Teachers, pedagogy and professional development - Teaching with Technologies: The Essential Guide - page 94

on situated learning in online communities of practice in her role in developing and
launching a successful and award-winning national Web 2.0 environment for local
government in the UK (see also Chapter 10). She used Rogers' diffusion of innovation
theory to develop the user base progressively and found that two types of online com-
munity developed quickly. Each was driven by particular user needs in the particular
community of practice.
One type of community was driven by national policy officers to meet national
policy goals and provided an example of social constructivist learning theories in
practice - this means there is a more experienced leader, and others learn from being
within a zone of proximal development - that is, being able to learn from a leader
with more knowledge. A second major type of community was found to be of an
entirely different nature. This community was self-forming. It consisted of groups
with similar responsibilities who, in order to show they were using national resources
effectively wished to share their ideas and to develop and then benchmark practice
against others with similar responsibilities. This way of working provides an example
of Leask and Younie's (2001) communal constructivist theory in action with a group
of experts coming together to work collectively on shared problems to generate new
knowledge. In order to justify ongoing expenditure on the online environment the
savings to local authorities of both ways of working were measured to identify finan-
cial benefits.
Facilitating change: teacher ownership of technology
One answer to the question of how to embed sustained technology change with
teachers is through providing them with their own mobile technology. Research
on 'laptops for teachers' proved to be very successful, demonstrating significantly
improved teacher competence (Becta 1998; Stager 1995; Selinger 1996). Becta's 'Mul-
timedia Portables for Teachers' project reported by Youngman and Harrison (1998)
found the degree of computer literacy of many teachers increased to the extent that
even relatively inexperienced teachers were quickly able to use their computer to
evaluate software packages and select information to better suit their own curricu-
lum purposes. Teachers' confidence and skills improved and teachers reported their
knowledge had grown 'substantially'.
Specifically, the project identified four success factors: training, personal owner-
ship, portability (between work and home) and technical support (combination of
formal and informal). The findings of this national research were also strongly sup-
ported by the evaluation of local and regional schemes (Loveless and Stevens 2002).
Overall, the research projects found that providing laptops for teachers led to a sig-
nificant enhancement of technology use.
To summarize then: the key factors supporting and hindering teachers' use
of technology are multiple and interrelated. The research into teachers' use of
technology identified the barriers teachers face, the factors involved in support-
ing technology use and the stages that teachers ascend when learning to use
technology for professional purposes. Barriers included: lack of access to technol-
ogy, lack of technical support and lack of appropriate technology training. The