This mountain blocks a lot Young Icelanders use multimedia making creative products outside school and ICT to communicate with the world How do schools and teachers respond? Þuríður Jóhannsdóttir Workshop in a European Grundtvig project Iceland University of Education, 14th october 2005

LearnICT research project Funded by Iclandic research council LearnICT research project Funded by Iclandic research council How is information and communication technology used outside school and in the school? Here lower secondary. An attempt to understand which consequences ICT brings into learning and teaching in schools Interviews with youngsters and their teachers in iclandic schools during 2004 and 2005 See the projects website:

Fishing villages and towns This mountain is blocks the satelite disks and disturbs the kind of TV channels we can reach

Multicultural schools Many foreigners come to work in the fishing industry Up to 30% of inhabitants in one village are foreigners Most of the foreigners have a satelite disk to reach television channels Many use Internet to communicate to their homeland

What do teenagers/pupils at home? Talk to my friends and I have a blog-site on the Internet We chat on msn, write on our blog-sites, search for photos and things like that We made a short film the other day and we are going to send it to the icelandic movie website kvikmynd.is... Look at the icelandic hobby web Tilveran.is or batman.is or something funny or the icelandic movie web The teen-agers are often responsible for websites e.g. for their sport-clubs and community center or other kind of after school activity

What do the pupils say about what they learn realted to ICT in the school? I would say that the computers in the school are comletely useless - outdated We are just doing assignments in Word and Excel. Then we might have to go to Google on the Internet and search for some person and find information about this and that. I thing that I know beforehand everything that they are teacing in the computers We can not demand that the teachers learn fast enough to be able to teach us

What do the teacher say? We direct the pupils into areas that they do not practice on their own initiative. Our pupils are said to be well prepared into the secondary school concerning ICT use. They learn to use the Office-package and how to use computers for work in general Basic competence must be tought in special lessons, otherwise there will always be the same pupils that lag behind Pupils are just using msn and word processing programs but do not know how to use other kinds of programs – we have to teach them to be competent using them

Teachers about pupil’s out-of-school use of ICT They all have blog-sites and special sites for their photos on the Internet. The boys are playing games a lot, competing, connecting their computers and playing for the whole weekends. Our pupils document everything they do out of school in photos. Two days trip and they have sent sms and photos in their mobile phones and written blog about it all and there is nothing left to tell about when arriving home. Can the school take this into account when planning the ICT curricula? How important is it? Why og why not?

Home andi in the school Teen-agers have access to better and more technical devices at home than in the school Computers, quick net-connections, digital cameras and video- cameras Programs that teen-agers use are normally free-ware that they are quick to find on the Internet and quick go learn to use They use ICT in creative way In a survey % of years old had blog-sites. In schools pupils are tought how to use the most common user-programms – most of them in the Microsoft Office package The schools aim is that pupils graduate with competence in using the ICT-tools that both secondary schools and work demand

Is this rift between in-shool and out- of-school use OK? How can and need the curricula to respond to the out-of-school use of the pupils? What can the school learn from the pupils and what can the pupils learn from the school? What kind of learning material do to days kids need – in order to be motivated and educated?

Sound – picture – text; also in icelandic Profesional guidance of specialized teachers in how to work with pictures and sound – talk and music Access, also to Icelandic cultural heritage in digital form – talk, music and visual art – pictures and movies in addition to traditional text material Tools to process and work with such material in a creative and organised way Possibility to learn more about the technology itself for interested pupils Look at ICT from young peoples perspective and see which possibilities the ICT opens up for them The school must not be like the mountain – blocing the beam from the outside world