What ICT means to me

As an avid user of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in my teaching and learning, I hold the view that developing ICT skills our in students and educators is vital, and must be a strong focus for contemporary teaching and learning.

As it stands, I believe that the current Australian educational system is failing our students. An example of this is the Stage 5 cohort at our school, where after surveying students, I learnt that not only are students incapable of utilising ICT effectively for learning, but they have little interest in technology as a whole, seeing little relevance to its use as a tool for learning and development. Of course, this is not every student, however, it is still disconcerting to me as an educator. The result of this is that we are going to have a generation of students (those after DER/before BYOD), who are going to lack the basic ICT skills required to gain viable employment, and miss out on exciting opportunities that being ICT skilled can provide in the future.

In my role as the e-Learning Coordinator, I work across multiple schools in the region to support and inspire ICT use in pedagogy. I work with students, teachers and across the community to ensure that people have access to quality ICT training which allows them to become productive members of our community. In collaboration with my team, we aim to develop programs that are relevant, and linked to real-life scenarios and engaging to my students. Throughout my experience, I have found that no one size fits all.

Different contexts will have different needs, and ICT training and development must differentiate for this. The teachers I work with are at completely different scales of ICT knowledge and integration, and I work with a lot of teachers. While some are still at the basics of cloud storage using Google Drive, or Microsoft OneDrive, others are able to code and develop sophisticated websites for their classes. Each educator I collaborate with has different requests, and many wonder how they can actually learn all they need to use ICT successfully in their classrooms.

We are living in an ever-changing world, one where technology changes rapidly, expanding in ways inconceivable before, and therefore need to take the leap into joining our students in developing our ICT proficiency, not just as teachers, but as learners ourselves, no matter how difficult that leap may be.

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