| ICT Conference Acts as National Springboard | June 2002 | ||||
| In May 2002 more than 240 delegates attended a conference in Birmingham on the topic of ICT and adult basic skills. This was a collaboration between this Partnership; Advantage West Midland; the Government Office of the West Midlands; the national Adult Basic Skills Strategy Unit and LearnDirect. The conference was designed to highlight some of the next steps that can be taken, at a number of levels, to ensure that best uses are made of ICT tools in order to get better adult basic skills outcomes.
The inputs were firmly linked to the national strategy framework, and to major vehicles such as LearnDirect. They scanned both what we know about ICT in relation to the teaching and learning of basic skills and what future directions the technological tools might take us in. Workshops picked up on a number of developments from across the country and asked ‘where next?’ in the links between basic skills and ICT.
Primarily, the use of a range of technologies should add value to the teaching and learning of basic skills and should open up new pedagogical approaches based on real insights about how adults use the technologies for real learning gains. The evidence base is still developing and one aspect of the ‘springing forward’ is to get much more robust understandings of how different uses of technologies can best be used for learning.
|
|||||
ICT has an increasing function within diagnostic assessment, provision of learning materials, on-line support and potential on-line testing. ICT acts as a tool and a vehicle for improving levels of basic skills; and increased basic skills act as an underpinning for better use of ICT.
Insights from the conference are being packaged together to form a basis of ‘next steps’ developments via the national strategy, and as a platform from which a range of organisations can move forward in their various ways.