Training needs and opportunities in the UK John Siraj-Blatchford Jon Dawson

Research on Education and Training shows: “…the availability of technology alone cannot bring about radical change” “…while some (potentially effective) technologies are embraced (by educators) others are resisted” “The use of technology in classrooms is found to be socially contextualised, interacting with the institutional and organisational cultures of schools and reflecting elements of the prevailing social relations in and around the context of use” (Editorial) Issue 5, April 2003) edition of New Perspectives for Learning http://www.pjb.co.uk/npl/npl5.pdf

From UK research experience we also know that when we report our research findings these need to be anchored in concrete teaching contexts: “Teachers will not take up attractive sounding ideas, albeit based on extensive research, if these are presented as general principles which leave entirely to them the task of translating them into everyday practice – their classroom lives are too busy and too fragile for this to be possible for all but an outstanding few. What they need is a variety of living examples of implementation, by teachers with whom they can identify and from whom they can both derive conviction and confidence that they can do better, and see concrete examples of what doing better means in practice.” Black and William (1998)

Kinderet in the UK has aimed to identify and understanding the theoretical and practical needs of early childhood educators in terms of their use of ICT and to work in collaboration with them in developing resources to support their colleagues. The Kinderet survey was applied in 2004 to identify: The personal and professional characteristics of respondents How ICT was applied to the Curriculum The availability and application of ICT resources The training needs and preferences of practitioners

The personal and professional characteristics of respondents

While it might have been assumed that years of experience and the age of the respondents would have been a good predictor of varying opinions of the value of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), this does not seem to be the case. No significant correlation was found been age of respondent/length of service and either their confidence in or their concerns for ICT.

91.9% of respondents felt ICT was an ‘important’ or ‘very important’ area of the curriculum and only 38% felt that they had been provided with sufficient training to provide it. Where individual respondents were less motivated this might have been an indication that the technology was being used inappropriately.

How ICT was applied to the Curriculum The respondents were asked what objectives they had for the use of ICT and they were also asked separately what they felt that children learnt from there use of the tools. Interestingly their responses were quite different.

Areas of the curriculum that practitioners felt ICT could contribute to the most.

Why do we use technology? What do children learn from technology? The references to social skills referred exclusively to issues of co-operation which suggests the need to raise practitioners awareness of the importance of children talking together and developing their collaboration skills.

The availability and application of ICT resources Software Selection Criteria Category Number of respondents who rated this important Age appropriate 44 Developmental Appropriate 22 Educational 34 Graphics/Visual/Audio 26 Child Friendly/Ease of Use 39 Fun/Interesting 18 Recommendation 6 Price/Cost 9 the criteria used to select computer software

In the UK ICT education includes all those new technologies that handle information and support communications. e.g. cassette recorders, traffic lights, telephone, video, bar code scanners and programmable toys. 12/2/2018

Pixie: A programmable Toy

Cash Registers: for socio-dramatic play

Digital Cameras

Cassette Player/Recorders

Computer Workstations

Interactive Whiteboards

The training needs and preferences of practitioners Training Areas requested % of answers 1 Office Tools (e.g. PowerPoint) 70.0 2 Working with new (recommended) software 67.3 3 Desktop publishing (e.g. Publisher – text handling, graphics and images) 59.6 4 Programmable toys, floor and screen turtles 56.4 5 How to create web pages 55.8 6 ICT Curriculum Integration 53.1 7 Evaluating educational software 52.9 8 Computer maintenance and troubleshooting 51.9 9 Computer/Technology education 46.5 10 Training to use e-mail 44.7