Innovate with ICT: enhancing learning across the curriculum

Abstract

BarbaraHowell B.Howell@rave.ac.uk Innovate with ICT: enhancing learning across the curriculum, by Johannes Ahrenfelt and Neal Watkin, London, Continuum, 2008, 136 pp., £24.99 (paperback), Much has been written about 'digital natives' during the last decade or so. Today's students from school, college through university have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, email, the internet, video games, digital music players, mobile phones, and all the other gadgets and applications of the digital age. These 'digital natives' expect to study and work in very different ways to previous generations.When I started to read Innovate with ICT, I was not clear who the target audience was supposed to be. As I worked my way through the chapters, I suspected from the references to students preparing for GCSEs that the main beneficiaries would be secondary school teachers. If an audience of secondary school teachers exists that need to keep pace with these 'digital natives' and as the book suggests teachers have little time to explore and experiment, then Innovate with ICT provides a useful toolkit. However, one can't help thinking that although the book makes reference to some relatively new ICT concepts, a significant proportion of the content may have come a little too late.Innovate with ICT is broken down into two main parts. The first part focuses on how to use a particular tool and the second part expands on how a particular theme, for example assessment, can be enhanced through the use of a particular ICT tool.Part 1 takes gentle steps to move the reader from novice, intermediate to the more experienced ICT user. To support this transition, each of the three sections consists of a set of easily digestible bite-sized chapters, comprising a modest set of instructions to support the use of ICT applications in creative and imaginative ways. These instructions are supported by a 'learning zone' box, which provides an opportunity to extend a particular skill, 'did you know' element, to give the reader a gentle nudge to find out about a particular (potentially unknown) feature and a 'differentiation' box to provide further ideas to stretch the more able and support the weaker student.The novice section helps the reader exploit some fundamentals of Word, PowerPoint, web applications, photos, sound and the Interactive Whiteboard. The intermediate section provides sets of basic instructions to enable the use of software tools, such as Captivate and Wink, build websites, make movies, manipulate Google Earth and employ some of the more advanced features of PowerPoint. The last section in Part 1 moves the reader onto applications such as blogs, wikis, multimedia editing, podcasting, Adobe Flash and additional more sophisticated elements of the Interactive Whiteboard.Part 2 comprises five sections associated to key educational themes. For example, the first section focuses on engagement and delivery, and literacy and numeracy; the second section, assessment and homework; the third section, thinking skills,