ICT and workforce development
Findings from qualitative research
The workforce development theme of ICT Test Bed is concerned with changes in the working practices of teachers, managers and support staff which may result from the use of ICT. Matters of particular interest to policy makers are the potential for ICT to:
- reduce teachers' workloads by giving teachers laptops, providing good technical support and simplifying administrative tasks
- introduce new equipment and software that will make it easier for teachers to share resources with each other as well as re-using them on future occasions, perhaps after some small revisions
- enable staff to work more flexibly, assisting one another and sharing tasks between them rather than keeping their roles strongly demarcated
- increase the efficiency of record keeping and retrieval and thereby give individual children a better service.
A range of work has been carried out during the first two years of ICT Test Bed to carry this theme forward. In this report we focus on these areas of policy interest. The final section, which reports on the impact of giving laptops to support staff, indicates that some ICT Test Bed schools are at the forefront in exploring possibilities to implement policy aspirations (see PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2004).
Reducing teachers' workloads
The use of ICT to reduce teaches' workloads is still a developing area of ICT Test Bed work, partly because all participants wanted to focus first on teaching and learning, but largely because many of these gains depend on the installation of complex networked software such as management information systems with enhanced functionality. We report here on some examples of good practice which suggest very positive gains are likely to be achieved in the next two years.
All teachers in one cluster and many in other clusters have been given either a workstation or a laptop for their own personal use. This has greatly assisted with lesson preparation and eased administrative tasks. Many schools have also given teachers 'memory sticks' (sometimes called 'thumb drives') and these are highly valued because they enable files to be transferred easily between home and school.
Good technical support has proved to be essential since, without it, teachers have the worry of trying to cope with technical problems at the same time as teaching a class. Once ICT is widely used for teaching and learning, across the curriculum, every classroom becomes technology-dependent. The ICT Test Bed project has shown clearly that this makes in-house technical support essential, since where schools have to wait for technicians to come from another school or support service teaching cannot proceed as planned.
Beyond specific curriculum teaching and learning, whole-class technologies are being used for organisational, management and extra-curricular purposes. Increasingly the interactive whiteboards are used for registration and as a vehicle for inter-class communications and, through video conferencing, inter-school communications. In particular the information can be collected by the central school office and absences, and even assessment results, can be centrally collated, analysed and action taken. Efficiency gains of this kind are already in place in some of the schools. Pupils reported finding visual resources such as reminders, daily timetables and team points both helpful and an enjoyable mode of presentation. In one school senior managers reported that ICT had enabled them to put systems in place to reduce teachers' workloads, in particular lesson planning:
When we got questionnaires back there weren't hours and hours of planning. That was the first thing that surprised us. Because we have got the planning [software], it's done electronically and shared.
One secondary school has made a number of changes to staffing, designed to give teachers better support to make effective use of ICT: it has appointed a classroom technologies technician who was previously an adult trainer and relates well to teachers; it has also appointed a permanent database administrator since temporary staff could no longer cope with the work; and key staff with ICT Test Bed management responsibilities have had their non-teaching hours increased. It seems likely that the noticeable reduction in staff turnover in this school is related to these changes. A junior school has provided a range of new services direct from teachers' desktop computers, including networked photocopying facilities and a system for reporting technical faults. The latter can be accessed from a web page on the school intranet developed by the IT technician. At this school a number of staff who was classed by colleagues as 'technophobes' are reported to have left.
Development and sharing of resources for teaching
Many ICT Test Bed teachers are spending considerable amounts of time and energy on the production of resources for use with whole class technologies. This is seen as a good use of time in the short term in order to achieve long-term gains, since these materials can be stored for future use (and easy editing) or shared with colleagues, for example across a whole department.
In the study of 24 classrooms (see the section on Teaching and Learning above) the content of teacher-prepared materials for whole-class use (such as Smart Notebook materials and the use of sound and images in PowerPoint presentations) provided evidence of teachers' skills in finding, creating, putting together and manipulating web-based resources, digital and scanned images, sound etc. It was indeed often difficult to distinguish between commercial programs and those created by the teachers themselves. Given many teachers' expressed lack of knowledge and experience with ICT prior to the start of ICT Test Bed, their confidence and competence in using computers and other resources is remarkable.
It is clear that staff now need to start differentiating between what they do and do not use. This has implications for time, and is ongoing. As resources grow they will need to be annotated and some form of critical appraisal attempted. The increasing range of resources in all sectors will need careful assessment and validation, not an easy task when a resource which works well with one teacher or group of learners may not resonate with another. Nor is it easy to incorporate effective methodology with the electronic resource. Here, perhaps, is a particular role for the school subject coordinators and departmental or college ICT champions in providing critical support for their colleagues in relation to the available resources.