My PGDE Geography class had a presentation this wednesday from the inimitable Ollie Bray on how to ‘invigorate’ our Geography lessons through the use of IT. (Sorry you can tell my age – I still can’t completely bring myself to call it ICT … yet.) And a very fine session it was too.
Beyond all the top-tips of using the ‘geek-stuff’ (Generators, advanced Google , blogs, podcasts etc) the main tone was about how we should be teaching using the medium that kids are using in their everyday life. Kids use the web more than they watch TV, they have their phones with them all the time, they listen to MP3s/podcasts, they build their own websites and mash-ups. As teachers we should use these things - because to fail to embrace technology makes our lessons boring and makes us look like dinosaurs. All good stuff with which I completely concur, and something I will try to do in practice. (Though perhaps getting kids to text me in class won’t be something I’ll be experimenting in on my first placement!)
But here’s my comment on the hurdles of everyone gaining the IT proficiency that Ollie covered …
- … first how are teachers out there in real teacher-land to gain these IT skills? In my experience to gain IT proficiency you need confidence, and for many more to get there they need those few initial pieces of knowledge to get them ‘onto a roll’. Is there the time/support in schools for teachers to do this? I haven’t been there enough yet to know – but I suspect not. So then maybe the problem will solve itself as a new generation of IT-savy teachers join the profession. But to do this the current set of student teachers need to have, or be given more IT knowledge/confidence.
- … so my second point is – Where are the current set of student teachers getting this IT knowledge from? Ollie did a great session, but it was only 2 hours out of 18 weeks of study. Given that a level of IT is not a pre-requisite for entry to the PGDE course – should there not be time in the PGDE dedicated to giving students more IT skill as part of their ‘core skills’ for teaching?
But then maybe this is just life, the same with everything. At the end of the day we just need to get down and get on with it … but the other big message from the session is to ensure that we all share best practice in the spirit of the way that Ollie so enthusiastically demonstrated.
Posted by Andrew Duff 
The piece was on 
