Inspiring change through ICT – a summary
Suggestions for Priorities 2003 - 2007
Theme 1 - Transforming teaching and learning
“ICT can transform the way that education is delivered and open the way to a new pedagogy. It can make it easier for teachers to plan and find high quality materials, and it can help pupils to find out more about the subjects that they are studying. Critically, new technology can enable teachers to tailor their teaching more closely to the abilities of individual pupils”.
The ingredients of change will be to develop autonomous learners, the teacher’s role as facilitator, focus learning more on higher-order skills development, provide quality interactive resources, and assure access to learning at any time.
To make this happen we will need to promote the acquisition of digital content by schools, ensure teachers have the ICT resources needed to develop their role, orientate the curriculum towards the acquisition of higher-order skills, and provide access to ICT for all learners.
The government should seek to champion schemes that provide access to ICT, extend the Laptops for Teachers Scheme, oversee the successful flow of digital resources to schools, ensure the availability of learning resources at home via broadband consortia, and further develop the role of ICT in the curriculum. They should open up examinations to ICT-produced work, support action-research bursaries to help the community to understand the learning process with ICT, devise more flexible employment patterns for educators, and promote e-learning methods.
Theme 2 - Connected communities
“Almost all of the innovative programmes of leadership development in the public and private sector are connecting participants to practice through the use of mentors and coaches.
ICT is increasingly emerging as a central, integral interactive part of the learning cycle with emerging on-line learning, virtual activities, the use of websites, e-network and e-discussion groups”
The teaching profession can be revitalised through the development of networked learning communities, and local collaboration would bring enormous benefits in relation to developing an intelligent professional community. Teachers should be encouraged to become reflective practitioners, and schools should become centres of innovation in this respect. Schools should seek to share best practice and to identify leading teachers in the use of ICT. Existing obstacles to professional development should be eased by a greater use of e-learning methods, coupled with mentoring. There should be a ready-availability of broadband resources for teachers at work and at home.
To make this happen we need to establish professional learning networks and actively promote their use, schools should work together in clusters, or federations, and the notion of community leadership should be promoted. Opportunities for CPD in the use of ICT should be regular and of high quality.
The government should take specific action to promote networked learning communities, linked to the development of quality CPD for teachers. Professional and community organisations should play a role. Research evidence into the impact of networked learning should be made available, and the Leading ICT Teachers scheme should be established.
Quality CPD should be developed in regard to e-teaching, higher-order skills, and strategic leadership in ICT.
Theme 3 - Managing the effective learning environment
“The school of the future will remain at the heart of the learning process for children and adults for the foreseeable future. However, process redesign can yield significant workload reductions whilst securing undoubted advances. But these applications are dependent on widespread access to ICT facilities.”
Schools will need to change they way they work if they are take full advantage of what e-learning offers to learners. Schools need to plan for self-directed change, to make workload management a reality, to broaden the media available for learning, to make arrangements to assure technical reliability, and to further develop the school’s ICT infrastructure.
They should secure sustainability and seek to promote proven teaching technologies .
The school day should be re-shaped to allow greater opportunities for e-learning, and buildings re-designed to allow open access to ICT. Support staff should be organised around the roles needed to make e-learning centres work effectively.
The government should promote school development planning to target these developments.
They should commission solutions to workload demand, and promote research into the benefits of restructuring the school day. Knowledge about the development of effective-learning environments should be shared. A career structure for support staff should be defined, and grants should be used to encourage home and community links. A unified national strategy for e-learning centres should be developed, and the school capital programme used to steer the transformation of learning.