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Children, on-line learning and authentic teaching skills in primary education |
Pedagogy&ICT |
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Main Topics
More information ...
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Using ICT to teach ICT - a case study An internship student (second year B Ed) was interviewed in an attempt to understand the key factors that would explain his recent highly successful experiences using ICT to teach ICT in a Tasmanian secondary school.
The intern reported that the students were very computer oriented and that there was a culture of learning, doing well and using computers. He had 'inherited' a successful class program and was able to maintain it during his internship. He also reported that group software being used enabled attention to detail, sequencing of tasks and the establishment of a time frame for completion of work (milestones). This enabled the students to understand what was intended and expected and to know where how they were progressing. The software also enabled the teacher to have an overview of students progress.
In addition the software enable the students to keep a journal of their work and the class shared a discussion board.
What can ICT do? The use of ICT by students to undertake their learning was clearly a success. However the intern also reported that he was 'not sure if ICT could do everything'.
Pedagogy: a system view This case study supports the systems model below:
The class program incorporated the use of ICT to teach ICT. The groupware was managed by the teacher to scaffold students activities by providing information, schedules, milestones and a sequences of activities expected to be within the students' zones of proximal development at each stage,
In some cases the groupware also prompted the teacher to mediate students' learning experiences as a result of matters that arose through the discussion board and/or student journals. The contribution of ICT From the case study it can be seen that the contribution of ICT is likely to be much more significant and effective in scaffolding learning activities than in mediating learning experiences.
Scaffolding provides the students with information to help them undertake their learning tasks and activities. That is, the information capacity of ICT the key to its contribution to scaffolding. ICT based resources (information) can be designed and created by the teacher (or indeed another teacher) in response to course requirements. In this case the online resources had been created elsewhere and the selected as suitable for the class by the school and/or the regular teacher. Thus the starting point for scaffolding may be outside the class program itself. In the case study, the use of the groupware enabled comprehensive scaffolding of learning activities covering the bulk of the learning tasks in the course. When the prepared scaffolding proved to be unsatisfactory for a particular student the teacher had to intervene by providing interim alternative scaffolding.
On the other hand mediation starts with the experiences of the students as they engage in the learning tasks that are part of the class program. The discussion board and journals may provide some starting points for communication resulting in mediation. Thus in mediating the learning experiences the teacher may utilise the communication capacity of the ICT provision to assist the learner to gain insights into their experiences. This is one of the significant differences between groupware and an single user interactive website containing the same content.
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