ABSTRACT
The computer is a powerful and highly motivating learning tool. Used creatively it can enhance our primary pupils’ repertoire of learning skills; increase their access to the curriculum especially for those children with a variety of individual needs and from diverse cultural heritages. In primary schools its effective use also poses issues of classroom management, which in their solution can force teachers to confront many of the challenges of today. It has for example been argued elsewhere (Harrison, 1994c) that facilitating group work can help schools: to value what children bring to school and explicitly, their cultural
diversity;
to encourage children to value themselves as part of human kind, which celebrates both similarities and differences;
to allow children the opportunity to stand back and view situations objectively;
to allow children to express what they honestly feel about themselves, the treatment of themselves and others and their everyday conflict situations;
to prepare all pupils for life in a pluralistic society characterised by differentiation in language, ethnicity and/or cultural heritage;
to encourage children to look for strategies for resolving problems, especially conflicts and to capitalise on cooperative communalities;
to help children to discover aspects of their own culture, particularly those which help them to locate themselves;
to foster empathy by imagining the feelings of people both in similar and different situations to their own;
to use everyday situations to discuss uses and abuses of power and to consider individual and collective rights and responsibilities.
