The leading Learning team running the netbook project met again in January. There were a number of items under discussion. The first was a series of updates on the different parts to the project that included the IMPACT 09 project, being conducted by Nottingham University, arrangements for the away-day INSET.
Of particular interest was a discussion about whether the use of netbooks had fully supported the learning in classrooms or perhaps, to our surprise, in some ways it had hindered it. The observations started to prompt us to think about the learning processes that were taking place, for example it made us think about the extent to which collaboration and group-work in music composition had a more powerful effect on the levels being achieved or whether access to more specialist computers helped students create better musical compositions. In geography it was interesting to observe how a very experienced teacher rose to the challange of attending to mutliple requests of help from a very enthusiastic year seven group!
The discussion also considered what was the best technology for the future? The netbooks being based on microsoft technologies that rely on access to high volume electro-mechanical storage or whether the future was more likely to involve portable devices with lower volume solid-state storage that had reliable internet access to that application could be accessed anytime anywhere any device.
It was felt that we should continue our efforts to find devices that might provide access to these sorts of technologies but it was recognised that the key to these developments would be good quality high speed internet access. The meeting agreed that these views would be passed to The ICT strategy group at a later date and would form part of the findings from the study.
