ABSTRACT
In The Medium is the Message (1967), Marshall McLuhan talked about how ‘New technologies take the place of the old’ (McLuhan and Fiore 1967: 14). School classrooms have always been places where technology has been used; it is very unlikely that you will not find a range of technologies in the religious education (RE) classroom. What has changed, over the last few years, are the kind of technologies that will be doing similar pedagogic or methodological tasks. Ten years ago it would have been common to have found a television, VCR player, CD player and an OHP in your RE classroom, with maybe a tape player and slide projector gathering dust in the cupboard. Now most of these will be redundant, replaced with a video projector and computer connected to the school network and to the wider internet. The questions that I will raise in this chapter are: ‘What are you doing with these technologies, the technologies that students have in their pockets and schoolbags, that is methodologically different or which allows better RE to take place?’, ‘How is the technology in you classroom empowering learning as well as teaching?’ and finally ‘What core purposes for teaching RE are enhanced by the use of the technology?’
