Nm Breeze

Transforming teaching and learning: embedding ICT into everyday classroom practices

Drawing on socio-cultural theory, this paper describes how teams of teachers and researchers have developed ways of embedding information and communications technology (ICT) into everyday classroom practices to enhance learning. The focus is on teaching and learning across a range of subjects: English, history, geography, mathematics, modern foreign languages, music and science. The influence of young peoples out-of-school uses of ICT on in-school learning is discussed. The creative tension between idiosyncratic and institutional knowledge construction is emphasised and we argue that this is exacerbated by the use of ICT in the classroom.

The Sub-Culture of Music and ICT in the Classroom.

In this paper the authors utilise findings from the Economic and Social Research Council‐funded InterActive Education project to present a characterisation of the sub‐culture of school music with Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in England. They consider the opportunities and challenges ICT presents to the teaching of primary (ages 4–11) and secondary (ages 11–18) classroom music through an investigation of the perceptions, personal philosophies and pedagogical styles of seven teachers with whom they worked over a period of three years. Their work is underpinned by Goodson and Mangan’s definition of subject sub‐culture and they draw on Shulman’s notion of ‘knowledge bases’ in order to categorise and discuss the data. Through the identification and elaboration of key themes, the authors provide a snapshot of the emerging sub‐culture of music and ICT in schools.

Multimodality: an Illuminating Approach to Unravelling the Complexities of Composing with ICT?

Having previously been employed to investigate science and English classrooms and listening in the music classroom, theories of multimodality would appear to have much to contribute to an examination of group composing using Information and Communications Technology (ICT), owing to the multimodal nature of music software and group discourse. This article reports on a PhD study in which a multimodal perspective was used as a prism with which to investigate pupil composing with computers in the classroom. Utilising a mixed-methods approach, which included video, a specially developed computer-based tool was used to categorise and thematically link the data. A key finding was that the multimodal theoretical perspective enabled various diverse aspects of the music classroom to be revealed and investigated in detail, some of which have hitherto remained largely unexplored. These included the use of classroom space, group collaboration and appraisal of pupils’ composing processes and enabled an in-depth consideration of effective learning designs to be made.