What is Four in Balance? - PDST

2 - Benefits of using ICTThe education sector has not concerned itself with this problem in anyconsistent manner. It is wrongly assumed that youngsters are so handywith computers that schools do not need to teach them how to search forand select information on the Internet. By way of illustration: a recentstudy has shown that only one out of five primary and secondary schoolteachers gives frequent or very frequent lessons on using Internet sourcesselectively (Van Gennip, 2011a; 2011b).That means that pupils’ digital literacy currently depends mainly on thesituation at home and what their school happens to teach them. Unlikemost of the other European Union Member States (Eurydice, 2011), theNetherlands has not defined learning objectives for the digital skills thatyoung people need to survive in the twenty-first century.Studies are making it increasingly clear, however, that many pupils areincapable of using the Internet effectively as a learning resource (OECD,2010a; Walraven, 2011). In other words, we tend to overestimate pupils’computer skills (Kanters, 2009). Although many pupils have mastered anumber of ICT skills, that does not mean that they are capable of using ICTto learn or of using it responsibly, critically, and creatively.2.6 Learning to learn“Learning to learn” covers various teaching methods that focus primarilyon the pupil’s learning process and his or her awareness of that process.The content is subordinate to the process. There is some overlap betweenlearning to learn and inquiry-based learning.We still know too little about the added value of applications that supportthis type of learning. Schools are experimenting with ICT in this respect,but the working methods are still too open-ended to study their effects.29