Transforming education: the power of ICT policies - Commonwealth ...

Most often, a nation will combine two or more of these rationales in a mutually reinforcing ways. The important
thing is that policy-makers identify a rationale and provide a vision that will rally support, mobilize change, and
advance national goals.
Professional development
Teacher professional development and initial teacher training are an important component of ICT in education
policy. Often policies that address teacher training will do so in the context of providing teachers with the skills
needed to operate the equipment. But ICT in education policy can address much larger issues related to professional
development and do so in a broader context of educational change, as does the Knowledge Ladder and the UNESCO
ICT Standards for Teachers (UNESCO, 2008). A big challenge to developing countries that are bringing more students
into the education system is to increase the number of teachers. In many developing countries, ICT are being used
to extend access to education for teachers, particularly those in rural areas. The UNESCO ICT in Education Toolkit
Toolbox 3 provides helpful suggestions in this regard. Beyond helping to increase the number of teachers, ICT can be
used to improve teacher quality, a crucial factor in the success of high-performing education systems (Barber and
Mourshed, 2007). Consequently, ICT policies and programmes related to teacher training should be structured in a
way that connects to specifi c classroom practices or engages teachers in a community of professional practice and
ongoing development, policies that have proven to be effective in school reform (Cohen and Hill, 2001). In many
countries, ICT-related teacher training policies spell out a specifi c set of skills that teachers are to acquire, as well as
specify the duration of training (Kozma, 2010). In the early phases of ICT introduction, teachers need training in the
operation of hardware, software, and, to some extent, networking. As ICT use by teachers becomes more common,
professional development shifts to the pedagogical integration, the creation of content, and the development of
shared knowledge and practice.
Pedagogical change
An especially important component of ICT in education policies, particularly for policies that promote education
reform, is the articulation of ICT-related changes with innovative pedagogical practices. Early applications of
ICT in schools included tutorial or drill-and-practice software that focused on the memorization of facts and the
application of simple procedures, associated with traditional pedagogical models. But more advanced applications,
such as simulations, games are associated with pedagogical changes that treat the students as active agents who
are engaged in collaborative projects to solve complex, real-world problems, or sustained investigations, as in the
Knowledge Deepening approach. Or, as in the Knowledge Creation approach, they include knowledge building environments
that support student discourse and interactions that generate new ideas by building on and extending the ideas
of others (Scardamalia and Bereiter, 2006). The pedagogical role of teachers is to structure and support these
practices by providing resources and explicitly modelling cognitive and social processes and prompting students
to take up these practices (Bransford, Brown and Cocking, 2000; Blumenfeld, Kempler and Krajcik, 2006; Krajcik and
Blumenfeld, 2006).
Curricular development
In initial stages of ICT use in education, the focus has often been on the introduction of courses on ICT literacy in
the curriculum. Students learn how to operate equipment and common productivity software. But as education
systems become more experienced in the use of ICT and as it becomes more embedded in schools and classrooms,
the curricular emphasis can shift to the integration of ICT throughout the curriculum to support the learning of
school subjects, as in the Knowledge Deepening approach. The Knowledge Creation approach extends the curriculum
beyond the subject domains to include the development of other skills facilitated by the use of computers.
These can include information management skills, reasoning skills and complex problem solving skills, creativity,
communication skills, collaboration, elf-management skills, and character development. Cross-discipline project
work can be introduced into the classrooms to develop these skills and attitudes.
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