THE ROLE OF ICT ON TEACHING AND LEARNING OF BIOLOGY IN SENIOR SECONDARY SCHOOL (EDUCATION PROJECT TOPICS AND MATERIALS)
CHAPTER ONE
1.0 INTRODUCTION
Computer science education, information and communication technology (ICT) are at present becoming one of the most important elements defining the basic competences of students. Information technology integrates medial, informative and computer science education, but also all the educational subjects mentioned in the curriculum basis of general education. In science and biology education there increasingly appear concepts of integrated teaching showing the student the world in a holistic manner. The principle of universal activity of students in cognitive, emotional and motivations well as in practical sphere is preferred. More and more often attention is paid to the fact that the contemporary problem is not so much lack of information as its surplus, and the crowd of information as well as its unnecessary excess of details may be an effective tool of disinformation. Hence forming students such skills as selection, evaluation and organizing of information (forming its structure) seems justified, so that they can serve drawing conclusions (Wikipedia, 2012).
Ability to work with information and communication technologies (ICT) is recognized as one of the key competencies necessary for success in life and competition in the labour market (Levy and Murmane, 2001; Salganic. 2001: Eurydice, 2002) which every citizen should posses (Recommendation of the European parliament and of the council, 2006), and term ‘computer literacy’ was introduced to distinguish between users and non users of ICT (Bawden, 2001). Concerning ICT, two important roles are assigned to schools. The first is to fulfill the expectation of society for demanding ICT skills, and the second is to raise the quality of education in the schools with the support the ICT. Many scholars, teachers and teacher-trainers have recognized the potential of ICT to enhance teaching and learning and as a side effect the number of published articles about the use of ICT in school work is enormous (Bell and Bell, 2003). However, despite significant investment in training and resources, in reality school are still far below the level of ICT use in science, transport, communication industry, and many other fields (Hawkins 2002; Hepp, Hinostroza, Lawal and Rehbein, 2004; Machin, McNally and Silva, 2007; Eteokleous, 2008).
