Monday, March 15, 2010

Comments on the main areas of research on and with ITE

My opinion on main areas of research on and with ITE:

== How to narrow the gap between the theory and real practice in ITE? ==

I have been studied in Hong Kong from kindergarten to master's degree level. After I graduated, I have been working on tertiary education in Hong Kong for about two years. I observed Information Technology was introduced to the classroom since in the middle 90s. Here are the comments I would like to summarize on the main areas of research on ITE, particular in public school system in Hong Kong.

According to my observation, the government invested lots of money on IT hardware. Nowadays, every classroom in public school should have installed a computer with broadband connection linked with an overhead screen projector and a speaker. For software, the government also encourage teachers to learn Information Technology. However, for most of the hardware installed, the utilization is very low.

In public schools, except computer related subjects, Information Technology is seldom used to present the course materials. Although many cutting-edges and effective Web 2.0 teaching tools are evolved, most of the teachers still stick to the PowerPoint presentation, which is proved not attractive enough for students in a classroom.

I feel there exists a big gap between the theory of ITE and the education in my real life. Some teachers are keen on introducing new IT to their classrooms, but there exists lots of resistance, including lacking IT support, lacking funds to buy software which are effective for teaching and lacking time to prepare new teaching materials. I think exploring the way to narrow the gap is one of the future direction. For example, how government policy can be proposed to leverage the gap between the theory and the real practice? How to encourage teachers to prepare Web 2.0 teaching materials and bring them in their classrooms? How to let students to adapt to the new mode of teaching and learning?

1 comment:

  1. Just a little opinion..

    I think the problem is there are some few people know what is exact meaning of "ICT in Education". Even government, they just think that using techonology in the processing of teaching is enough, however, definitely not! As a result, they just know to input resources because they think if schools have resources, ICT in education can be reach! The main problem is...the concept of "ICT in Educaton" is wrong.!

    What is needed are ICT-based pedagogy! If a school is well-equipped with latest hardward and software, but teacher just use Word, PPT, Excel or web. That is meaningless! Policy needs to be changed! I think the first thing should do is ..highly focus in ICT-pedagogy. Try to put it as important as it can. Put it as a major subjects in all PDGE! Even non-IT teacher...then, combining with Government resources, situation maybe better

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