Obstacles and difficulties faced by teachers

The difficulties described by primary school heads, teachers and IT team members are similar (School Heads Questionnaire item 18, IT Team Members’ Questionnaire item 4 and Teachers’ Questionnaire item 6). The main problems cited by the school heads were teacher workload, teachers lacking skill to apply IT to education, lack of suitable educational software (also cited as a major obstacle in the Preliminary Study) or IT teaching resources which mean that teachers have to spend time preparing their own materials, and insufficient computer resources. 55.8% of the school heads also indicated that the existing curriculum is not conducive to IT applications inside the classroom, which was also supported by 55.4% of the teachers, although relatively few rated this as a serious or very serious problem. The major difficulties encountered by teachers when using IT in their teaching were heavy workload (identified by 87.3%) and insufficient time (76.8%). The workload problem was also rated highly by the IT team members (80.7% for their own workload and 84.7% for that of their colleagues).

This was supported in the focus group interviews, where they mentioned that effective use is also restricted by large class size, which makes it difficult to conduct interactive exercises.

It’s just not possible for one teacher to monitor the behaviour of 40 students. Some of them just play on-line games or ICQ by themselves.

We did try to have some interactive exercises with the students in the class, but it is extremely difficult for one teacher to manage 40 students as you have no idea of what they are doing behind the screen.

They also mentioned the difficulties of finding appropriate materials and resources within the limited time they have available:

Teachers in Hong Kong need to take up more than thirty lessons every week, together with students’ problems, other school administrative duties, sometimes we need to attend common courses, foundation courses etc. On top of that, we need to squeeze time to prepare software for class. I think the workload is very heavy and it’s difficult to allocate the time required.

Chapter 6: General Findings from Primary School Sector

Should we want to use more interactive teaching materials, we need time to gather additional and updated information from various IT sources, need time to put them onto the Internet and need time to learn new IT techniques to do so.

As for teaching software, we know that there are plenty of resources or packages available on the Internet or elsewhere, but the problem is we have to teach at least four subjects every day, you ask us to search all these by ourselves from the Internet, time is really tight.

It is interesting to note that in the school heads’ interviews the same problem was discussed. This is why the school heads felt strongly that the position of IT coordinator should be retained, not necessarily in the sense of a person to provide technical coordination, but as a resource person to assist in the preparation and location of suitable teaching materials.

Even given the substantial percentages of teachers who have attained IIT, as reported above, 66.2% of teachers still think of lack of knowledge or skills as being an obstacle and 77.7% of the IT team members believe this to be a problem, even though in both cases relatively few think of it as a serious/very serious problem. Of particular interest is the fact that 65.5% of the IT team members rated their own IT knowledge/skill inadequate for promoting IT in education effectively. Another problem, indicated by 60.2% of the teachers and 77.6% of the IT team members, was insufficient computers.

Lack of interest was rated relatively low as a reason but, nevertheless, is still high when considering that 40.5% of teachers still cite lack of interest as an obstacle and 69.7% of IT team members rated other teachers’ lack of interest as an obstacle to their being able to promote IT in education effectively.

Overall, however, none of these was seen as being particularly serious by teachers or IT team members, with less than half of the respondents rating most of them as serious or very serious.

In the teacher focus group interviews, a number of barriers have been mentioned that discouraged a more interactive student-centred approach to ITEd by teachers. Most of the comments were to the effect that they could not do much because of time and workload constraints:

Teachers in Hong Kong need to take up more than thirty lessons every week. Together with student's problems, other school administrative duties, sometimes, they need to attend common courses, foundation courses, etc. on top of that, they need to squeeze time to prepare software for class. I think the workload is very heavy and it's difficult to allocate the time required.

Should we want to use more interactive teaching materials, we need time to gather additional and updated information from various IT sources, need time to put them onto the Internet and need time to learn new IT techniques to do so.

As illustrated in the following quotations there were some other reasons why many teachers do not feel they are able to make more effective use of IT for other purposes:

All teachers can manage PowerPoint but it is limited to presentation and is non-interactive.

Few teachers can use interactive software in their teaching.

The training courses are too technical and not related to teaching, so we are not able to make use of the knowledge learnt in school...By and by we will forget what we have learned, and that will diminish the value of our training.

Teaching materials from publishers have improved a lot in recent years, but some of them are still not comprehensive and interactive enough.

Hardware we bought five years ago becomes too slow and incompatible with the new software.

The curriculum and examinations limit the flexibility of using IT in Education. Teachers cannot freely and fully utilize the information available for teaching activities.

Another obstacle is that teachers, especially those teaching in schools situated in the neighbourhoods of poorer socio-economic areas, claimed that they have to spend a lot of time in tackling disciplinary and management issues, hence IT is given less priority. It was clear from the focus group interviews that most of the primary school teachers interviewed are willing to put in extra time and effort to actions that will improve the quality of their teaching, but in the case of IT many of them have yet to be convinced that ITEd gives returns in keeping with the amount of effort that is required to use it well, as exemplified by the following comment from a teacher focus group interview:

… how teachers can make it depends on how much time and space are given to them. I believe that teachers are willing and competent to do it. But, a lot of times, there are just too many things happening. When you think of IT at one moment, you are not able to manage others at the same time. It is a wrong perception that IT can make everything happen immediately when you formulate the policy. It is not that simple, it takes time.

In addition to these reasons, many of the school heads interviewed expressed the concern that the students’ home backgrounds and family education can influence the way in which the teachers design teaching activities and particularly homework:

… since most of the families in this district belong to lower-income groups, the percentage of students having computers at home is not high, maybe around half to one-third. ... We have a considerable number of students who are newcomers from the Mainland. Most of them do not have computers at home. For some lower form students, they already know how to use the Internet before doing computer classes, probably because they have computers at home. Teachers will take this into consideration when designing teaching activities.

This was particularly the case in two or three of the primary schools visited that were in relatively poor socio-economic areas where the extent of home computer ownership and the support of parents were not so high. One example from the teachers’ focus group interviews was the following teacher’s concern that even though only a few children do not have computers at home, their lack of the knowledge that could be expected of children with home computers created obstacles to effective use of IT in the lesson:

For example, last week, I taught sending of emails. Most of the students have computers at home, only a small portion does not. For those who have computers at home, they are already aware of how to send emails. But, for those who do not, they do not know how to log-in, and not even how to use yahoo.com. I assisted them to register. They had problems with registration, and logging in. ... So, the whole class was affected. This topic was planned to be finished in 2 lessons, in the end, it took 3 lessons. ... So, if they have computers at home, that really can help students to learn easier.

It is interesting to note, however, that this perception contradicts evidence reported elsewhere that high percentages of children reported having computers at home and that even those without their own computers seem to think it is not a problem because they can access them at friends’ homes or other places. Therefore, it appears that while some school heads and teachers have the view that they should not encourage out-of-school use because it disadvantages those who do not have computers at home, it might in fact be an effective strategy to encourage students to make use of IT for study purposes outside school hours.

The students, on the other hand, did not indicate any major obstacles to their use of IT at home for their learning (Students’ Questionnaire item 26). However, this is more likely to be due to the fact that they have very little requirements to use computers at home for teaching and learning.

Chapter 6: General Findings from Primary School Sector