Why is this site here? This is what I was talking about at the ICT SIG Afternoon. Because for quite some time I’ve been feeling uncomfortable with most of the ICT sessions I saw (and did!). We talk and talk about Web 2.0, how much it is about cooperation and sharing instead of lecturing and waiting for someone else to hand us ready-made solutions. And still, this is exactly the way most ICT sessions went. The presenter got on the stage, told the audience that we now live in a new world, the teacher (and the presenter) is no longer the sage on the stage but the guide on the side. And then we went on lecturing. We showed the audience sites we thought useful and explained how to use them – without actually knowing their needs, their teaching situations, their students. Yes, you can say that there are a lot of useful sites that everybody can use. You can say that even if you know that it’s not true. And why, oh why keep talking about a single site for any longer than one minute? Can the teachers not go to the site themselves at home and see whether they find it applicable in their own teaching situations? Giving tips about using them is fine – this is where the one minute limit comes in.

Ever thought about how absurd it is to give a website address at an offline session? It’s a whole different medium… You put the link online where people can click on it – isn’t it logical? Isn’t it what everybody does in a normal situation? Yes, of course, everybody – except for ICT trainers, of all people…

Everybody laughs at the university lecturer who practically reads his book aloud to the students – and still, when someone presents an activity at an ICT training session to the unsuspecting audience and tells them they needn’t take notes because they can find the whole thing on his blog, we call it ICT training.

I know this because I’m guilty of all of the above. My excuse? Showing a couple of clever tricks and useful links was so easy. They earned a pat on the shoulder and a couple of kind words after the session. A few months later nobody remembered any of those things and never actually used any of them in their classrooms. Not because they were not really clever tricks and useful links – they were, just not in their individual teaching situations. They liked them; it’s only they couldn’t use them. And how could I have known all their groups and all their students? Impossible, of course. This can’t be the way to go.

I’ve had success stories as well, of course. Colleagues told me months after sessions that they were using some of the sites I showed them – in quite a different way. Because they tailored them to their students’ needs, as all good teachers do. And it’s the same with everything else in connection with ICT, not only links and sites: you yourself have to see whether a certain technique or approach is right for your students. And what works in one of your classes might not be that successful in another one. This should not come as much of a surprise as we all experience it with everything else in teaching: one activity falls flat in one class, while it works perfectly with the next group of kids.

So where does all this lead us, now that it seems that ICT offers no magic bullet either? You should simply do what you do when making decisions in other areas of your teaching: look at your own teaching situation and start from there. See what you want want to achieve and think of ways you can achieve it. Then bring these ideas or problems here and hopefully someone will be able to offer a solution. Look at what others are already doing and learn from them – this is what we do anyway, isn’t it?

Does this sound like a setup that might work?