ICT - a tool for teachers?

With the school I am on placment on, ICT is very much a tool for teachers. I ve have found that it helps them with their planning, all of which is done on computer and emailed to the head teacher and any LSA's on a weekly basis. I also provides a wealth of resources for teachers in the form of internet sites, online games/programmes, software that the school owns and additionally that found on the IWB's. I have also found that the majority of staff at my school keep online records using a traffic lighting system with assessment for learning in mind. This I have found very useful and is something I will certainly be using in my future teaching.

Nevertheless, I have also discovered that using the ICT at my school can be quite time consuming and have its constraints. In terms of preparation, the length of time it takes to organise a resource very much depends on the experience of the user - in my case, it took me three times as long to sort something than my CTM simply because I am unfamiliar with the software and resources available. Additionally, I observed that when using a class of PC's with the children, you had to shave off a good 15 minutes of the lesson just to set them up and log them off because the children took so long to get organised - this left a 50 minute lesson a bit short in some cases! I also became aware that the ICT could also become a distraction for teachers too. In an entirely wireless school, it is possibe for members of staff to log on to the internet anywhere, and this means teachers need to be really disciplined during PPA time, before and after school, to get productive planning done... it is so easy to search for something relevant to a lesson and get completely sidetracked on the internet!!!!


One further point that I feel necessary to mention is regarding the benefits of having a filtered internet/intranet system in school. Yes, it is superb for the children when they have free internet access, but sometimes it can be so frustrating when researching/planning lessons. I taught a series of lessons on adverts in english and had soooo much trouble accessinf them online in school due to the filter, that eventually I gave up and downloaded them at home.