What do kids know

Released 03/03/2010

Suzannah Wright reports on findings from a recent Futurelab study

Today began in a positive way - with free food and a nice cup of coffee at a breakfast meeting organised by Futurelab to discuss findings from some research into students'ideas and opinions about building and re-designing schools.

The results were still in preliminary stage but suggested that pupils would like to be more involved in the design and transformation of learning environments, and they had some interesting opinions on the usefulness of various ICT learning tools.

For example, while 46.6 per cent of respondents (students) said they used interactive whiteboards daily in their school, only 31 per cent said they thought IWBs are a very effective tool to support learning. Or consider that a third thought their school's learning platform was not an effective tool for learning, and just 7.8 per cent used the school learning platform daily. So what did pupils think were the most effective tools for learning? Web searches (53.8 per cent) and laptops (34.1 per cent). Are they simply choosing things they associate with classrooms and projects, or are teachers not making the most of the more exotic ICT tools out there?

Drop me a line on editor@edexec.co.uk and let us know what you think, as we'll be writing about this issue - looking specifically at the effectiveness of whiteboards, in a future issue.

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