TOPIC: Educating the Educators through New Technologies:
Mode, Medium and Meaning
In Greece, the use of new technologies
in formal education was recently introduced as one of the main
priorities in government policy for education. This change is
considered a vital component in the efforts to modernize the
Greek educational system. Often, however, this has involved putting
in second place pedagogical principles and the curriculum contents.
New technologies are thereby elevated to such importance that
the myth is crated that these are the only condition necessary
for educational transformation and development. For instance,
during the recent elections in Greece considerable weight was
attached to the introduction of new technologies by the conservative
and socialist manifestos alike. However, what the politicians
do not anticipate is that the new technologies threaten the traditional
power/authority relationships in the classroom. Nor do they adequately
account for the reality that educators, without having any basic
training, are unable to adopt new pedagogies that are made necessary
by the new technologies. In this presentation, the first findings
from a pilot project of creating an internet website for the
further education of the language secondary education level teachers,
are presented. The creation of this website was assigned by the
Ministry of Education to the Center for the Greek Language.
