Teachers, pedagogy and professional development - Teaching with Technologies: The Essential Guide - page 104

What can technology offer? Technology can offer alternative formats and
approaches to teaching and learning that go beyond routine classroom activities. It has
the potential to change pedagogy, to transcend the instructional paradigm and move
outside a transmission model of learning. Technology can be a catalyst for changing
the roles of teachers and learners; it can be used to instigate interaction (talk), collabo-
ration (shared outcomes), higher-order skills (problem-solving) and support creativity.
Technology can support creativity in the sense of learners creating original prod-
ucts with personal meaning. What the technologies allow is the transformation of
artefacts, texts, sounds, images, which involve authenticity and control. Similarly,
shifts towards higher-order thinking can be supported by technology. For example,
computers can carry out routine procedures (datalogging), freeing up learners to focus
on higher-order skills of synthesis and analysis. Technology also has the potential to
increase interactivity between learner and technology, learner and learner, learner
and teacher, where learner-inquiry is enhanced - as envisaged in the 'conversational
framework' through multimedia software with built-in narrative structures (Lauril-
lard 1993), and dialogic learning with interactive whiteboards (Mercer et al. 2010).
Crucial to such deployment of technology is the way teachers change their roles.
Hammond et al.'s (2009) research with innovative practitioners found technology
often led teachers to re-think their roles, by freeing teachers up:

. . . it takes responsibility away from the teacher of having to keep every-
thing going. You no longer have to run round spinning plates. You can
give [learners] much more freedom knowing that their interactions with
the technology will keep them on task better, so then the job becomes, still
inspiring them . . . but having a different kind of context where you really
can teach in different ways and you really can change the roles radically of
students.

(Hammond et al. 2009: 88)

Table 5.2 Transforming pedagogy with technology

How technology affects: Potential changes include:

Teacher role - decrease in: teacher direction
and exposition, whole-class instruction

Teacher as facilitator - probe thinking, scaffold
reflection, guide to useful resources, stimulate
debate, reframe

Pupil role - change to learner centred enquiry Learner control, decision making, self-regulation

creativity - by supporting authenticity and
learner control

create products, transform artefacts - texts,
sounds, images

Interaction - by increasing dialogue, talk,
communication

Learner - technology, learner-learner, learner-
teacher

collaboration - cooperation, team work Working together on a shared product, joint

outcome

Higher-order thinking - problem solving metacognition, synthesis, analysis, evaluation