TEACHERS' USE OF REUSABLE LEARNING OBJECTS IN TEACHING ENGLISH POETRY: EXPLORING THE INFLUENCE OF PREVAILING PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICES

Despite the attempts to integrate ICT across the curriculum of all post-primary education systems in the developed world there remains low levels of use. One of the major reasons for this low level of use is the availability of curriculum relevant software. In recent years the availability of high quality authoring tools has provided opportunities for the low-cost development of highly reusable curricular relevant materials. The increasing use of educational repositories can now facilitate the wide-scale distribution of these resources. This has the potential to reconceptualise use of ICT across the curriculum in schools, particularly in the Humanities area. This research aimed to design curriculum specific educational software and explore the ways in which it was used by Irish post-primary teachers in their teaching of English. The research found that teachers used the software in different ways largely mirroring existing pedagogical practices. The research raises a number of issues for the development of such tailor-made solutions and highlights opportunities for future developers. The research concludes by presenting a tentative conceptual model of the nature of Reusable Learning Objects (RLOs) use and the implications for future development and use of reusable learning objects.