7. Where to Next: Future Realities

To sustain and accelerate the growth that Year 7 and 8 teachers have made over the three-year period it is essential that the TELA scheme maintains momentum. The area of immediate concern identified in this evaluation is the need for professional learning opportunities with a focus on the pedagogies that would enable the best use of laptops/ICT at the Year 7 and 8 level. Across the three years of the evaluation the most prevalent ‘main’ area for development for teacher use of the laptop was to ‘learn about ICT as a tool in teaching’. The main areas selected in 2006 are compared with responses from 2004 and 2005 in Table 21.

Over the period of three years tasks associated with teaching were selected by over half of teachers overall as their main goal for future development. In 2006, 60% of respondents identified this set of tasks as the goal for development. The proportion of questionnaire respondents focusing on skill-related tasks dropped from around a third (35%) to just under a quarter (24%). The proportion focusing specifically on learning to use and improve skills fell from 23% to 15% from 2004 to 2005, this maintained in 2006.

Given that TELA teachers remain quite focused in their desire to learn more about the potential of the laptop to help them in their classroom teaching it would seem appropriate that professional learning opportunities include an emphasis on student–centred pedagogies and pathways to pedagogical change.

The main area for development of the laptop each year was to learn about ICT as a tool in teaching. The goals in the focus groups were also mainly related to use in the classroom as a tool for teaching and learning but also focused on the support needed to achieve this main goal, this including time for self-directed professional development and release time for helping reluctant laptop users, and improved technological infrastructure.

To sum up, the examples of teacher laptop use in this report are merely small glimpses of ongoing activities. Nevertheless, they show an important development in school-based learning. They illustrate that there have been changes within the learning environments in Year 7 and 8 classrooms as a consequence of teachers having TELA laptops. They also show how the teacher’s laptop can change the learning environment towards more flexibility and greater connection to the world outside the classroom. Teachers generally agreed that a major impact of their use of the laptops on student learning was increased pupil motivation and increased availability of information to pupils. Teacher commentary indicated that many were creating and tailoring teaching and learning resources that met the learning needs of students and that students were engaging creatively with these resources. There were also evidence that the laptop has afforded students with a way to take responsibility for their own learning as they carry out tasks on their own or in a group, create a website, work on authentic problems, publish their work for others to read, and collaborate using the laptop. In this way the laptops can be seen to have helped teachers to cope with the complexity of learning needs in their classrooms that Alton-Lee (2003) suggests is the central challenge for teachers. Teachers using laptops were increasingly making connections, providing multiple opportunities to learn, facilitating shared learning, enhancing the relevance of new learning and creating a supportive learning environment for their students, as the new draft curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2006b) requires.

Teachers were becoming more effective and efficient by using customised tools to aid their lesson planning and preparation, and administrative tasks. They were using group-learning opportunities that recognised individual differences and they were giving students opportunities to learn outside the classroom. TELA laptops have helped teachers to begin to integrate ICT effectively into their teaching practice. Teachers wanted to use laptops more in their teaching role and believed they needed more time and professional development, along with reliable school connections and easy access to peripherals.