The differences between home and school use of ICT

Despite the promotion of the ICT use, school is often creating limits and restrictions about it. Slow access, filtering system, boring ICT based assignments and teacher’s lack of technology skills are just some of the barriers that hinder the student's work. Students nowadays poses extensive internet skills, they come to school with expectations, experiences and skills that many times are not recognised in the classroom.

The digital disconnect

Inside Pew Internet & American Life Project there has been made a study Widening gap between internetsavvy students and their schools, 2002 in which the authors Douglas Levin and Sousan Arafeh named mismatch between home and school use of ICT as “The digital disconnect”.

“Many schools and teachers have not yet recognized—much less responded to—the new ways students communicate and access information over the Internet. (Levin and Arafeh, 2002).

Teacher policies about internet use are many times completely different to the student’s home-use of internet. Nevertheless, I am sure the biggest part of ICT use (for educational or non-educational purposes) is still taking place at home. Which side should therefore adapt? Well, maybe we can find the middle way. As the study reports students want better coordination of their out-of-school educational use of the Internet with classroom activities. They argue that this could be the key to leveraging the power of the Internet for learning. For this purpose, teachers should be equipped with a sufficient amount of knowledge on the use of ICT and that primarily we should give lessons about the use of ICT to teachers. Only with that, we can assure high-quality online information for students to complete school assignments, information which will be placed in the direction of healthy use of the Internet. Of course, assignments have to be set engaging as well. Use of the Internet contains many pitfalls; students can quickly lose focus and the red thread if assignment does not draw them.  

What is your favourite thing you do with technology at home?
(http://milesberry.net/2009/01/informal-learning-wordles/, 20.2.2017)

Levin, D. and Arafeh, S. (2002). The digital disconnect: The widening gap between internetsavvy students and their schools. Retrieved from http://immagic.com/eLibrary/ARCHIVES/GENERAL/PEW/P020814.pdf.