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

2. 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

3. 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)

4. 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

5. The personal and professional characteristics of respondents

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

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

10. 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.

11. 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

12. 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

13. Pixie: A programmable Toy

14. Cash Registers: for socio-dramatic play

15. Digital Cameras

16. Cassette Player/Recorders

17. Computer Workstations

18. Interactive Whiteboards

19. 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
44.7