ABSTRACT
Until the late 1990s television played a signifi cant role in schools, for example almost all primary school children watched Words and Pictures and Look and Read as part of their reading lessons. You can probably remember sitting and watching these and other programmes yourself. The common practice was for the whole class to sit in front of the screen and watch the broadcast live, until video recorders became cheap and common. But the last twenty years or so have seen a revolution in the use of communication technology in schools. It’s sometimes easy to forget how rapidly new technology has been introduced into schools. Just thirty years ago schools made occasional use of a cine projector, usually a treat at Christmas, and some teachers used slides and fi lm strips and others made use of tape recorders. The fi rst wave of new technology to come into primary schools included the specially designed and produced BBC micro-computers; each primary school was given one machine and the software was on an audio tape. Specially designed machines became more sophisticated and a range of machines – usually incompatible with each other – were used in schools. If you go into any primary school now, you will encounter a range of sophisticated hardware and software. What you will also notice is that, though software is specifi cally designed for schools, the hardware is more or less the same as that used in commerce, industry and the home. What you will also notice is how many children talk about using their home computer and the way in which teachers sometimes suggest that children use the home machine to search the World Wide Web.
