Students should spend less time worrying about the appearance as opposed to the content. Teach kids how to
research ethically and move away from cutting and pasting large volumes to complete set tasks. (Parent Year 5b)
Since the introduction of the laptop program, teaching and learning dynamics in the classroom have
changed. For the first time, teachers need to deal with issues that arise with the temptation for students to be
off-task, these being the use of applications that are not relative to learning. Interviews that took place in the
first year indicated that there was an element of off-task behaviour that was not only being noticed by
parents, but also by students.
At times it’s hard to concentrate, as there are too many games, especially when the person next to you is playing
Call Of Duty 4. (Student Year 7a)
Parent feedback focused on issues of effective monitoring:
I see far less of what he is doing in respect to homework and assignments. Much of the work is supposedly done at
school. It is more difficult to monitor his progress with homework and progress on assignments. (Parent Year 7c)
This may indicate that many parents feel a sense of trepidation of their son using the laptop including the
extent to which it impinges on their home life. At the end of the first year of the study, parents and students
were asked to rate the level of change they had seen or experienced through the laptop program. A Likert
scale of low to high, for each cohort, students and parents, was used to rate the level of change. Results are
shown in Table 3.
Table 3. Student and parent views on the level of change in learning since the laptop implementation (annual data)