Assessing out of school access to ICT

[Ric_]

I've just started going through some of the Self Review Framework... the aim is to try to achieve the ICT Mark.

One section that it seems we have ignored somewhat is the assessment of pupils' access to ICT outside of the school. It seems that useful things to know would be whether they have any, how much access, etc. It also looks like it would be handy to know what ICT skills are held by the pupils' families (this is another area we are lacking).

How do other schools get this information and, when you've got it, how do you make best use of it?

[steve]

Every year we have an independant company take a survey:

http://home.btconnect.com/mark.chaplin/index.htm

We alternate each year between students and parents.

We're looking at the data in conjunction with the computers for pupils initiative. You could also look at it in terms of providing access outside of normal hours for those without computers or broadband - either in school or perhaps work with libraries / community centres.

The ICT teachers also take mini surveys for the more intensive courses like dida to ensure they can all complete homework.

[webman]

If you're interested in making surveys to take online, I recommend trying OpenSurveys.

[becktonboy]

If you're interested in making surveys to take online, I recommend trying OpenSurveys.

Trouble with that, webman, it wouldn't really pick up the families with no access, would it?

We do a year 6 survey as part of an ICT datahandling unit. They survey the whole school about home use of ICT. The data is not exactly 100% reliable, some of it coming from quick questions to year 1 children but the comparative data over the last 3 years makes it possible to talk about trends in our community.

[webman]

No, but just as a FYI for online surveys...

[enjay]

Our Year 7-9 pupils fill out a self-assessment sheet in ICT/Key Skills which has things like "I can open a Word file", "I can save a file with a different name" and so on, then moving on to more complex tasks. The idea is that they tick these off at the start of the year, update them part-way through and then again at the end of the year. I suspect that if we ever went to family-assessment, we would use similar.

Access to equipment at home is worked out by our ICT teacher who does a very basic "hands up who has access to a computer at home?" at the start of each year. Not very scientific, but it meets our requirements - at present anyway, the Frameworks may change that!

We are in the fortunate position of being able to assume that all students have PCs and broadband at home, and many have highly computer-literate parents (due to our "M4-corridor" location!).