Designing the Classroom Curriculum Designing the Classroom Curriculum | Page 164

Designing the Classroom Curriculum
Chapter 14: Learning Spaces
If someone was asked to describe a school classroom it is most likely that his/her reply would be very similar
to this:
Rows of desks facing a teacher’s desk in front of a black/green/white board with the teacher at
the front of the room dictating the lesson.
This is the classroom that in which most of us completed our schooling. There would be minor differences
dependent on the decade you were born in as to the electronic equipment that was in the room, but basically,
the modern classroom, would be of the same design. A plan that Ken Robinson describes in his ‘Changing
Educational Paradigms’ was the educational structure designed for the economics of the Industrial
Revolution and this design has not changed even as we start the 21 century.
Accepting that ICTs must change the way that we teach, both from a pedagogic and a curriculum view point,
then logics would dictate that to achieve the most benefit from this change we should look at changing the
learning spaces in which these new paradigms take place in. The NSW Education Department has over the
last three decades progressively introduced ICT’s into the classrooms introducing the Internet to schools in
1996, quickly followed by the ‘Computers in Schools (CIS)’ program in 1997 (i.e.1 computer for every 12
students in a school). The ‘Technology in Teaching and Learning (TILT)’ in-service state-wide program
training teachers to use computers in their classroom began in 1997. Later, 2001 saw the introduction of
Web services to all teachers and student and email for all, expanded to broadband in 2002. CIS, concludes
but then reappears as the ‘Technology for Learning (T4L)’ program with 1 computer for every 8 students.
2007 heralds the ‘Connected Classroom Project’ giving each school an Interactive whiteboard and video
conferencing facilities. In the same year the “Digital Educational Revolution (DER)’ started when each
student in Year 9 to 11 would receive a laptop computer. Futher development in 2012 saw IPads introduced
into classrooms. So fast has been the pace of development that in 2015 , the idea of Bring Your Own Device
(BYOD) was introduced to schools t o replace the government supplied laptops. From this brief outline of
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