Letchworth Electronic Network

 

This project was supported by the Letchworth Electronic Network charitable trust and involved providing the town’s schools with Internet access and supporting teachers in their use of the Internet. CeNTRE carried out an evaluation of the project through regular questionnaire survey of teachers and pupils as well as one to one interviews and observation of Internet use in and after lessons.

It was found that in each school there were core groups of teachers who used the Internet in the classroom, the most widely used Internet based activity was giving pupils supervised access to the WWW, to sites the teachers had chosen for pupils to look at. Teachers who did use the Internet in their teaching reported very positively on its value for motivating pupils and giving them access to material which was not otherwise easily available. Time and access to machines were constraints on teachers in all schools. Pupils appreciated the visual nature of Web sites and used email for communication purposes. They also felt they had more control over their learning in a lesson in which the Internet was used. Teachers were concerned over pupils’ ability to handle information and a recommendation was made to develop information handling as a cross curricular skill.