A case study of communication technology within the elementary school

Communication technologies, specifically the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW), are rapidly expanding into both the educational and non-educational sectors. This advancement is providing new ways for people to communicate on a global scale and access vast amounts of information, in the case of the WWW, in a visually appealing and interactive manner. The Internet is providing educators with the opportunity to implement a range of new teaching and learning practices. Opportunities for global communication and access to information are redefining classroom learning experiences, as this technology is providing students and teachers a medium through which the development of information handling skills and the use of student-centred learning may be utilised. The use of the Internet and the WWW in the classroom is not only changing the design of the learning experiences, it is also redefining the emphasis on more traditional content-based curricula. Although this is essentially new to the majority of schools, a number of pioneering schools have proceeded to incorporate the Internet and the WWW into their existing teaching and learning practices. It is the investigation of these exemplar schools that forms the focus of this article. We explore the application of the Internet and the WWW in the Australian elementary classroom. Through the review of current academic writing and the investigation into the efforts of a number of individual schools, the research identifies how many schools are presently utilising this technology, and reports on a range of consequences that are affiliated with the integration of information technology into education.