How do primary school students want to use technology to improve their learning? Well it isn’t through robotic teachers or hologramatic maths. According to new research, although they are disappointed with the way schools lag behind what they know, simple things would make it better. Like the opportunity to bring in their own technological devices from time to time.

Many industry professionals argue that schools should be rebuilt and restructured to suit the upcoming cohorts of what are described as digital natives – children completely at home with new and evolving technologies

But a year long study of over 600 pupils in primary schools across England discovered that children are not asking for that.

“While we expected children to be making radical demands for virtual classes or robot teachers, the majority simply wanted the occasional chance to bring their own devices into school”, says Dr Neil Selwyn a senior lecturer at the University of London’s Institute of Education.

“They also wanted a greater say in the rules and regulations that surround ICT use in schools. The kids in our study were remarkably ‘school-savvy’ as well as being ‘technology-savvy’. Most accepted the need for school ICT to be more serious and perhaps less exciting”.

The study discovered:

• More than half of the 7-11 year olds in the study had their own mobile phone,
• Nearly 90 percent had their own games console at home
• More than 80 percent regularly played computer games
• More than one-in-five regularly used social networking sites such as Bebo, Habbo or MySpace in their spare time.

In contrast, the most frequent uses of ICT in school were word processing and internet searching.

Selwyn concludes: “This study does highlight an obvious difference between home and school technology use. However, schools shouldn’t panic about making drastic changes to pander to what they think students might want. Despite their high-tech activities at home, most pupils seem to want relatively low-key changes at school – most notably a moderate ‘loosening’ of the restrictions on their ICT use.

“Schools should concentrate on ways of getting kids more involved in the decision-making processes surrounding what devices can be brought into school or what websites are filtered. Any big changes to a school’s ICT provision should be gradual and consider the views of everyone in the school.”

The study also found a continued need for schools to work with children on issues of internet safety. Only one third of the pupils surveyed were knowledgeable about staying safe when using the internet. Similarly, more than 60 percent wanted more help from their teachers in terms of learning about ‘e-safety’.

A report from Ofsted (the Office for Standards in Education in England) called The Safe Use of New Technologies, argues that the children are safer online when they are given more responsibility in their use of the internet.

Looking at 35 schools, Ofsted found that five were outstanding in terms of e-safety, 16 were good, 13 satisfactory and one inadequate. Pupils in the schools that had ‘managed’ systems had better knowledge and understanding of how to stay safe than those in schools with ‘locked down’ systems.

Pupils were more vulnerable overall when schools used locked down systems because they were not given enough opportunities to learn how to assess and manage risk for themselves and so were at more risk out of school.

The book from the research project is ‘Primary schools and ICT: Learning from pupil perspectives’ - published on 15th February 2010 by Continuum [ISBN 1855395789].

If you are a parent interested in learning about internet safety for children, courses are held at the GEMSICT Academy. Contact Debbie Wild, ICT Academy Leader on +9714 394 3500 ex 230 or see www.gemsictacademy.com

(c) Gemseducation