The paperless society may be almost upon us, but the desktop computer - despite its potential for enriching education and motivating learners - remains inferior in some respects to the humble piece of paper. You can’t stick it in your pocket for a start.
There is also a more subtle point, as Stirling Council discovered while developing its continuing professional development management information system.
“In our brochure of events and activities we list and cross-reference them according to subjects and priority areas for the authority,” says Bob McGowan, service manager for staff development.
“On paper that lets a teacher see the overall picture, then turn back and check it out in different ways - but it’s not so easy doing it on a computer.”
A sophisticated electronic system from which useful information took longer to extract than a leaflet through the letter-box would impress no one, least of all busy teachers. This is one reason, says Mr McGowan, for taking an evolutionary rather than a big-bang approach to introducing the system, allowing a generous period during which paper and electronic versions exist amicably side by side.
Another good reason is that ICT in schools is in a state of flux, and anything introduced now must be capable of being expanded, modified and enhanced in the future.
Perhaps by this time next year Stirling will be part of a national online system enabling teachers from the US or Japan to enrol on courses in Scotland. But in the meantime there remain teachers in Scottish schools who hardly ever look at a computer, but are as entitled to CPD as everyone else.
So progress with the new system, which will let teachers browse and enrol on courses - while guiding them to those that enhance their own professional profiles and address the authority’s areas of priority - is advancing with one eye on CPD and the other firmly fixed on the progress of ICT in schools.
In this there are two critical factors governing the speed of development, explains Janet Stevenson, Stirling’s education development officer with responsibility for the provision of computer and communication systems, and the training of teachers.
By the end of this year more than 50 per cent of Stirling teachers will have participated in the New Opportunities Fund training programme and here, as elsewhere, considerable input from the authority has been needed to make materials accessible and appealing to the teachers.
“The training programme tends to go well in primaries where the whole school is working together, sharing good practice. In the secondaries we organised it on a subject basis, and at first brought teachers in to our Riverside ICT learning centre. But nowadays 70 per cent of the training is school-based, and our teachers like that better,” says Janet Stevenson.
“It has gone particularly well in schools where senior management has been involved, and we now have some superb portfolios and case studies of good practice, some of which have gone to HMI to be published.”
The bare figures for uptake of training - suggesting that more than a third of teachers will remain untrained by the end of the programme - are not, she says, as worrying as they seem. Many will be teachers of subjects like business studies or computing, who did not feel the need for an introductory course, while others will be teachers approaching retirement.
At the end of the training programme there will certainly be a small, unskilled minority, but a greater concern is what to do with the majority who want to develop their skills further.
“We are looking at a variety of ways to take forward accreditation for ICT training. Synergy 2 in Glasgow in November should be useful since it’s one of the main themes of the conference.”
Regarding computer systems, Stirling secondary schools have already achieved the 2002 target ratio of 5 pupils to 1 computer, while the primaries are at 17:1 and falling rapidly.
All schools have access to the Internet and the authority’s intranet, and by early 2003 all will be fully networked and able to communicate with each other, or with schools anywhere in the world, via high bandwidth connections that support video conferencing, peer tutoring and distance learning.
A preview of what will then be possible is provided by the McLaren High cluster of rural schools, which have piloted - and presented at a recent conference - a successful peer tutoring and video conferencing project.
These developments in hardware, communications and teachers’ ICT skills open up the prospect of much CPD being provided in future in the comfort of teachers’ own homes or schools, a prospect to which Mr McGowan is very receptive.
“We are a small authority but we have been developing links with other providers, higher education institutions and other councils so that we can work to get the best quality CPD for our teachers.”
