Implementing a whole-school IT policy
Planning, by Terry Freedman
Regular visitors to this website will know that I often republish articles and newsletters from way back in the past. This is not because i cannot think of anything new to say, but because I think it’s important to do my bit to ensure that the past is not lost. It’s useful to see what has been tried in the past, and whether or not it was successful. As Sean McManus said on Twitter recently:
I think he is wrong about the year 2000, but the principle is correct. Things I had published before around 1995 are nowhere to be found on the web. (Mind you, as far as some are concerned, I’m quite pleased about that. I like to think my writing has evolved over the years.)
He asked recently whether he should delete stuff he wrote 20 years ago, or archive it. I thought he should republish it, but if there is only a binary choice then archive it, definitely. I believe that is what he is going to do.
I’ve always believed in leading by example! With that in mind, here is the very first article of mine that was published in an education magazine. Not all of it is relevant today, but perhaps surprisingly much of it is. Therefore I hope you find it useful, or at least interesting. I’ve added some explanatory notes that were not required when I wrote the article, in 1989. The article was aimed at secondary school information technology co-ordinators, but many of the suggestions work in primary schools too.
Implementing A Whole-School IT Policy
IT = Information Technology. At the time this was written the official subject in England was Information Technology. It wasn’t a subject in its own right, but Target #5 in the Technology Programme of Study. The term ICT started to be used later. This stood for Information and Communication Technology in England, and Information and Communications Technology in Europe. At one point a few of us suggested that we reserve the term Information Technology for hardware and infrastructure, and ICT for the curricular aspects. Some people were using the term education technology. some were using educational technology, others were using digital literacy. Basically it was, and really still is, a mess!
You can see the topics and skills that were meant to be covered in this official document available at the time. Although there is a nod towards problem-solving, the first iteration of the IT Programme of Study was very skills-based. It was improved later. Also, as my own confidence and competence grew I drew away from the skills-based model in my own teaching, preferring a problem-solving approach in which the requisite skills would be covered automatically. As far as other subjects were concerned, I encouraged them to address the IT skills while covering their own subject matter, not to teach IT modules.
For example, I suggested that the history department could make use of a database about the assassination of JFK when that topic was being covered. The database was freeware, and I obtained it in the hope that it would be useful. It was.
Another thing I did, as time went on, was to make general announcements to the staff (in the form of a staff newsletter) stating things like:
"Year 7 students are now able to do the following things with a database: simple searches, complex searches and sorting (explaining what those terms meant, of course)."
This reassured colleagues that if they wanted to make use of the IT facilities in their teaching, they wouldn’t need to spend time teaching the kids how to use them (apart, perhaps, for the odd one or two who might have been absent for those lessons). This took an enormous weight off their minds, and had a significant impact in terms of the take-up of the use of the computers.
Note that the nomenclature changed soon after this was written. First years (secondary) became Year 7, because that was their 7th year of schooling, Second years were Year 8, and so on.
More and more LEAs (Local Education Authorities) are adopting a whole-school approach to the teaching of IT skills, whereby use of IT eventually becomes as normal a part of lessons as books are now. Whilst much has been written about the educational advantages and disadvantages of such a policy, relatively little mention has been made of the practicalities involved.
This article addresses these practical aspects, from drafting the policy to fully implementing it.
Drafting the Policy
Generally speaking, the aim of the whole-school policy will be to enrich the learning experience, and to develop competence and confidence in IT skills. For example, the guidelines issued by my LEA encompasses investigative learning, individual and group work, problem-solving, and the significance of IT in the outside world.
However, such broad aims need to be broken down into manageable segments, including staff development, delivery of IT skills, software ordering and so on. Ideally, a Working Party should be established, the individual members of which would have specific responsibility for one of these areas. In this way, balance of progress can be retained. It is important, of course, to state not only long-tern goals but short-term targets. This an aim such as "The policy will be fully implemented by 1994 needs to be supplemented by statements like “The First Years will be receiving IT training by Christmas 1989".
Staff awareness and Enthusiasm
The IT policy is intended to be delivered by ALL Departments.
It was a requirement at the time that IT had to be cross-curricular. There were even some people who advocated having no discrete IT lessons at all, but I only knew of two schools who (according to them) had succeeded in making this policy work. For IT skills to be taught solely within the context of subjects requires the senior leadership team to support the policy in more than name only. That means making time available for teachers to learn how to (a) use the technology and (b) apply it meaningfully in their lessons. The research at the time, and certainly my own experience, suggested that when teachers used IT in their lessons it was usually at one or two levels below the level of the subject in those lessons. (This was the era of Levels.) That is to say, if the geography lesson was intended to address aspects of Level 5 in the geography Programme of Study, the level of the IT in those lessons was probably around Level 4 or below — at least insofar lessons can be said to be at a “Level” at all — it was the work that was supposed to ‘levelled’, not individual lessons.
It is therefore essential at an early stage to make staff aware of the IT policy and, most importantly, its potential benefits-especially to them personally. In the current educational climate of radical change, and new initiatives appearing constantly, it is difficult, but necessary, to avoid a situation in which the IT policy is perceived only as representing yet more work. From my own experience and that of others, the best way to approach this is as follows.
First, the staff as a whole can be made aware of what software is available and what developments are going on through the media of staff meetings, bulletins and notice boards. As well as keeping staff informed of technical developments (eg "There are now three printers available on the network"), the IT co-ordinator can invite staff to, say, a lunchtime demonstration of a database program which could be used for keeping stock records.
However, as necessary as such strategies are, all they really do is to raise and maintain a kind of background awareness. In the world of business it is well-established that on average 80% of a company's revenue comes from just 20% of its customers. It is possible that a similar type of statistic obtains in the average school. Thus the second approach is similar to the first, except that it is targeted to specific groups.
The groups to target are not necessarily those who will eventually be key groups in the overall IT policy, such an the English Department. In the early stages of the implementation of the policy try to target areas of known strength. These are the people (a) who have already indicated enthusiasm for IT and (b) with whom one is friendly on a personal basis. By cultivating awareness of and enthusiasm for IT amongst such people one is likely to make more rapid progress than by adopting an apparently more straightforward approach. This is because other people tend to start to feel left out in some sense, and a kind of snowball effect is set in train.
INSET
INSET = In-Service Training
INSET courses should also be targetted at specific groups, though for different reasons, and should be more than only one-off sessions. A one hour session for the whole staff is worse than useless: the problems of dealing with a large group comprising widely different levels of ability and degree of interest are likely to result in some people being deterred from pursuing the matter any further especially in the classroom. INSET courses are likely to be successful when the following steps are taken:
· work with one Department at a time
· tailor the INSET to the Department's requirements in terms of its own aims
· if possible, work alongside members of the Department when they begin to use IT in the classroom.
· undertake a formal evaluation of the entire process agree on follow-up strategies.
The success of INSET is indicated by the realisation of its aims, and so by limiting the aims and evaluating progress success is more likely to be enjoyed.
Co-ordination of Departments’ Work
The work of Departments must be co-ordinated in order to ensure:
· consistency across Year groups and
· progression between Year groups.
In the initial phase one may construct a grid to show which Departments are intending to deliver which skills to which pupil groups. It is not unusual to obtain the kind of result shown in Figure 1.
I’m afraid that I don’t have the original published article containing these illustrations, which have disappeared during the course of the last 30 odd years. I have reproduced them to the best of my memory, but I haven't completed all the slots. You get the idea.
IT Policy Fig 1, by Terry Freedman
Then it is a matter of targetting one or two pupil groups and negotiating with Departments. In the example shown in Fig.1 the strongest areas are the First and Second Years, while the weakest are the 3rd and Fourth Years.
For instance, the History and Geography Departments need to be given the opportunity to discuss the database work they are doing with the 2nd Years, so as to avoid either repetition or some groups slipping through the net and not being taught databases at all.
Looking at the grid from another angle, we see that wordprocessing is not taught at all in Years 3, 4 or 5. Thus at least one Department needs to be encouraged to provide wordprocessing-based work in those Years if the skills gained in the First Year are not to be lost.
Profiling Implications
Many of the IT skills can be broken down into very specific assessment criteria, as shown in Fig.2. Problems arise, however, in separating IT skills from subject skills. For example, a pupil may know how to set about solving a history problem, but may not possess the technical skills required to use the database to do so.
IT Policy Fig 2, by Terry Freedman. The criteria are taken from the curriculum document referred to earlier.
Other problems include the difficulty in assessing an individual's progress where group work is concerned, and finding the time to evaluate a pupil's progress in situ. In the initial stages at least, one may have to resort to accepting hard copy as evidence of skills attained, and obviously this is by no means ideal. Nevertheless, assessment is an integral part of any educational strategy. and even a simple checklist-based approach such as the one shown in Fig.2 is likely to prove useful despite its limitations.
Central Ordering
Co-ordination of the IT policy ought ideally to encompass the ordering of items like paper and software. This is both more economical than leaving it to individual Departments (since it avoids unnecessary duplication of resources) and also in itself encourages Inter-departmental co-operation, as it necessitates discussion about, say, which software in likely to be used by more than one Department and so on. Furthermore, a logical outcome from an administrative point of view is for the IT policy to be treated as another department for the purposes of capitation. The funding which results from this is therefore known in advance and planned expenditure can be undertaken. This is a vast improvement on the situation experienced all too often wherein funds for IT-related items, eg printer leads, have to begged, borrowed and stolen on an ad hoc basis.
Getting the Pupils Involved
In my experience the problem is not so much getting the pupils involved but encouraging them to spend LESS time on the computers. It is very easy for pupils to feel that they need to complete every task on the computer. I now make it a rule in my lessons that the computers cannot be used at all for wordprocessing, databases or spreadsheets until they have planned their work on paper first. This ensures that the work they do at the computer station is as productive as possible, and also helps to prevent frustration arising from pupils having to wait to use a computer which is being used by someone who is taking ages to complete a task simply because they haven't thought it through properly in advance.
Conclusion
A gargantuan tank like co-ordinating a whole-school IT policy needs to be planned adequately before any "practical work is done. Very importantly, while the overall scheme must of necessity be rather ambitious, a realistic approach to its individual components entails recognition of the fact that progress is bound to be piecemeal and, at tires, frustratingly slow. Nevertheless, it is exciting and gratifying to observe the growth of staff competence, confidence and commitment as the policy begins to take off.
Terry Freedman
August 1989
