digital lifeboat

Week 4  was working on the research design. It’s been slow going and I felt bogged down and wanting to start work on the course building before I run out of time.

In the middle of all that took a few days “out” by way of a diversion to do a bit more family history research. Inspired by the 90th anniversary of the ending of WW1 and spent some late nights unravelling the amazing story of a Great- Great- Uncle who died at the Somme.

Anyway as sometime happens, when busy at work and study, a ”mental break”  renews one’s energy to get back to the task at hand.

So to week 5 and a bit of excitement the first tangiable object resulting from the project, the results of my training needs survey are in.

Here the beauty of using Moodle comes into its own. The survey was done on line and the built in reporting tool has already done all the analysis work for me and provides the results in graphical and numeric form.

Comparing this with the effort of the last piece of research I did on the pupils on paper I recall the hassle and inaccuracy, double checking, inputting all the data into excell and then figuring out the correct equations to get a meaningful result.

Granted it took me several hours to build the questionairre, but it was a fraction of the time I spent on other recent paper based surveys. The last time this survey was issued the results were looked at briefly but never analised at all statistically.

All I had to do this time was observe the number of participents entries rising until after a couple of e-mail reminders all but one of my study group complied. I deliberately did not look at the results until they were all in having learned from my previous research that the full picture often looks different from the interim result.

Here is an example showing the way the results are presented for a rating question.

I found that by scanning through the 16 questions I could quickly identify the gaps in knowledge, and those areas where a whole topic was not well understood. For a busy teacher with several hundred pupils this must be of great benefit.

Week 2 a bit of a blow out due to illness. A lot on at work managed to hold things together there but had to drop the study ball. Have half term week 3 to move forwards again.

Have more or less finalised my informed consent letter, hope to get this delivered and signed during the inset day at the beginning of term. Lots of discussion and thought about all the info that the study subjects need to have to give informed consent.

As the research methods course gets going so does my preparation. Attempting to organise my research using the Zotero FireFox plug in. As I usually use IE this means setting up another browser and beginning to separate my research and leisure browsing. Not a bad thing perhaps, less confusing and vital as the project rambles on to capture references and reduce the workload on the writing stage. 

Pleased with my initial efforts with Zotero. A quick trip to Amazon puts all the bibliographic info in place and I can get down to attaching notes as I read. I will need to look at ways of backing this up however before I get too carried away!

In Victory posting building up as we get our teeth into the work. Good to hear from everyone again. The course is now reduced somewhat again, but those going on seem determined and ready for the fray.

By way of limbering up to the research methods course about to get underway here are my thoughts on my attempt to do some research on the pupil cohort at work.

This week I finally manged to publish the results from my survey of pupils from last term. I will write about how I did this research and what I learned in broad terms without publishing the statistical results here.

The purpose of the research was to discover how many of our pupils had access to a computer at home with broadband Internet access suitable for accessing work in the school VLE, Moodle. It seemed to my colleagues and I that we could not push forward the development of the VLE without having some indication of how many children could access it from outside school. Also we needed to be looking at how we might make provision for those children who might not have computers and Internet access. We are aware of the growing scale of gov initiatives to address the digital divide, however we expect a number of children to fall through this net even so.

A questionnaire was prepared on paper which was sent home with all the pupils. Responses were identifiable initially so that they could be checked off a register to see who had replied. We wanted to get statistics for the children by year group. The personal identifying information was then removed before someone else entered the data into a spreadsheet. I had to re check the data several times as some of the sample groups were very small errors in the input had a disproportionate effect on the results.

The initial round of questionnaires bought in a return of about 30%. I then sent out via e-mail and letter further copies to those who had not responded.  By the end of term we had had a response rate of 50%.

In general I think next time I will send the survey directly by post and e-mail to the parents. The survey itself was quite long and we attempted to get too much information. Next time I will have just three questions. Do you have a computer, do you have Internet access, is it broadband?

Maths and statistics not being my strong point I have a vague awareness that there may be statistical methods by which the data we have could be extrapolated to make predictions about the the 50% who did not respond. However in the absence of this knowledge the application of “common sense” to the figures had yielded some interim conclusions.

The results from the group who have responded show a disproportionately high percentage of broadband Internet access way above the national average, currently 57%

This lead me to conclude that those who did not respond largely represent the balance of those who do not have computers or internet access.

This means that overall across the school our pupil cohort have well under the national average of access to the Internet. This would be consistent with other measures of the student cohort.

It was interesting that as the returns came in I was initially impressed with the level of Internet access the pupils seemed to have, and was quite optimistic about our ability to close the gap on the digital divide. However it was only at the end of the process that the true picture emerged. It is clear that only the massive levels of investment proposed by central government will make an impact on this situation. For ourselves, once the impact of the £300,000,000 is assessed we will need to revisit this question again, a year on from the first survey.

Meanwhile we can use the data we have to work on plans for a range of after school activities for pupils and their parents.