ICT tools – what achieves your objectives?

Think about what you want your students to get out of ICT.

Just a few years back, software tools were stored on your computer but today you can find similar tools online. The tools offer the added value of giving your work an audience, getting feedback, sharing and improving it. Somewhere in the process, you can imagine that learning does happen. There is surely a resource in this list that will help you achieve your objectives. Several will chime with some teachers and not others.

We've provided a little guidance on how you might use some tools, or tagged them with ideas on how they may work. ICT is often not about what the tool can do, but what you do with the tool. For example, Google Drive enables you to share files but you could get students using it to engage in shared real time research. It then becomes a sophisticated tool to collaborate with. Weigh up a focused use, besides a 'hope for the best' use. Don't weigh up quality with hardware and features. At times you might let students choose their own tools.

Of all the words we’ve available to describe these tools, you ought notice that some are entirely absent. The words are enjoyable, cool, innovative and new way to learn. The key words are to do with what achieves teaching objectives. So do experiment, and even return here to share a use that enhances what we aim to do.

Pedagogy and ICT - A Review of the Literature

The Pedagogy and ICT a Review of the Literature article (Loveless, 2009; published by BECTA) covers the relationship between pedagogy and ICT use. This review attempts to offer frameworks for thinking about the ‘What?’, ‘How?' and 'Why?’ questions of teaching with information and communications technologies (ICT), offering a range of tools to help us to understand our teaching in local and global contexts, to help us, as Freire urged, to ‘read the world’ of our practice (Freire and Macedo, 1987). It covers a range of approaches to pedagogy, relating these to ICT and some particular issues raised in the literature ^{(Adapted from Pedagogy and ICT a Review of the Literature, section Introduction).}