Education for All goals at an affordable cost. They have great potential for knowledge dissemination, effective learning and the development of more efficient education services. To be effective, especially in developing countries, ICT should be combined with more traditional technologies such as books and radios and be more extensively applied to the training of teachers.
Education must reflect the diversity of needs, expectations, interests and
cultural contexts. This poses particular challenges under conditions of globalisation given its strong tendency towards uniformity. The challenge is to define the best use of ICT for improving the quality of teaching and learning, sharing knowledge and information, introducing a higher degree of flexibility in
response to societal needs, lowering the cost of education and improving internal and external efficiencies of the education system.
This handbook is designed for teachers and all educators who are currently
working with, or who would like to know more about, information and communication technologies in schools. The technologies involve much more than computers, and so the abbreviation we use for information and communication technologies - ICT - is a plural term to denote the whole range of technologies associated with processing information on the one hand and, on the other, with sending and receiving messages.
However, this handbook is not primarily about hardware (the term applied
to computers and all the connecting devices like scanners, modems, telephones, and satellites that are tools for information processing and communicating across the globe): it is about teaching, and, more particularly, learning, and the way that all these technologies that we group under the acronym ICT can transform schools as we currently know them. ICT have already impacted on the economies of all nations and on the fabric of society at every level within which teachers and students live and interact.
In so far as ICT have the potential to impact similarly on every aspect of the
life of a school, the coverage of this handbook is very broad and includes - to
mention just one topic from each chapter - educational technology of the mind,
multimedia presentations, multiple intelligences, wearable computers, goals of
education, and information objects.
Although the handbook coverage is necessarily broad, much of the content
is quite specific and directed to teaching and learning activities with ICT in the
classroom. Thus there are sections on modelling forms and meanings of reading,
writing, and oral communication, or the new literacy, as we prefer to call them.
Other sections embrace science experiments, foreign language learning, research in social sciences and humanities, and the mathematics of informatics.
The handbook, then, is for teachers at all levels, from kindergarten through
elementary, middle, and high school. Further readers who should find this handbook useful are those in pre-service teacher education courses at colleges and universities who are preparing to become teachers. Classrooms that they will enter promise to be very different environments from those when they themselves went to school, thanks largely to developments in ICT.
A major theme of this handbook is how ICT can create new, open learning
environments. More than any other previous technology, ICT are providing
learners access to vast stores of knowledge beyond the school, as well as with
multimedia tools to add to this store of knowledge. ICT are largely instrumental,
too, in shifting the emphasis in learning environments from teacher-centred
to learner-centred; where teachers move from being the key source of information and transmitter of knowledge to becoming guides for student learning; and where the role of students changes from one of passively receiving information to being actively involved in their own learning.
Two other recent UNESCO publications complement this handbook nicely.
These are Information and Communication Technologies in Teacher Education: A Planning Guide (UNESCO 2002a); and Information and Communication Technology in Education: A Curriculum for Schools and Programme of Teacher Development (UNESCO 2002b). Both publications are available online (see References for full details).
This handbook consists of seven chapters that together provide a comprehensive treatment of ICT in schools within the context of broader movements in society and the world at large.
The first chapter, Society, Learning Imperatives, and ICT is intended to provide basic perspectives of:
-
society, peoples, individuals, and their needs;
-
educational systems to serve society and individuals; and
-
ICT as a powerful and versatile means to support socio-cultural
-
development, especially in the field of education.
The second chapter, ICT: New Tools for Education, is devoted to technical matters. ICT are described here on the basis of little prior knowledge. However, this chapter should be useful for ICT-using educators as well.
The third chapter, Schools in Transition, contains a systematic overview of the traditional or classical school with its strong and weak points, its problems, prospects and possible solutions for further development. Some of the solutions we suggest can be implemented with the help of ICT; other solutions should be taken into consideration while introducing ICT into schools.
The fourth chapter, ICT in Learning and Teaching, investigates the elements,or atoms of teaching and learning activities in view of different kinds of support,improvement, and extension made possible by ICT. From atoms, the chapter moves to more complex teaching and learning activities or molecules.
The fifth chapter on Structuring the School Continuum covers the problems of practical use of ICT in schools and offers possible solutions.
The sixth chapter on Mathematical Fundamentals of Information Science
focuses on the fundamentals of computer science and technology (or educational informatics). These fundamentals are relevant for different ICT applications and belong to what we call the new literacy.
The final chapter on ICT and Educational Change brings together the several key themes that underlie this book: the need to restructure schools, strategies of change, and dimensions of ICT development.
A final section puts forward practical suggestions for planning.References to all works cited, a glossary of key terms, and an index for ready reference complete this handbook.
Source: UNESCO.
|
