Matthew French
Mihara Board of Education, Hiroshima
About
Matthew is an EFL teacher with 7 years’ experience teaching English in Japan. He has taught primarily junior high and elementary school students in Japan as an ALT on the JET Programme. In class he is always looking for new ways to incorporate technology and music, while his research interests lie in using corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis, particularly political and news discourse, to reveal the power of words. He has recently submitted his dissertation for his master’s in TESOL through the University of Birmingham. Matthew currently works at the Mihara Board of Education in Hiroshima, Japan.Sessions
Paper Presentation Junior High School Teacher Attitudes Towards the Adoption of ICT as Part of MEXT's GIGA School Program more
Sun, Jun 6, 11:30-12:00 Asia/Tokyo
My dissertation investigated the introduction of the GIGA School Program into public Junior High Schools in Mihara, Japan. The Program is a major Information and Communication Technology (ICT) initiative, providing computers and internet access for all school students and teachers. The primary purpose of the survey was to ascertain the major attitudes, beliefs, and concerns that Junior High School teachers held towards technology and the use of ICT in the classroom. The survey also sought insight into teachers’ views of themselves and feedback on issues they felt would help or hinder their adoption of ICT in the classroom. The study found that while teachers held overall positive views of the upcoming change, a range of first-order (external) and second-order (internal) barriers to adoption were revealed. Recommendations were provided to address these issues and facilitate the successful introduction of the Program, and some recent first impressions of the initial introduction of the technology will be given.