Information & Communication Technology Education (ICT Education)

Learning with digital technologies provides the essential skills and literacies necessary to operate effectively in our world while providing an environment that is interesting and engaging. We have outstanding units where we teach through video, audio, blogs and discussion forums (to name a few) to develop engaging learning communities. Our units offer full interaction with staff and students in stimulating workshops and seminars related to developing skills and teaching with learning technologies. There are two aspects to our courses and our units of study in digital technologies education:

• teaching about digital technologies; and
• teaching with digital technologies.

Study digital technologies for learning in your undergraduate and postgraduate coursework

Whether you are a preservice teacher new to digital technologies, or a qualified teacher wanting to advance your skills, our priority area in teacher education is to ensure you develop your skills in using digital technologies for active and meaningful learning, through current and innovative teaching and learning strategies. We encourage you to be confident and creative in your approach to using digital technologies in your classroom. Pre-service teachers are required to participate in professional experience in schools to deliver effective teaching and learning activities that employ digital technologies to achieve your students’ learning outcomes.

Our focus is that graduate teachers meet the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) Professional Teaching Standards, and have achieved the mandatory requirements developed by the NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA). While some of these organisations often refer to digital technologies as Information and Communication Technology (ICT), their expectations for teachers are as follows:

• an understanding of the underlying pedagogical assumptions of ICT, educational relevance, social impact, suitability for the classroom environment, cooperative learning and peer interaction;
• consideration of the issues of appropriate access to, and verification of, information gained from a variety of sources including the Internet;
• an understanding of innovation in information and communication technologies and their potential for enhancing student learning;
• a developed awareness of the range of applications and adaptive technologies available to support students with special needs;
• an evaluation of ICT-based learning materials and software for educational purposes;
• an effective deployment of digital technologies to support specific syllabus outcomes, content and processes;
• developed skills to design a range of ICT-based assessment tasks employing marking criteria clearly linked to syllabus outcomes;
• an understanding of the requirements that they and their students use electronic information appropriately including in relation to plagiarism, copyright, censorship and privacy;
• a developed capacity to employ software to construct texts, manipulate images, create presentations, generate digital sound and visual sequences, store and retrieve digital information for classroom and online learning;
• a successful use of software that supports social networks and communication including email, forums, chat and list services; and
• a developed capacity to use appropriate software for student profiling and reporting, lesson preparation and class/faculty administration.

We encourage you to be confident and creative in your approach to using learning technologies in your classroom. Our digital technologies for learning lecturers actively conduct research into learning with technologies. This research directly informs our education courses.

Units of study

Digital technologies for learning units of study, (those with an EDIT prefix), are offered in undergraduate and postgraduate awards. For a detailed description, refer to the Course Handbook.

Courses of study

Digital technologies for learning units are integrated into multiple undergraduate and postgraduate courses offered by the School of Education.