ICT4D Blog

Analogue Teachers vs. Digital Students

(notes from the homonimous session at the bdigital Global Congress)

Moderator: Begoña Gros

Three main reports issued in 2007 in Spain about ICTs at Schools. The conclusions are more or less the same: everyone uses ICTs (teachers and students) but not at school.

Ismael Peña-López
Digital students, analogue institutions, teachers in extinction

(click here for Spanish version of the presentation and presentation downloads)

Jordi Vivancos
Knowledge and Learning Technologies, a transforming vision of ICT in Education

The Educational sector (i.e. teachers) is one of the sectors with highest penetration in the use of ICTs. So, teachers are not analogue anymore.

The design of the traditional syllabus did not make possible the introduction of ICTs in the educational programmes, especially the acquisition of digital competencies. This was solved (in Catalonia) in year 2006, where such capabilities where included in new syllabuses.

Copernican change in Education (K-12): shift from “memorizing the capitals of the world” towards “learning how to use a map”.

Three stages of tech education:

And especially the last stage requires huge amounts of investment to achieve total capilarity of ICTs at school.

But, computers per student, without data about its use, is a useless indicator: it is intensity and not density what counts. So investment in computers is not (only) the issue. So, how educators and schools should and could appropriate technology for teaching purposes? How to improve, through ICTs, the learning processes?

Antoni Zabala
Computer sciences at school or PC at school?

The ICT adoption problems comes not from the Education professionals, but from school policies and design. We’ve been putting computers in the schools and this has not happened anywhere else: in other sectors of the Economy, there’s been no “pc installation” but “computer-based strategies”.

We use to relate ICTs with educational innovation, in quite a Freinetian approach. But ICTs might not solve each and every problem educators have.

As long as ICTs help educators solve their problems and move ahead, ICTs will be successful. The inverse (ICTs will be successful as long as they change the way educators act) is completely wrong.

Thus, we should analyse what the necessities are, both the educators’ and the students’ in the whole educational process. And leaps are no solution, but tiny and smooth evolutions.

In this train of thought, specific tools and software are better than computers. For instance: there are plenty of handooks from which the educator can choose to impart their courses, but there’s not such a thing in the instructional technology landscape: not a real choice, not competence.

Manuel de la Fuente
ICTs and Education: A Vision from the Classrooms

Not ICTs, but KLTs: knowledge and learning technologies.

SWOT Analysis on several schools:

Opportunities
Menaces
Strengths
Weaknesses
Way forward

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