Good Practice - Case Study Holy Family Primary School & Nursery and Cuffley School

Using Netbooks for one-to-one computing in Year 6

School Nos: 539, 568

Hertfordshire Development CentrePage 1 of 3/Good Practice - Case Study

Using Netbooks for one-to-one computing in Year 6

These case studies focus on two Hertfordshire schools that are using netbooks (also known as ‘minibooks,’ and ‘mini laptops’) to provide one-to-one computing for pupils in year 6. The underlying aim is that children will have greater and more personalised access to ICT across the curriculum…

HolyFamilyPrimary School

The HolyFamilyPrimary School in Welwyn Garden City is a single form entry voluntary aided RomanCatholicSchool. There were 27 children in year 6

duringthe 2009/2010 school year.

The Equipment

The minibook chosen by this school is the RM Asus Minibook (also known as the Asus Eee PC) running Windows XP Home. These have a 10” screen, weigh less than 1.3kg and the school reports a battery life of around 5 hours from fully charged. The minibooks access the internet through the school’s wifi, which is connected to the HGfL and therefore filtered. The minibooks are kept in a lockable charging cabinet so that devices can be safely stored and charged when not in use. The school network runs an RM Community Connect 4 system (CC4,) and the minibooks connect to this through ‘RM Connector’ software which enables Windows XP Home devices to connect to CC4 networks.

Each minibook has been given a unique number and the pupils always use the same device, identifying it by this number.

Use across the curriculum

As the school has chosen Windows devices that can integrate with the whole school network, the children have access to the range of software that is available across the school. This includes Microsoft Office and 2Simple Software, as well as online access to SAM Learning and MyMaths.co.uk.

During my visit to the school in December 2009 the children were keen to show me a variety of work they had completed, or was in progress, on their minibooks. This included a project on Cyberbullying, carried out during anti-bullying week. The children had made advice posters in Word, which featured a ‘super hero’ character which each pupil had designed for him/herself using the Marvel.com website. These superheroes became anti-bullying heroes in the posters. The children had also completed a project on rivers, and had used the minibooks for internet research before writing up their findings in Word or Publisher and illustrating their work with images found online. Work completed on the minibooks was mainly saved to a shared drive as this gave them more storage space than if saving to their own home folder on the network. This also had the added advantage that the teacher could display the shared folder on the whiteboard and the children could see their files appear on the board when they saved them, so that they knew they had saved to the correct place.

Benefits

Though, at the time of my visit, the minibooks had only been in use a short time, it was clear that the one-to-one access to effective ICT, whenever it was necessary, was having a positive impact on the children’s learning. Where as before, the children would have had weekly visits to the ICT suite, where they might be working together with a partner to access the resources, they were now able to use ICT in a far more personalised way, working more independently and at their own pace.

CuffleySchool

CuffleySchool is a Primary two form entry FoundationSchool.

The Equipment

Like Holy Family, Cuffley use the RM Asus Minibook running Windows XP Home. The minibooks access the internet through the school’s wifi, which is connected to the Hertfordshire Grid for Learning and filtered. There are wifi access points in several positions around the school so that the minibooks can be moved around the school and still have full connectivity. Each of the two classes has access to a lockable charging cabinet so that devices can be safely stored and charged when not in use. The school network runs an RM Community Connect 4 system (CC4,) and the minibooks connect to this through ‘RM Connector’ software which enables Windows XP Home devices to connect to CC4 networks.

Each minibook is labelled with a pupil’s name so that they use the same computer every day.

Use Across the Curriculum

Probably the greatest use of the minibooks is with office applications – word processing, spreadsheets and presentations. Each device is installed with OpenOffice 3.1, a free open-source Office suite that is compatible with Microsoft Office. As the fixed PCs in the school run Microsoft Office, children are encouraged to save their OpenOffice documents in .doc format so that they can be accessed from the fixed computers. Some examples of OpenOffice use at Cuffley include:

Using the spreadsheet program for a science morning – collecting data and producing graphs.
Writing discussion texts – e.g. should mobile phones be allowed in school?
Making photo-collages using the OpenOffice word-processor.
Making presentations about rivers using the OpenOffice equivalent program to Powerpoint.

The school feels it important to maintain the importance of handwritten work, so the minibooks are not used for all writing tasks. Often, the pupils will produce their draft work handwritten, and when the text is ready they then use their minibooks to type up the final version.

With internet access available through the minibooks, the school has taken advantage of some of E2BN’s online resources. This has included an interactive live eSafety session using the E-ngage Liveservice, in which the pupils took part in an online question and answer session with an expert in the field of eSafety. By logging in to the session on their minibooks the children used the E-ngage Live interface to receive emailed esafety scenarios, which they discussed with a classmate before replying with how they would respond to the scenario. They then received personalised feedback from the expert.

The minibooks are often used for researching topics online. For example, for guided reading the children were reading a Michael Morpurgo book, and they used the minibooks to do research on the author.

They have also used the minibooks to access SAM Learning and BBC Bytesize. The class would be split into groups with each group working on a different online activity.

The RM Asus Minibook features a built-in webcam. Using E2BN’s Flashmeeting, which is a web-based video-conferencing tool, they practised video-conferencing with each other, using their minibooks in different areas around the school. The pupils also made sound recordings using the built-in microphones and the free, open-source software Audacity. They recorded poems they had written and imported sound effects to add a dramatic effect to their poems.

Benefits

As with HolyFamilyPrimary School, the use of netbooks in Year 6 at Cuffley provided wider opportunities to use ICT across the curriculum, in a creative and personalised way. Both schools had considered carefully how to integrate the mobile devices into existing practice and systems, and how learning could be extended through the use of one-to-one devices.

Hertfordshire Development CentrePage 1 of 3/Good Practice - Case Study