While reading chapter 38 in Handbook of Research on New Literacies, I came across the acronym ICT. I consider myself "tech savy" and thought that I was literate in the new terminology. After all, I am on facebook. However, this was the first time I'd seen this acronym. Even though the author defined the term, I felt obliged to research it on the internet. Which was ironic since the internet is probably the most used information and communication technology (ICT).
The purpose of this study was to explore how 13 teachers used the internet in their classroom to enhance literacy. This article was written in 2001, not that many years ago, and technology was not used as a major literacy tool. What's weird is that I couldn't imagine my day without the use of technology, only 9 years later. So, how could I expect my students to go an hour without it. What this article has taught me as a researcher is that the theoretical framework of your research article may change just as rapidly as the world changes.
While I understand that researchers need to not only answer the unanswered but also answer the unasked, it makes me nervous to think of the responsibility that holds. I have to learn more about the metacognition needed to conduct an effective research study. For when I perfect that, I will be on my way to writing landmark research articles also.
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WOW!! Andrea. It seems like you are making some great connections about the research process. After reading the above mentioned article I too felt the need to research the term. This was also my first time reading it and I wanted to know as much about as I could. Like you I thought it was ironic that the Internet is one of the major ICT and it's what I used to learn about the term.
ReplyDeleteAfter I had a better understanding of the term, I looked at several ways of incorporating it into the classroom. Thankfully there are so many resources for teachers to refer to. If you're looking for a site that explains how to incorporate ICT into your classroom then i would look at http://www.det.wa.edu.au/education/cmis/
eval/curriculum/ict/. This site talked about every aspect of incorporating ICT into every curriculum.
The site first talked about how to use communication tools in the class. These were things like blogs, chat rooms, email, interactive whiteboards, podcast, social bookmarking, videoconference, and wikis. The site also discussed student safety which is always important. It talked about developing a school policy, establishing student responsibility, protecting student privacy, safe surfing strategies, cyber bullying, and school content filtering. The last thing that I found to be most useful was the information about using online information. It talked about copyrights, evaluating websites, plagiarism, and Wikipedia.
The site talked about several other issues and concerns but you can look at them when you have some extra time. I focused on the big ones for you. There were also several other sites that I found helpful but I feel that the one I was talking about offered the most information in one place, which made it easier to find.