There therefore seems to be good grounds for claiming that our pupils are ‘growing updigital.’ For these ‘Digital Natives’ forced to exist between two very different cultures, goingto school may well feel like travelling in a distant land. It is like a land that time forgot wherethe technological tools and experiences that support their informal learning at home aredismissed as irrelevant in the more formal learning context of the classroom. Thomas Marchin
Revisiting Webquests in a Web 2.0 World
(2007) concludes, “The embarrassing truth is thatin a few short decades, schools have gone from providing many students with their firstexperiences with computers and the Internet to what have become islands of impoverishment.”So why does this new digital divide exist? There is evidence of growth in the use of ICT inthe classroom and a generally positive disposition among teachers. The National Centre for Social Research (2006) found that at least three quarters of subject respondents to their surveystated that ICT was ‘very’or‘quite’important to their subject at Key Stages 1 to 4. 70% of secondary school respondents also thought that ‘all’ or ‘most’ teachers were enthusiastic aboutusing ICT. However, while many teachers have embraced technology it would seem they havelargely done so in an attempt to make their existing teaching more interesting and efficient.The
Harnessing Technology: School Survey
(2008) found that,” Teachers predominantly useICT for whole-class activities, in line with their preferred use of ICT for display and presentational purpose.” Many teachers seem to have become addicted to PowerPoint whichEdward Tufte, an authority on visual display, describes as ‘educational cocaine’, “easy tostart, hard to stop and not very good for you.” It is perhaps no surprise therefore that whilethere has been a dramatic rise in the use of presentational tools such as Interactivewhiteboards and data projectors in schools, Web 2.0 tools with their emphasis on pupil participation and collaboration have had little impact in the classroom. Technology, it wouldseem, has been used to automate teachers’ pedagogy rather than transform it and as aconsequence it is unlikely that the full value of technology is currently being realised inschools.This raises the question of whether the digital divide between teacher and student use of technology, and the resultant divide between the use of Web 2.0 at home and in school, issimply a matter of lack of awareness of what can be achieved using Web 2.0 tools, or a morefundamental resistance to transformation within the education system. In the remainder of this paper I want to tackle the question of awareness head on by looking at 10 reasons why I believe teachers should be using Web 2.0, and then consider how likely it is that Web 2.0 will play a transformational role in our education system.
1.
Web 2.0 Tools are Easy to Use
Given the rate of technological advancement over the last 20 years it is perhapsunderstandable that the focus of many Government and educational initiatives has largely been on questions of infrastructure and hardware. The Ofsted inspection report
ICT inSchools
(2002) found that even where training had been offered it tended to focus onimproving teachers’ personal ICT skills rather than classroom application. Therefore, it seemslikely that lack of awareness of how technology and Web 2.0 tools in particular can be used inthe classroom is part of the reason why there has been little transformation in how teachersuse ICT. This was recognised the
Harnessing Technology
: Next Generation Learning (2008)
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