Micros in Action: Three Classroom Case Studies
Mary Shooter, Patricia Lovering, Sheila Bellamy · 2025
We are grateful to Peter Bartlett and Phillip Bassett and three students of the Cardiff Institute of Higher Education (CIHE) for permission to use extracts from projects submitted as part of course work for their in-service diploma in educational computing. The diploma equips teachers, mostly in primary schools, to take responsibility for I.T. education and to observe and evaluate aspects of computer use in their own classrooms. These extracts are included not so much for what they say (although this is, in itself, valuable), but for the possibilities such case studies hold for teachers. They emphasize the fact that to understand the use of computers in classrooms demands a research paradigm that, firstly, incorporates a broad set of educational concerns; and, secondly, observes computers at their point of implementation. This includes apparently irrelevant activities that take place ‘around’ and even ‘off’ the computer but which are, nevertheless, part of the pupil’s learning experience. Teachers often find their attention drawn, for example, away from pupil-computer interaction to the talk amongst pupils it occasions, even though that talk may not be strictly related to the tasks-at-hand. To understand what is happening entails employing an educational rather than a technological framework. A good starting point would be use of Wilkinson&s;s (1991) ideational, interpersonal and textual to contextualize and make sense of pupils’ ‘computer talk’, or McMahon and O’Neil (1990) on the role of dialogue in learning. Indeed, we believe that recourse to such educational literatures in evaluating the deployment of computers is both an essential part of teachers’ technological literacy and necessary for the ‘educationalizing’ of educational computing. This is an issue taken further in the final paper (by Beynon) in this volume.