classroom looks like in another country.
And to exchange ideas and experiences
directly with the children from another culture.
Of course, this requires careful preparation
by both of the teachers involved.
Teachers can do a lot, even with quite small and
cheap mobile devices which can be connected to the internet.
But managing the logistics of giving them out
and then collecting them in and sorting and storing
and recharging all the devices, is part of
classroom management that's an important aspect of using ICT.
In the case study of digital leaders this week, the teacher explains how he
selects pupils to take responsibility for this
part of management of the ICT lesson resources.
All those iPods have to be given out
and then collected and then put away and recharged.
And with 30 devices to handle that's a lot of work.
But the children take responsibility for doing it all.
One classroom may have many different kinds
of ICT based activities going on within it.
Here we can see that one of the children is using a science program that's testing
his understanding of basic arithmetic concepts using concrete
images and situations to illustrate what the numbers mean.
The program can give feedback on whether they got it
right and provide hints and explanations if they got it wrong.
So the 21st century classroom will also be equipped with ICT
tools that enable students to make things in a virtual environment.
This is one of the most powerful ways of learning.
The child has a clear goal, to make a game for
example, in Minecraft, as we'll see in case study for week one.
Or to make an interactive program, using the Scratch programming tool.
And we'll see how our partners have been using
these kinds of tools later on in week four.
And now we come to organizational coordination.
This refers to what the teachers are doing to integrate ICT.
And includes questions about how ICT resources are used and managed,
but it also asks questions about the culture of the school.
An E-maturity survey must ask teachers how important
a role would you say ICT plays in teaching
at your school for your subject or level,
and we'll look at this in more detail later.
Asking about teacher confidence, overall how confident would you say teachers at
the school are in the use of ICT in delivering the school curriculum?
And this is way of accounting for the differences in ICT integration.
And we'll look at this further as well.
And the final question here is a different way of tracking provision across schools.
In planning the content of lessons in your subject proportionately, how much use
is made of digital resources such as web based content or software packages?
If the survey runs annually it enables you to
track the changes over time and see the extent to
which schools are developing their capacity and the way
teacher confidence is growing and the school culture is changing.
The EU Schoolnet Survey looked at school culture by
asking about teachers and head teachers' attitudes to ICT.
They found that between 90 and 95% of
students are in primary schools where school heads
and teachers agree or agree strongly that ICT
can be used to enable students to retrieve information.
Do exercises in practice and learn in
an autonomous or an independent and collaborative way.
But they're less certain about the positive impact
on students' achievement and skills and higher order thinking.
85% of students are in schools where the heads think ICTs have a positive
impact on achievement, transversal skills, and high order thinking.
But notice that teachers themselves are even less certain than the heads at 75%.
And actually that's reasonable.
By its nature if ICT is being used at all then the
students would probably be doing information
retrieval and practice exercises and learning independently.
But teachers especially know how hard it can be to make sure that
ICT is used effectively for these
more challenging outcomes within their subject teaching.
Now where does the teachers' caution come from?
Well, it's interesting to look at these
two graphs on teacher training and teacher confidence.
The top graph shows a wide range of ICT training provided for primary
teachers from nearly 90% of schools to almost nothing at the right hand end.
They get little help with learning how to use ICT in the classroom.
But look at the much flatter shape of the
lower graph of their confidence in digital skills generally.
Like everyone else, teachers have been developing digital skills in
their own lives and have the confidence that goes with it.
And the countries that come high on that list, Poland, Ireland, Portugal are
a long way down the list of ICT training in the upper graph.
So it's not the schools that are helping that confidence.
And this could be the origin of that greater caution among primary teachers.
They know what ICT can do and they've got the confidence to use it,
but how to use it effectively for the more important aspects of children's education.
That's where they need more help than they are currently getting.
And this is borne out by the conclusions
of the EU survey, that supporting and developing teachers
could be as important as providing technology, especially
once a certain threshold of infrastructure provision is reached.
In our UNESCO survey the innovative primary schools
all gave their teachers excellent support such as this.
Every teacher is giving an iPad, laptop, notebook, or PC, for shared diaries.
A virtual learning environment, email, and Skype.
The VLE and software is accessible to teachers
and pupils 24 hours a day via the internet.
Teachers can borrow a laptop or an iPad to experiment
with using the apps and to plan lessons after school.
And this is what counts, this e-maturity in a school.
Finally we come back to access.
Access is important because that's how you engage the
learner and this is the final issue we look at.
Access at school is important because many children
do not have access to ICT at home.
School is their only chance.
And it's the mark of increasing maturity of a school
that it ensures there's one-to-one access for all its students.
In our survey, we found that most of the
schools aim for one-to-one student access to tablet computers.
And these are made available for independent learning and project work.
Of course, there's still a digital divide even within a school
for students who have access at home and those who do not.
So many schools provide breakfast clubs and after school clubs
so that these children can still use computers for study.
In the UK, the E-Learning Foundation is a charity set up to help schools ensure one
to one access because everyone recognizes how important
this is and the website is giving right there.
It's a great unfairness in our education systems to allow poorer
students to go without the computers that other students have access to.
Well we've covered a lot in this lecture, so here's a brief summary.
The 21st century primary school environment is
completely different from that of the 19th century.
We've seen from the survey that schools differ greatly in
their use of ICT for learning in terms of infrastructure.
Some use the VLE across the whole school, others use it not at all.
In terms of organization, in some schools there is
very high teacher support and in some schools almost none.
And in terms of engaging the learner, some have one-to-one
student access and some have no computer access at all.
And the UNESCO survey showed that the leading
primary schools all aim for one-to-one student access.
They also give their teachers excellent support
in terms of professional development ideas and also
in terms of their own access to a laptop or computer for preparing their lessons.
So, primary schools are changing, slowly it's true.
But digital technologies are now making classroom learning more varied
and challenging, and also, therefore, much more challenging for the teacher.
And that's why we have to look at policy, and that's what the next lecture is about.
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