“InterActive Education:teaching and learning in the information age” is the largest ICT and education research project so far in the UK. The aim of the project was to find out more about how ICT can be used most effectively to enhance teaching and learning across the curriculum with all phases from primary to post-16.

The findings of this project which has been going since 2001 are now available. No real surprises in the two key findings:

• Teachers continue to be centrally important in designing and supporting learning with ICT across the curriculum, and
• The potential of new technologies was still not being fully realised

Their findings suggest the following reasons behind this situation:

• Hardware and infrastructure are necessary but not sufficient
• Teachers lack confidence to take risks with ICT in teaching and learning
• Teachers need to understand more about how to put ICT to use in teaching and learning
• Teachers question the relevance of ICT-based learning to achieving in the current assessment regime
• The impact of out-of-school learning is underestimated

Strategies for moving ahead are suggested, including:

• building partnerships between researchers, research students and teachers;
• establishing up networks whereby teachers and researchers may work together to design and evaluate projects which use ICT as a tool for learning; and
• promoting the use of video data to facilitate analysis and reflection about teaching and learning.

There’s also a useful list of publications that have been produced as a result of the research, with abstracts or full papers available for download.

All very interesting stuff – mostly reinforces what we already know through our own research here in NZ. So… if we know this is true, what are we doing about it to change things?