2004 Evaluation of Personalised Laptop Provision in Schools
Date: November 2004
Author: Mary Simpson and Fran Payne
Affiliation: University of Edinburgh and University of Aberdeen
Keywords: pedagogy, change, relationships
Summary:
The Personal Laptop Provision in Schools Project was an ambitious and innovative Local Authority enterprise, aiming as it did for radical change in learning and teaching relationships, mediated by technology, including wireless networking. Laptops and digital projectors were provided to give personal ICT access to selected teachers within one primary and one secondary school within a Scottish City Authority, as a pilot for possible extended laptop provision.
The laptops provided the teachers with the means to access and use computers in their daily teaching and to be flexible in their presentation of materials to pupils. In each of these two schools, pupils in selected classes were also provided with laptops: 60 pupils in the secondary school; 21 pupils in the primary. These were intended to be used for a range of learning related activities: accessing a wide range of information, communication with other pupils and with teachers, and the extension of access to learning resources to their homes. The authors consider many of the findings to be generalisable to other primary and secondary settings.
Key Findings:
In order to achieve transformation in learning and teaching:
* personalised ICT within the schools in the form of laptops was not a means to achieve this end in schools in which learner centred pedagogies had not yet developed;
* that the introduction of new technologies without adequate prior changes in pedagogical practice would tend to result in the technologies merely being fitted into current practices;
* the new focus for developments should be understanding and establishing new kinds of relationships between learning and teaching and the technology, the teachers, the pupils and the curriculum. Assessment is for Learning was seen by the Authority as a possible vehicle for taking this forward.
Source Article: http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2004/11/20254/46682
