National strategy for school teachers' IT skills needed

In today's issue of Computer Sweden is highlighted once again problems with the lack of a national IT strategy for schools. The author of the article politely asks whether this is due to political deadlock among the Alliance parties. However, anyone with the slightest knowledge of the matter knows that it is a personal deadlock on the part of the politician most responsible for the education system.

The dimension of IT use in schools where the need for a national strategy is greatest concerns the competence of teachers to use IT as a means of extending learning. Computers and interactive whiteboards are now beginning to creep into schools, but many simply do not know how to use them in a pedagogically creative way. The problem is not that teachers are not interested, but that they don't have the time (they have a thousand other things to do, many of which have nothing to do with teaching) or the inspirational role models, which means that everyone has to reinvent the wheel when it comes to using digital learning resources. One example is how to use different web solutions for communicating with students, where it would be very easy to develop a national template, rather than each individual teacher sweating out their own hand-crafted Wordpress solutions.

An important part of the national strategy must therefore be to allocate resources so that teachers can both free up time from other activities and benefit from the body of knowledge that is being built up through the various excellent initiatives of Computers in Education .