I have been conducting an ICT survey throughout the juniors over the past few weeks. I used Junior Viewpoint so it also tied in with our ICT curriculum and it was a format familiar to the children. I have done this because I was interested to find out what the childrens perceptions of ICT in school were, also to find out what they were up to at home with a view to thinking about where we were going in the future. Some of the results have come as a bit of a surprise to me - mostly because they do not seem to be leaving us behind. It is obvious that the children are more inclined to be motivated to try at home what they have learnt at school - I had feared that I would discover they were frustrated at school not to be able to do what they could do at home. (well in one respect they were but I've had google unblocked so that should cure that!!)
In summary:
Haven't had everyones comments yet but so far I've surveyed 169 children - 87 boys 82 girls. They all enjoy using ICT and feel it helps them learn with the exception of one boy who doesn't enjoy ICT because we don't play games all the time and doesn't feel it helps him learn because he "already knows it all"!! They seem to generally feel ICT helps them learn because they have access to a wider variety of information and they can present there work quickly, neatly and with a spell checker (I teach touch typing from year 2 to year 6 so some of them are already quite fast). 140 children have computers at home, 110 have the internet, suprisingly only 112 have a games console. Unsurprisingly at home they mostly use the computer for playing games with about a quarter downloading music and sending instant messages. Sadly (but not surprisingly) none of them think they get to choose when to use ICT in school but most would like to. They were asked to consider what they would like to use the computers in school for - most wanted to play games (despite being directed to make sensible choices for a school situation!!) , but a great number wanted greater access to the internet for research and to use the computer for presenting their work - wordprocessed, powerpoint and through creating web sites and 1 wanted to be able to use his PSP to access the internet in school.
Sorry I've gone on a bit but I guess if you're not interested you don't need to read this!! I would be interested to know if anyone else has surveyed their school in some way and to know the results.
1 comment:
Fascinating results Nettie! You obviously asked good questions too. I think I might have to ask you to email me the format you used, if you'd like to share it with others?
An excellent use of JVP too - I used it to track the number of installs of software on the PCs in my school - would never have been able to do that in MS Access! I feel I may need to 'borrow' that file too (or at least check it out at the next briefing?)
The only other survey's I heard of are ones where schools have surveyed home use of technologies, but never done one myself.
Post a Comment