The school has started to pilot Fronter a Managed Learning Environment (MLE) in some year groups. Creating online content, homework and quizzes. It was worth considering piloting this with my year 7 class and measuring the effect on learning. However after some thought, I felt it would be unwise to do so. Mainly because this was a system that I was unfamiliar with and trying to assess progress and the effect of this technology on learning would be flawed if I myself was learning the software. Differences in progress could simply be attributed to poor teaching of an unfamiliar system.
My Head of faculty mentioned a scheme that the school is in the process of initiating called “Computers for pupils“. The scheme is targetted at students on the Free school meal’s register and aims at providing students with a computer to use at home. Whilst the scheme had initially budgetted for 68 students at our school to have a laptop for 2 years, this would only include 1 year’s boradband Internet access through web ’n’ walk services. The software included was also quite minimal.
My head of department therefore decided on upgrading to a 2 year web ‘n’ walk contract and to have software which would be fully compatible with the school system. With this specification, the budget allows for 30 students to gain benefit from the scheme.
I therefore planned to assess the impact of this scheme on student learning and progress.
Tags: Action research, Computers for pupils, fronter, MLE, web 'n'walk
