Abstract:

The uses of information & communications technologies (ICT) by students in school and for school-related tasks are many and varied, and yet this wide variety of uses is frequently bundled together by the community, the media, government departments, and even by teachers and teacher education institutions, into a single amorphous term, such as “ICT in schools” or “technology in schools” or similar. It is contended that a lack of clear terminology and classification of the uses of technologies by students for school work is contributing to a lack of clarity in the discussion about technologies in schools in the wider community, what teachers and teacher education students need to learn about to prepare them for the 21st century classroom, and ultimately the purposes of including technologies in the classroom and school-related activities.

This paper will explore the variety of uses of technologies in schools and will propose a taxonomy of student uses of technologies. The paper is a companion paper to an earlier paper (Chambers & Reynolds, INTED2015) that proposed a taxonomy for teacher uses of technologies.

Keywords:

Technology-enhanced learning, Information & Communication Technologies, school education, curriculum, terminology, technology, classification, taxonomy.