Integrating technology in classrooms: from the microcomputer to ‘the cloud’ - Teaching with Technologies: The Essential Guide - page 5

careers and their experiences with technology, despite shifting contexts and techno-
logical changes.
There was also a time lag between advances in technology and their adoption in
schools. It must be stressed that at each stage of progression, the changes were driven
by Research and Development (R and D) in industry (Selwyn 1998) and the military
(Millwood 2009) rather than in response to pedagogical demands from educators.
Teachers were left to adapt these technological advances for school and classroom
purposes: 'this deprived participants and education at large, of a coherent narrative of
what computers in education was all about' (Hammond et al. 2009: 57).
Historically, the first phase from the 1960s up until the end of the 1970s can be
identified with the introduction of mainframe computers, which were chiefly used in
industry or in a higher-education context and led to widespread need for program-
ming skills. Teacher trainers involved in these developments straddled the univer-
sity and school environments and were fundamental in helping industry produce
teacher-friendly resources; this was achieved through writing specific programmes
for use in the classroom. There was a close working relationship between technol-
ogy developers and educationalists at this time, and small-scale collaborative projects
were characteristic of this era.
A second phase can be identified with the introduction of the micro-computer
into schools from the early 1980s until the end of that decade. Typically a pupil
would access information in a library and printed encyclopedias, but this changed
in the late 1980s to the use of CD-ROMs. A further phase was detected by Ham-
mond et al. (2009) with the introduction of a graphical user interface (GUI) in 1991,
which practitioners saw as an important shift in the move to personal computers in
schools and commercial software. Then, from the mid to late 1990s, a more advanced
phase can be identified with the introduction of the Internet and the rise of school
networks. For the first time, teachers had access to suites of connected computers
and pupils could access information through search engines with Web 1 technology.
Then, by 2005 Web 2.0 tools and Wikipedia heralded the rise of collaborative, peer-
to-peer knowledge building. More recent developments can be seen in the use of
wireless hand-held devices, which offer greater portability and potential for personal-
ized learning, alongside the move to greater social and professional networking for
information sharing and the use of 'the cloud' for storage of data.
In outlining phases of developments in this way, it must be acknowledged that
this history of technology requires further analysis of a critical political nature,
because the new ways of working made possible by using technology brought con-
comitant developments in education policy and pedagogical thinking.
Phases of hardware: introducing the micro-computer into schools - 1980s
In 1981 the newly appointed Conservative Minister for Information Technology,
Kenneth Baker, launched the 'Micros in Schools' scheme, which placed an emphasis
on the vocational aspect of technology (Dawes 2001). 'I want to ensure that the kids
of today are trained with the skills that gave their fathers and grandfathers jobs . . .
And that is the reason why we've pushed ahead with computers in schools. I want