Teaching and Learning with ICT                                  Teaching about or teaching through ICT       
The first issue relates to what Selinger (2002) has called the tension between teaching about ICT and teaching through ICT. Many of the papers illustrate the importance of changing the classroom context as a pre-requisite to enhanced ICT use. This is seen as particularly important if greater collaborative work is to be fostered. However, as Jayne Prior and Celia Tidmarsh have shown such changes of themselves are not enough to bring about the desired interactions. They point to the fact that the teacher needs to plan the collaboration carefully in a way that takes into account the varying levels of ICT competence and confidence displayed by the students. If not then there may be a disjunction between what the learner is attending to and the learning itself, which can result in confused subject understanding and task frustration. If the ultimate goal is to make the application a tool that can support and enhance learning then students have to be enabled to make the tool work for them (Selinger, 2002). However, teachers need to be aware of cognitive overload where, according to Chandler (1995), repetitive visual text and accompanying auditory support might impose an extraneous cognitive load on working memory-as it did in the vignette described by Prior and Tidmarsh. The dangers highlighted by the authors also mirror those of Hoyles et al (1994) who argue that collaborative work around ICT needs careful preparation and skilled support. Most importantly, tasks need to lend themselves to group work and the software should be appropriate and the hardware sufficient for the task. Steve Godwin’s portrait of the use of Omnigraph within a series of four lessons on the properties of quadratic equations highlights the importance of the above point. His description of the teacher ‘scaffolding the task’ with support materials that focus on the process of exploration, emphasises the salience of ‘a framework of structured independence together with pupil autonomy’ (Hoyles et al., 1994, p. 214). He comments: These experiments were scaffolded by the teacher who designed the tasks so that the students were directed to experiment with certain parts of the equation. This helps and enables the students to keep all the variables that make a quadratic fixed apart from one, and thus more clearly see its effect in the representation. If the students were given free reign it might make it far more difficult to see the effects of the individual parts since the changing the variables together might mask each other’s effects. The structuring of the experimentation by the teacher helps to address the problem that Goldenburg talked about with respect to the fact that he felt that students found it difficult to perform meaningful experiments.               There is always the danger that the software may allow a lot of random playing without thought or reflection but by structuring the play and providing tasks for the students their learning can be directed. Both Rosamund Sutherland et al’s and Marina Gall’s presentations point in similar directions although they extend the concept of scaffolding to include the use of extensive modelling – both stylistic and substantive - by the teacher, and the subsequent need to reinforce concepts and practices through metaphor, allusion and exemplar. The most important aspect appearing to influence the learning of the pupils, however, is the way in which the teacher structured the activities and paid attention to the detail of how these were presented at the outset. Lesson 5 is particularly illustrative. Here a stand in teacher brought a new pedagogical style to the class and instead of the usual careful, structured modelling, a worksheet was presented. As a result, levels of student engagement with the application were much lower than those observed in previous lessons and instead the class became obsessed with completing the sequential tasks. The outcome driven nature of the lesson combined with a lack of effective modelling showed that there is nothing inherent in a particular piece of software that will automatically drive learning. Such phenomena can lead a teacher to conclude that the technology was irrelevant, rather than encouraging reflection on whether the activity could be presented in a different way so as to make better use of the software. As the authors conclude: The way in which Pat (the usual teacher) elicited pupils’ own comments about polygons and their properties, in the whole class work, appears to be important from the point of view of engaging pupils in the mathematical work. Crucial to this whole process of teaching and learning mathematics is the making visible of developing conceptions and working with the whole class and the interactive whiteboard were an important aspect of this. Could pupils have been encouraged to ask more questions and how would this have effected their investigations and learning? This is something which can be probed in the revised design initiative. Embedded in the story of this design initiative is the way in which the teacher conjoined the technical lexis of mathematics (which underpins Cabri) with everyday language. Items with a uniquely technical meaning (usually Latinate in origin such as parallel, quadrilaterals and bisect) have a specific meaning and a number of vignettes show that understanding can be enhanced by the supportive use of appropriate metaphor and analogy. Taken further (as the presentation shows), it is at this point that the software begins to recast traditional knowledge for the purposes of creating new knowledge in the mind of the student. This creation of congruence through linguistic representation is, according to Sutherland et al., essential if software such as Cabri is to be used successfully. However, it is important to qualify this finding with the fact that a change of teacher combined with a new pedagogical style did not automatically bring with it similar linguistic-mathematical understandings. Thus showing the pervasive effect of pedagogy even within a micro-world environment. In the music initiative, inter alia, the importance of iconic representation mixed with colour likewise helped the children to develop a musical vocabulary that could be significant in the building of a solid platform for further more formal understandings. Such visual learning together with the simplicity of the software allowed the children to grasp many of the fundamentals of tone, variety and rhythm. Again this exemplar points to the need for pedagogical subtlety when using ICT in creative subjects. The teachers moved from orchestrators of the class to being managers and facilitators while simultaneously maintaining the classroom ambience and control necessary for active learning. This ‘help-line’ approach emerged as the design initiative progressed – it was not planned or factored into the lessons a priori, thus illustrating the generative nature of the project and the importance of serendipity.