InterActive Education:teaching and learning in the information age set out to answer a big question.
HOW CAN ICT BE USED MOST EFFECTIVELY TO ENHANCE
TEACHING AND LEARNING?
The Graduate School of Education at Bristol University, ten partner schools and over 50 teachers worked together on the research.
The five research themes incorporated in the project, individually and woven together, produced a rich and complex picture of ICT in education.
Some Background
In 2001 we had witnessed a massive drive to incorporate
ICT into every aspect of school life - policy initiatives aimed at
increasing the use of new technologies had seen over £1.7 billion
invested in training, hardware and software in UK schools. The expectation was that teachers
would develop innovative ways of teaching
with ICT, would use these technologies in administration and management
and use the Internet
to develop new ways of communicating with parents, students and other
practitioners.
Alongside these changes in school, students' use of computers in
the home was increasing, presenting teachers with the challenge of
marking computer-produced work, negotiating students' growing expertise
in the use of new technologies and confronting inequalities in differential
access to computers in the home.
The InterActive Education project project
aimed to investigate and understand the challenges presented by these developments, find practical means of addressing
some of the issues and discover ways in which new technologies can be used in
educational settings to enhance learning.
Researchers and Practitioners in Partnership
Central to the project was the contention that effective and innovative
practices in teaching and learning require a combination of practitioner
and researcher expertise. Thus teachers, teacher educators and university researchers
worked in partnership to develop subject design initiatives
in key learning areas. Cutting across the primary, secondary and
FE sector subject design teams worked in the areas of:
How we worked and researched together was based on the idea that our designs for learning should be informed by theory, research-based
evidence on the use of computers for learning, teacher's craft knowledge
and the research team's expertise. We also believe that designing is an iterative process. Our way of working, therefore, was cyclic; with the evaluation of our learning initiatives informing the re-design and more evaluation.
Diagnostic assessment and digital
video recordings of lessons were used throughout as tools for analysis and reflection
on teaching and learning.
The Five Research Themes
Educational policy and management
of ICT in schools aimed to identify the conditions
which give rise to effective management practices enabling the
creation of innovative computer-based learning environments.
Teaching and learning
aimed to describe and theorise the links between teaching and learning
in ICT-rich settings.
The role of subject cultures in mediating
ICT use aimed to highlight the similarities
and differences between subject cultures with respect to both
pedagogic practices and student's approaches to learning which
incorporate new technologies.
Teachers and professional development aimed to characterise productive professional development practices.
Learners' out of school uses
of ICT aimed to characterise young people's
and teacher's out-of-school learning with technology in order
to draw on this potential within school-based learning situations.
Within this context the specific research methods used were
multi-layered, operating at a macro, meso and micro level within particular
schools.
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