ABSTRACT
It’s at the heart of the digital divide between teachers and taught in schools; a divide which needs to be bridged in an e-school.
In this chapter we look fi rst at how the UK’s largest single ICT teacher education exercise was managed to achieve the maximum effect: a step-change in ICT competence for all serving teachers and school librarians. The national lotteryfunded teacher education scheme (1999 to 2002) identifi ed, rightly, the need for training in the pedagogic skills and knowledge related to using ICT in the classroom. It, again rightly, identifi ed classroom skills of an order higher than mastering basic techniques of computer operation. However, a major problem encountered by the approved trainers was the very unevenly distributed baseline of expected core skills across the teaching force. Many teachers needed a crash course in coping with computer crashes before they could even load the pre-training CD ROM.
