Role of the Teacher in ICT Integration

In Steve Wheeler speech to the National Czech Teachers Conference, he outlined some of the benefits that ICT can bring to the classroom.  These included shared learning spaces, shared learning resources, the promotion of collaborative learning, and the move towards autonomous learning.

He indicated that in the UK the government spent large sums of money to encourage schools to embrace ICT; this involved spending on physical resources and equipment and importantly, on teacher training.  In the US investments were made in centralized systems that could broadcast information to a network of schools simultaneously.  This allowed for a lot of autonomous learning by students in which they prepared projects without significant teacher involvement apart from general guidance.  In Minneapolis, 90 students became aware of any-time-anywhere-learning after they were loaned laptops and encouraged to do a lot of personal, unscheduled work/studies.

These research findings raised concerns about the role teachers will play in the ICT integrated classroom; concerns about how much control teachers lose to both the technology and to the students.  In fact, the research even led some to question the very need for teachers in light of ICT and concepts like collaborative and autonomous learning among students.


I believe that a certain level of autonomous learning is good. It helps the students to focus on the things that most spark their imagination. However, core curriculum is still going to be critical. Therefore, a lot of guidance is still going to be needed in order to achieve certain goals. While some may be concerned about teachers becoming more of a moderator than a director, this may not be a well founded fear. Remember, autonomous learning does not prevent the instructor from participating. The teacher can facilitate a certain amount of learning this way by providing a framework of content that needs to be learnt and then give the students a certain level of independence in how they go about examining, learning and demonstrating understanding of the content. Throughout this process, the teacher is still questioning, challenging, explaining - teaching. The key is in deciding how to aptly structure such activities to ensure this all takes place and that enough supervision and guidance is achieved.