Schools and students
Schools are changing in definition, purpose and function. As society deals with changing employment patterns, increased concerns about youth employment and impacts of global media on youth culture, schools walk the tightrope between community and government demands. Teachers are expected to take increasing roles in increasingly complex circumstances and cater for each "new" innovation and educational solution to community problems and concerns. This is amidst the task of understanding curriculum and pedagogical responsibilities in the context of changing information technology environments, applications and consequences.

Students on the other hand are also changing as they react to the global cultural shifts accelerated by information technology advances which are changing the media, popular cultural industries, employment patterns and lifestyles. Young people need to survive and thrive in a world more complex than that experienced by their parents. It is up to teachers to understand how to make use of information technology and technological processes in curriculum contexts, to provide students with opportunities to make sense of the world.

Structural changes
Structural changes in schooling are systemic and school level reactions to the increasing pressures to make school more relevant and valued by the stakeholders. For some schools, altering how schools are organised is an answer. The Middle Years of Schooling programs, College structures for older students and Open learning programs within schools are just some reactions. Teachers are expected to understand both the relationship of IT to the changing circumstances and the role of IT is helping facilitate the changes. Part of the response to the structural changes to make schools more relevant is the recognition by schools, commercial groups and systems that the education market place is a significant global and local market and that IT is both the key to enabling educational programs to be delivered to distributed students and the key to attracting students to schools. Laptop programs for students, brochures promoting technology facilities and technology field days are testimony to schools taking advantage of parent and community fascination of the link between IT and learning. However teachers carry the burden to make the link between information technology and learning technology practices.

Curriculum
The types of educational programs that are available in schools are also changing. For secondary schools, the integration of vocational education competencies in traditional syllabuses and distinct Vocational Education and Training programs in schools, traineeships, apprenticeships and other school-to-work structures add to the complexity of structures, resources and teaching programs. In some schools, IT industry programs and IT-related programs increase the need to recognise that some teachers need to have specialist IT competencies and knowledge as well as learning technology competence.

The changing curriculum frameworks within which teachers build learning environments and activities for students, are changing the nature of teaching and learning. These frameworks represent the reactions to the changing demands on educational systems to answer national and global issues, most of which are caused by, or related to, information technology use in society. In using appropriate constructivist, student-centred pedagogical techniques teachers will provide learning environments that connect students to authentic contexts and situations. It is important that teachers are able to match learning technology processes to these demands for changing learning environments.

Teachers
Thus for teachers, there are a myriad of technological processes, ideas, infrastructures and contexts to navigate as they play the roles of learning facilitator, counsellor of students, work colleague, employee and member of a profession. Therefore, in defining learning technology competence, systems and other stakeholders need to take a holistic view of teachers' lives and not reduce such competencies to a list of technical skills or even pedagogical and curriculum skills that ignore the connectedness between the roles and circumstances of teaching.