Antti Ekonoja: Benefits of Using Textbook in Teaching Information and Communication Technology

Why do Information and Communications Technology’s (ICT) teachers have to do all of their
study material by themselves? This was the conclusion I had after my own substitute teacher experiences
and talks with other ICT teachers. This is strange because it is not convention in other school subjects.
There they have textbooks in advance. I wanted to try if textbook could give some help also in ICT.
ICT teachers need help; in another case they can have a burn out in some years. Unfortunately there
are no real textbooks for ICT so I decided to write a new textbook and do research about that textbook’s
advantages for teachers and also for students. Writing a book and doing the research with that became my
Master’s Thesis in 2006. The main result of that study was that textbooks in ICT bring many advantages
to ICT teachers and students. Textbook still does not guarantee high-class education, although it makes
it possible. If the textbook is high-class, it assists good learning and also national ICT goals become
true when all students get same information about the subject. Now in my postgraduate studies I am going
to research that case more and clearly to get more reliable results of that case.