What is Four in Balance? - PDST

• ICT can be conducive to knowledge transfer, as many examples show.The various applications share a number of features: they do notfundamentally alter teaching, for example, and are relatively lowthreshold. For example, ICT adds something (such as visual material)or replaces part of the lesson (the practice worksheet). Even so, suchapplications often take more time and energy than teachers may atfirst expect, especially if the computer takes over part of the teachingprocess (as in the case of a practice program).• In terms of knowledge construction, ICT is still largely unexploredterritory and its added value is more difficult to demonstrate.Designers are wrestling with such questions as: how much structureand guidance should an environment give pupils, and how can teacherscontrol a learning process that takes place on a computer or network?When ICT was first introduced in education, the suggestion was made thatICT might at some point even replace teachers. Research results indicatethat the opposite is true. The more powerful the ICT tool, the moreindispensable the teacher. ICT creates a new relationship between pupils,subject matter, and teachers, forcing us to examine the balance betweenthe work that the pupil does on his own, how much the software controlsthat work, and how much the teacher controls the pupil’s learning process.The latter makes huge demands on teachers: they must keep a close eyeon the progress of pupils working on their own, take pupils’ differinglearning styles into account, and show pupils how the material they arestudying on the computer relates to other learning material.32