Why teachers use or not use ICT in class

There is no LOTE specific classroom available in my placement school although the LOTE faculty is quite big. Four LOTE language courses (Chinese, French, Greek and Italian) up to VCE level are provided with 12 teachers. I have tried to observe as much of these classes as possible and find the use of ICT is various.

First of all, not all of the classrooms are equipped the hardware which teachers may need to teach LOTE. Some classrooms have a TV and DVD player, some have computers, some have one computer and a CD player and some have almost nothing. (The most lucky LOTE class was the one using the ART classroom where is placed with enough PCs, digital TV, two big long white board and spacious room so is able to run role-play, problem-solving or situational activities) It is obvious that teachers in that school need to adjust their way of teaching according to their environment or……..make good relationship with their colleagues so they can swap classrooms when they need.

Secondly, the factors that which day or which period the classes are also influence teachers’ willingness of using ICT. Many teachers prefer to teach vocabulary or sentence structure in the morning with the traditional teacher-centered way and then introduce computer-based tasks as practice in the afternoon class.

Moreover, the beginning teachers tend to use more ICT in class if they are convinced that students will be more engaged while experienced teachers are more confident to engage students without any external assistance. Some of the experienced teachers even informally compliant that log-in takes too much class time. They also believe that computer-based projects just simply give students chances to browse irrelevant websites because the teacher cannot monitor all of the students’ computer activities at the same time.

One of the observed teachers says he uses ICT in his Humanities class but not in his ESL class because the VCE examination is paper-based. It sounds convinced but is still a bit doubtful after a second thought- does the VCE examination result account for the only meaning of language education in school?

A comment from the school Learning Technology leader is very suitable to be used to conclude this jotting: “Using ICT is mainly about attitude but not skills. If the teacher believes it will benefit students’ learning, she/he will manage to make it.”