ICT in Education: Is There an Emergence of Contrasting Learning Cultures between Students and Teachers?

In the last decades, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have been widely disseminated in high schools in order to revolutionise education and bring its strategies and processes into the 21st century. The literature states that after several waves of technological improvements and considerable investments made, educational ICT is still seldom used, both inside and outside classrooms and its effects on students' marks are considered meaningless. What causes this difficult integration of ICT in education, when its adoption in other dimensions of contemporary society has been so swift? Do institutions and teachers' adjustment strategies to this integration explain some of these shortcomings? This chapter is based on the data obtained through the responses given by head-teachers, teachers and students to a survey on ICT use in Portuguese secondary education schools. We ascertain that teachers and pupils' use and representations of ICT are quite different and that this widens the gap between the two main actors in the learning process. We conclude that ICT use in teaching and learning processes inside the classroom is heavily dependent on two different factors: the volume and quality of the available technology; the teacher's training and ability to use this technology in a pedagogically efficient manner. If the first factor is strictly reliant on the deliverance of public policies, the second has a still problematic relation with the teachers' personal characteristics, namely the intensity of ICT use and the personal representations towards the technology