"Our current concept of literacy as the written word is expanding to include the on-screen word. Information technology is an excellent educational tool."
You could easily imagine the above quote coming from Bill Gates, trying to sell more Windows products to schools. In fact, it comes from much closer to home - the website of the Irish National Teachers Organisation (www.into.ie), in fact.
The report "IT in Irish Primary Education" is just one aspect of a site that is a credit to the union.
Having called, since the 1980s, for a national policy to establish information technology in primary education, the INTO fear that children, teachers, and society as a whole are losing out.
The recommendations in the report can be distilled down to three fundamental principles:
every child and teacher has a right of access to the curriculum through information technology at school;
teachers have the right of access to training in IT both in pre-service and in-service.;
information technology should be integrated into the primary curriculum as a cross-curricular resource.
The INTO's site homepage divides its content into four sections: union business; teacher to teacher; information and publications; and professional development. Each section is packed with useful information for teachers, is well designed, easy to read and, with a few minor exceptions, easy to navigate.
One of the best areas is the "common questions" section. It gives simple answers to questions such as "How do I become a recognised primary school teacher in Ireland?"
The site also provides excellent links to other educational and union sites. Many of these will be of use to secondary, as well as primary, teachers, and parents too.
The INTO's site looks even better when compared with that of the Association of Secondary Teachers, Ireland (www.asti.ie).
ASTI's current homepage is mostly turned over to reinforcing its RTE, TV3 and TG4 advertising campaign.
The slogan "Teachers Teach More Than You Know" - the thrust of their efforts to convince the public they are worthy of a 30 per cent pay rise - is so prominent when you enter the site that initially you wonder if there is any other content at all.
Even when you do discover further content, the rudimentary design, and difficult-to-read, screen-wide sentences, make reading it a somewhat laborious task.
Nevertheless, the content of their campaign is worth examining, even if just to see if you recognise any teacher you ever had as someone who is a "counsellor, motivator, psychologist, coach, mentor, mediator, leader, administrator, manager . . . teacher."
It is difficult to see who is the audience for this message. Unlike the INTO's site, there is little reason to go to ASTI's unless you are directly involved. It seems they are merely preaching to the converted and their web presence is, for the moment, a wasted opportunity.
The Teachers Union of Ireland site (www.tui.ie) is also of little interest to those not directly involved with the union, but at least the homepage is relatively easy to navigate from. The internal search engine is good, if a little slow.
The "Frequently Asked Questions" section is comprehensive and well designed, as are the "Services offered by TUI" pages. The publications section is very busy, but once you click into the individual areas they can be difficult to read because of how they are laid out.
A lot of the rest of the site is very dry, academic and could only interest the most ardent trade unionist.
Most people leave secondary school knowing a lot more than when they left primary. However, in the case of the teachers' web sites, the secondary unions could learn a lot from their primary colleagues.
The INTO's site is how a union site should look. The TUI's is about a third of the way there, but ASTI would do well to put some of the fortune they're spending on TV ads towards developing a website of use to their members and the public alike.
