This booklet is an open educational resource (OER) developed by a group of teacher educators to support school leaders and any resource-person that accompany staff’s Professional Learning and Development (LPD) within their institution with a view of enhancing the conditions and quality of learning in the school.
It is an adaptation of the Apréli@ booklet Piloter l’usage des TICE dans votre établissement and of the TESS-India Unit Leading the use of technology in your school, both available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence.
See the booklet : Leading the use of ICTs in your school
What this booklet is about
The purpose of this booklet is to support you in making the most of available technology in your school, even if you do not have computers. The intention is that your teacher-colleagues, with motivation and the right skills, will be able to use technology that is available.
As school leader, you do not need to be a technological expert (although you will benefit from developing basic skills), but you must provide a vision for ICT to support teaching and learning and to create the environment in which your teacher-colleagues will embrace this potential.
This unit will highlight some of the ways in which technology can support student learning and the implications for teachers. Using ICT to support learning requires new pedagogical skills from teachers: the internet provides wide and more democratic access to multiple sources of knowledge, but it is also necessary to be able to choose the relevant information and to make it appropriate to the school learning context. The teacher’s role is less to "transmit" knowledge and more to accompany learners to allow them to develop new skills to search for information, analyse it, sort it, select it, integrate it into a school task. This fundamentally changes the relationship between teacher and student. And it is not only the relationship between the teacher and the learner that is changing. Technology, be it hardware or software (programs), is also rapidly changing, and young and beginner teachers may have more skills than established teachers, and may be in a better position to keep abreast of changes. Some of your older teacher-colleagues may feel threatened; it is up to you to encourage them and create an environment where teachers learn from each other.
Note that the focus of this unit is on leading the use of technology to support learning in your school. It is not about teaching technology as a subject, nor is it about installing equipment, hoping that their mere presence will cause an educational miracle. ICTs are therefore not a magic wand, but a tool with great potential, which must be intelligently used to serve educational and sustainable development objectives.
What you will learn in this booklet
The resources, activities, pauses for thought and case studies in this booklet will help you to:
- gain insights into the range of technology that might be used in your school
- consider the creative use of ICT tools and devices in school
- consider ways in which you can use the internet to support your own learning
- support your teacher-colleagues in using the internet for their own learning and in their classrooms.
See more :
Transforming teaching-learning process
Leading teachers’ professional development
Supporting teachers to raise performance
Accompanying teachers: coaching and mentoring
Leading the use of ICTs in your school