English and ICT

English and ICT

The pervasive influence of new media and technological innovation are forcing us to re-examine fundamental assumptions about the nature and development of literacy, and the place and purpose of English as a subject in the school curriculum. These pages address some of the key perspectives on English and ICT which we find useful in working with trainee teachers. There are links to resources for working with student teachers on Moving Image, Using the Web, ICT and Literacy Teaching, Using ICT for Reflection, and Digital Writing.

Learning to teach with ICT

Trainees enter particular school and classroom cultures as polite visitors. They face the sometimes conflicting demands of teachers, mentors and the QTT standards, and have to work with the ways in which the statutory curriculum is interpreted, resourced and delivered in their placement schools.

This means that to a large extent their experience of ICT in the classroom is determined by features of the placement context such as hardware and software provision, access to technology, school policies on ICT, technical support and teacher confidence. Trainees often have to base their teaching on school scheme’s of work and this may limit possibilities for the use of technology in some areas of the curriculum.

Trainees also bring their own levels of confidence with ICT into this situation. They may be experienced and confident in a narrow or wide range of personal uses, but this does not necessarily transfer into pedagogy. They may also have good technical knowledge but again this doesn’t always translate into classroom application.

However the role of ICT develops, it is likely that the key focus for teachers of English will remain on verbal expression. This is also the way into the use of ICT which teachers find most comfortable. Whilst acknowledging the potential of using audio and visual digital media in the English classroom, trainees can also be encouraged to use ICT to help learners to interact with ‘traditional’ text, and to discover (or rediscover) the importance of the element of play.

Playful engagement with digital text is attractive because of the ease in which pupils can manipulate text in electronic environments. Some of the areas in which electronic interaction with text can be most fruitful are:

• transforming texts: for example, re-sequencing poems; reworking a text for a different audience or purpose; transforming a play extract into prose.
• investigating texts: searching texts for repetitions; revealing the words or lines of a text one at a time; separating two interwoven texts.
• organising writing: the creation of templates, frameworks and other kinds of guidance in the writing process.

• New technology is unevenly distributed, both in homes and institutional contexts. Value systems and economic factors interact to create a digital divide, yet it is critically important to build on the knowledge about ICT that pupils bring to the school setting. We think it is important that students recognise the role that new media plays in their everyday lives as a way of modelling this. The central question is: How do we recognise and build on pupils’ ICT literacy capital?
  
• New technology is currently characterised by media diversification (satellite/cable TV; mobile communication devices; digital cameras; MP3 players) but there is an increasing convergence of technologies suggesting the need for more generic skills, choice and possibility in terms of mixed media and multimodal analysis and production. The central question is: How can we ensure that all pupils have opportunities to produce and critique a range of digitally mediated texts?
   
• New technology provides access to vast amounts of information on demand. The ubiquity of digital media, combined with commercial and sometimes undesirable influences, suggests that is important to develop a critical perspective on everyday and educational ICTs. Intellectual and ethical considerations are important in searching, locating and evaluating information. The central question is: How can we help pupils to make sense of the digital information at their fingertips?
   
• New technology transforms social relationships, facilitating rapid, interactive communication between those who are geographically dispersed. This suggests that, in the future, learning interactions may expand beyond the immediate classroom setting, involving a dispersed peer group, of other learners, adults and experts. Transformation of learning spaces mean that learners and teachers do not necessarily need to be in the same place at the same time. The pioneering work of the Notschool initiative for excluded pupils provides a blueprint of this). The central question is: How can we harness the communicative potential of ICT in meaningful, educational contexts?
  
• New technology has the potential to transform learning in many ways, so would we still need teachers if we had excellent software and content? The flexibility offered by new technology questions accepted learning sequences, notions of progression and fixed point assessment. It makes individualised learning possible. The central question is: How might ICT be used to transform the school curriculum and re-define the role of the teacher?
   
• New technology provides us with the capacity to capture, archive, revisit, edit and remix material in a variety of modes. This presents new opportunities for reflection and creativity, but also raises issues about intellectual property, originality and copyright. The central question is: How can we utilise the characteristics of new media to promote learning and understanding?
   
• New technology allows us to make new kinds of texts. These are often multimodal in character, involve new ways of reading and writing and encourage interactivity. Pupils may well have experience of computer-mediated role play, simulation and gaming. The central question is: How might the curriculum adapt in response to these new kinds of texts?