Every year at about this time, I take some time out to consider whether I still have a job or not. Not because it’s time for my annual performance review, but because, in many ways, if I do my job properly then I shouldn’t have a job at all. All teaching is like this. By the time the matrics come to their end of year exams they shouldn’t need their teachers anymore. Success in teaching is measured by the degree to which you make yourself superfluous to your students’ needs.

 But, as an ICT teacher, I feel this is doubly true for me. If I do my job well enough, it shouldn’t be necessary to teach ICTs. By ICTs I mean computer literacy in the main. I do teach a bit of programming, but I currently teach grade 8 to 10 computer applications: the Office suite as well as graphics and web design tools. I also try to cover social media and netiquette issues, and information literacy such as research skills. The whole notion of teaching computer literacy as a distinct subject is controversial. Ideally computing is something which is infused in every discipline, and is integrated across the curriculum. This is an ideal to strive for, and yet, for a number of reasons, it is extremely difficult to achieve. In a sense then, I see my job as striving to get to a point when teaching computing separately will not be necessary, when it will be integrated across the curriculum, and I will be out of a job.

If I look back at the year which has passed, things have moved a little closer to an integrated, computers across the curriculum scenario at my school. More and more teachers are using digital media and requiring digital production from the students: pcs, laptops, iPads and mobiles are being used in lessons somewhere in the school on a daily basis. Bandwidth has rapidly become our biggest problem as our capacity is stretched by the increased demand. And yet the need for a distinct computer skills class has never been greater.

What do I mean by this? Let me start by challenging this whole notion of digital natives. Yes, I know that if you give an eleven month old baby an iPad it will be enormously engaged and will learn to navigate its way around the screen with some dexterity. But give an adult an iPad and time the two, and see who learns quicker. There’s no contest: adults will soon be running up spreadsheets and trading junk bonds on the device. The baby will be stroking the kitty’s tummy! Well, maybe the adult will also be stroking the kitty’s tummy, but that’s another issue! It’s a complete myth that children are better at using computers than adults. Are teenagers today better at using computers than their parents were at their age? Sure! When I was a teenager computers hadn’t been invented yet! But generally speaking adults do much more sophisticated things with ICTs than teenagers and children do. It is extremely dangerous to assume that teenagers simply “know” how to use computers. They don’t. They have to be taught. And that’s my job within the school.

Kids are, of course, generally speaking, able to take to computers with a great deal of facility. You don’t have to sit them down and teach them how to use Facebook, for example. They are able to discover a great deal on their own. Back in the 1990s when I started teaching computer literacy, the dominant pedagogy was the discovery method. Heavily influenced by Seymour Papert and Piaget, it was largely assumed that the best way to teach computing was to set a task, and allow the students to discover solutions. The big problem with the discovery method, however, was the scholar’s dilemma. How do you know to discover something if you don’t know it’s there? Left to their own devices, teenagers would spend all day on Facebook and learn very little. They’d also write all their essays in PowerPoint and would think a spreadsheet had something to do with house-work!

Slowly, over the years Piaget has given way to Vygotsky as the great font of all pedagogical wisdom, and with it the idea that children need to be guided and taught how to do things, and that explicit instruction has a place as long as it is introduced at the right moment. In terms of computing this is certainly true. Children need to be taught the digital tools that they can use to solve problems in their curricular studies. Much as English Across the Curriculum programmes floundered on the rocks of questions like whose responsibility it was: asking all teachers to be responsible for teaching computers is an ideal, but one which seems a little way away at the moment.

My ideal school of the future would be one in which students are constantly engaged in digital authoring tasks across all areas of the curriculum. They would be using Databases in History class, spreadsheets in the Drama class, creating vodcasts in Maths and tweeting in English. They would be using a variety of devices. The classroom would be connected, but versatile enough to allow for students to work individually or in groups, and be able to use computing devices wirelessly around the school.

But, once a week I see students going to a dedicated computer centre to work at learning new applications which they can then apply to whatever else they are doing. For the moment at any rate I cannot see a way around this. I still have a job!