It is vital that practitioners have the skills and knowledge
to use ICT effectively, that they have the correct training to boost their
confidence so that they can improve their teaching styles to fit their pupils
learning types.
A study conducted by Wikan and Molster (2011) in Norway found
that teachers tried to use ICT within their classroom however, it wasn’t that
they didn’t know how to it, it was just they failed to see the benefit of it.
If teachers aren’t aware of the positive effects it can have on children, then
they aren’t going to include ICT within their classroom. They should therefore
be trained on the advantages that ICT can have. I found this to be the case
when working in a special needs school for two weeks. In their classrooms, they
had an abundance of technology that supported the children in their learning. Therefore,
having a broad understanding of why technology is important is vital for the
effectiveness of ICT as without it they wouldn’t be using it.
If a teacher doesn’t have the right skills and knowledge,
then ICT can’t be used to its full potential (Gil-Flores and Torres-Gordillo,
2017). They need to be well trained on how to use multiple devises and what
they are capable of doing. Kale and Goh (2014) stated that for a teacher to
incorporate ICT within their lesson then it needs to match their pedagogy,
relating to my previous point that ICT cannot be used effectively if the
teacher does not believe it can work.
References:
Gil-Flores, R. & Torres-Gordillo, J. (2017) ‘Factors
that explain the use of ICT in secondary-education classrooms: The role of
teacher characteristics and school infrastructure’, Computers in Human
Behavior, 68, pp. 441-449.
Kale, U., & Goh, D. (2014) ‘Teaching Style, ICT
Experience and Teachers' Attitudes toward Teaching with Web 2.0’, Education and Information Technologies,
19(1), pp. 41-60.
Wikan, G. & Molster, T. (2011) ‘Norwegian Secondary
School Teachers and ICT’, European Journal of Teacher Education, 34(2),
pp. 209-218.
I like your post about teachers needing to believe in ICT for it to have the desired effects on pupils, however Akbiyik and Seferoglu (2012) found that even when teachers were positive about the use of ICT in classrooms, they often were not given enough time for teaching to have the impact that would be possible with the pupils being exposed to ICT for longer.
ReplyDeleteReference
Akbiyik, C., and Seferoglu, S.S. (2012) ‘Instructing ICT Lessons in Primary Schools: Teachers' Opinions and Applications’, Educational Sciences: Theory and Practice, 12(1), pp. 417-424.