Creative ICT
Putting
the creative use of technology at the heart of the curriculum
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News
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What have Darth
Vader, Obiwan Kenobi, X-wing fighters and Luke Skywalker got
to do with cutting-edge teaching and learning in the 21st century
classroom?
"When people talk to me about the digital divide,
I think of it not being so much about who has access to what
technology as who knows how to create and express themselves in
this new language of the screen. If students aren’t taught the language
of sound and images, shouldn’t they be considered as illiterate
as if they left college without being able to read or write?"
George Lucas (Star Wars) Talk to most
people in their early forties and they can tell you about the
tremendous visual impact that Star Wars had when they watched
it in the cinema. Twenty eight years later few people realize how
committed George Lucas is to educate children in the power of the
media of sound and image. He has set up the George Lucas Educational Foundation
(GLEF) to foster his ideas, spread best-practice
and de-mystify the use of digital technology in school.
Huge progress
has been made in most English and Welsh primary schools in the
delivery of the QCA scheme of work for ICT. However, much work
remains to be done in the area of cross-curricular opportunities for
ICT; and there is very little recognition of the need to consider the
implications of educating children in George Lucas’s language of sound
and image. However, the development of mass-market consumer digital technology
gives schools the ideal opportunity to work with the media that
George Lucas espouses without needing to go cap-in-hand to the bank-manager.
Indeed, much of the software that we need to exploit these tools is
actually free (Apple Istudio, Microsoft Moviemaker and Producer, Audacity
etc…)!
All of us who
have taught lessons on reading webpages will recognize the difficulty
teachers have in giving children the discrimination skills necessary
to filter the information they receive. The few teachers that
are blazing the multimedia trail with their camcorders will also
understand the huge conceptual leap that children have to make
from being the passive receiver of the multimedia image (on web
or TV) to being the creator of that image.
George Lucas’s
vision of an education system that teaches children in the language
and skills needed to get on in a multimedia world may not be here
today, but we’re working on it...
John
SuttonIn England
and Wales, we do have an organization that is encouraging schools to pick
up their camcorders, digital voice recorders and Ipods and create; it’s called
the DfES!
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