4. Results - Initial implementation findings
4.1. Perceptions of how much laptops were used
Parents are, to some degree, unaware of how laptops are used in classes for learning. However, many
indicated that their sons used the laptop for a range of activities at home mostly involving social media,
gaming and music. Most parents and educators are keen to make good educational use of ICT to improve
student engagement and learning (Selwyn & Husen, 2010). A consistently reported message was:
I am concerned that, although boys are getting used to using a laptop and all they offer, it is at the expense of
handwriting, and specifically, the speed of writing and when they eventually get to Year 12 exams. (Parent Year
7a)
Initially as indicated in the results in Table 2, parents in Year 7 had an underlying concern about how
much time was spent using the laptop at school. When comparing baseline data to the data collected at the
end of the first year of the study, Year 7 parents indicated a 13.7% increase in their perceptions that laptops
were used too much. This compares to the perceptions of parents from Year 5 who actually recorded a
decrease of 2.1%.
Table 2. Parent views on time spent using laptops at school