This is the recorded lecture on approaches to integrating ICT by Diana Laurillard. A UNESCO survey of primary schools that are integrating ICT included questions about how they approach that process. This is documented in the chapter in the UNESCO book, ICT in Primary Education Volume Two. And in Volume One we also looked at different countries around the world and how they approached the issue at national government level. In this activity we look at just the selection of the approaches to integrating ICT. But, with a particular focus on the teachers who have to do it. Here we look at the analysis of national approaches in chapter five of the Unesco Survey, Volume One. Where we analyzed policy documents from a range of countries around the world to discern these common policy headings. Vision or aims for e-learning, who's involved in defelopment and delivery, links to government initiatives. The approach to technology in the curriculum, digital tools and resources, teacher development, and developing the digital infrastructure. That chapter discusses all these points. But in week one, we're focusing on just the experiences of the leaders and teachers for this particular activity. If we think about policy change from their point of view, it's useful to think in terms of the drivers that teachers and school leaders are most aware of. These are the influences that prioritize their activities in the classroom or school. The ones marked in bold here are probably the most powerful ones. All of them, notice, are external to the school. And this is what leaders and teachers focus on most. It's what you think about when you wake up in the morning. It's important to understand these, because if they're not in tune with ICT or with innovation, then nothing will happen. In the UK, for example, we find that the governors of an autonomous school, an academy, sometimes drive it towards the use if ICT and sometimes away from use of ICT. The assessment requirements are typically exams that test concepts and skills that have nothing at all to do with those that the children have learned in the context of ICT-based learning. And the quality inspection process usually does not allow for the early stages of innovation when things can go wrong, things fail. And that means that schools stop innovating if there's to be a quality inspection. So, although all of these drivers are intended to work to improve teaching, many of them are not aligned with what it takes to innovate and integrate ICT. Change also happens because teachers and leaders are unable to change. These enablers are the mechanisms that help them improve the activities they prioritize. For teachers who wish to integrate ICT, the most important ones are probably those in bold here. ICT training and development used to be thought very important, but as we saw in the EU Schoolnet Survey, most teachers are now becoming much more confident in their digital skills anyway. It's teaching with ICT they need help with. And that means help with information and guidance about the latest new technology and what it can do, and support for new kinds of learning design and lesson plans that take advantage of those new technologies. And more important than training courses, are communities of professional practice. This is because the technology has changed so fast. A training course is good for basics, but not for the latest interesting tools and resources. For that you need a dynamic community to help you keep up, enabling you to exchange practice and ideas with other teachers. The drivers of primary education are much stronger than the enablers. But if teachers and leaders can work together, it's still possible to innovate. In all the innovative schools we surveyed, it was clear that the innovation was driven primarily by the enthusiasm and committment of the teachers and leaders in those schools, despite the lack of funding. So, to take just one aspect of the overall systemic picture of how innovation happens within a school, let's follow through what the surveys say about how we should support the innovative teachers. Well, they say the same thing. The EU Schoolnet survey concludes that implementing a vision and strategies to support ICT use in teaching in learning requires adapting teaching approaches. A challenge that can be usefully supported by specific strategies at the whole school level to allow teachers to cooperate and or have the time planned for it. The same point is made in our UNESCO IITE survey which concluded, one of the distinctive features of all these schools is the emphasis on collaboration between the teachers. Recognizing that the very difficult task of working out how best used technology in the primary school is more manageable if they do it together. So to summarize, for ICT to become effective, we must move away from teachers only doing their own lesson planning and design and towards teachers sharing and reusing each other's great ideas about how to use ICT. And more than anything, we can't leave it all to the teachers to do in their spare time, which is what the Schoolnet survey suggests exactly what's happening, but that's not possible. [BLANK_AUDIO] So what do we do? Shifting back to the system level, let's consider how a national approach could plan a rolling program of change and innovation. This is a way of building on the fact that there is innovation already going on in primary schools, due to the enthusiasm and commitment and the digital skills of the teachers themselves. The problem is that the innovation is scattered and it doesn't necessarily migrate to other teachers and schools. So let's look at this rolling program. In Phase 1, the ministry of education identifies the schools and teachers that are already the leading innovators and supports them in sharing their promising practices with other schools ready and willing to make the change. They're identified as leading adopters who also receive funding to commission help from the leading innovators. In this way they can exchange policies, approaches and learning designs to spread the innovations wider. In Phase 2, we now have more schools able to act as innovation leaders and more schools ready to lead act as leading adopters. Therefore spreading the innovation wider. By Phase 3, we have nearly half the schools generating innovations in ICT and nearly half adopting those ideas from betting into their own practice. Those left will be the most challenging schools which will probably need additional support from the government. And by phase four, we're in the sustainable stable state. All the primary schools are now involved. Each one leading innovation in some areas of ICT and each one adopting from other schools in those areas where they cannot also lead. And in this way, the knowledge, ideas, mechanisms and learning designs are shared across the whole system. It becomes a learning system which means it's now able as a system to adapt to the continually changing technologies because schools and teachers are working together to learn and share their discoveries of how to integrate ICT. So that could be a four to five year program of change and innovation. Of course the same approach could be used not just for ICT integration, but for all kinds of innovations in primary schools where the teachers' good ideas tend to remain local and often unrecognized. With ICT to be integrated effectively across the school system, we need an approach of this kind for all schools and teachers to be able to learn from each other. But we have to remember that all this takes time. Teachers cannot do this alongside normal teaching job. It's the role of the national government to make sure that every school has sufficient funding to give their teachers the time to innovate, and that's the final message of this activity.
