Maine - second day, research

The second day started off with Doug Snow talking about expectations and define the broad path the projects are to take. The first year should evolve around four main categories - define, design, deploy and reflect. David Silvernail, one of the researchers, presents the multi-year research and evaluation strategies - a mixed methods approach. Shortly as below:

1. Longitudinal survey studies with teachers, students, principals and others.
2. Selected visits and observation.
3. Interviews with stratified samples of school personell.
4. Analysis of documents.
5. Controlled experimental and quasi-experimental studies.

The core research has been focusing on three major general questions:

-> How are the laptops beeing used by teachers and students?
-> What are the benefits and impacts of the laptops on instruction and learning?
-> What are the costs of the middle school laptop program?

I'm just gonna throw some numbers out for reflection:

Frequent usage of the computer (>few times per week):
1. Curriculum:
"Use your laptop to develop instructional material" - 83%
"Use the laptops for formative assessment" - 53%

2. Communication:
"Use your laptop to record student grades" - 76%
"Use your laptop to communicate with parents and students" - 75%

3. Over time usage curriculum:
"Use laptop to develop instructional material" - 57% in 2003 up to 83% in 2010.

4. Over time communication:
"Use your laptop to communicate with parents and students" - 40% 2003 up to 75% in 2010.

5. Student reported laptop use in classes:
"Mathematics" 46% of the teachers never use computers. Only 15% use it more than 4 hours per week.
"Arts and music" 51% of the teachers never use computers. Only 10% use it more than 4 hours per week. (To me, really strange).

6. Pretty equal usage of the computers when related to age.

7. Teachers self-reported competency in integrating the laptops into the lessons
9% not at all competent. 21% slightly competent.

8. Many teachers feel that they are being more student centered than teacher centered with the computers. A clear shift.

I shall probably just leave all this data for later. If someone wants more data just get back to me.

One thing that stands out for me, in a good way, is the question "The laptops have become such an important tool in my teaching that I cannot image teaching without them" - 51% strongly agrees and 23% somewhat agrees. I think this is a main question in a Swedish context too. I find a lot of teachers saying that they could not go back to a non-computer savvy environment or even stating that they possibly could not go back to a non 1-to-1 environment. There are a number of reasons for that of course, but the main reason seem to be that it is so much easier to communicate, structure the daily work and beeing a lot more transparent towards colleagues and students. But that's not an easy task and I think that is one of the main reasons some teachers just don't like or see the value in technology.