Abstract:

The use of digital learning technology has great potential for the school sector. It can promote individual and lifelong learning via the use of special learning environments and prepare content in a form that would be difficult or impossible to implement with conventional means. This is accompanied by new methodological approaches that enable or simplify forms of collaborative work and support different types of learners.

But despite the great amount of different ICT solutions on the market to be used in our classrooms, we still confront a low use of technology to perform innovative teaching and creative learning in the European classrooms (see [1], [2]). For the EU-funded project “Learning Technology Accelerator (LEA)”, a needs analysis has been executed to identify what teachers and students actual needs are. Qualitative and quantitative methods in the form of face-to-face-workshops with students and teachers and online questionnaires have been used.

While focusing on the main actors, our approach was to not directly ask them about what they need, but what they think are barriers that limit the exploitation of the full potential of learntech for use in schools, and about the skills they have. From these findings, the needs are derived that are necessary to overcome the barriers.

The research has been concentrated around the following questions:
- What skills do students/teachers need to use digital teaching and learning tools?
- What are the barriers for students/teachers when using digital teaching and learning tools?

In order to answer these questions, a quantitative survey for students and teachers has been developed and conducted in five European countries with almost 300 teachers and more than 900 students participating. In this paper, we present our answers for the questions.

References:
[1] Lang, M. Lounaskorpi, P. Pardo, A., D 6.1 State of the Art in Personal Learning Environments; EU-project IMAILE 2014, http://www.imaile.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/IMAILE-Recommendations-SoA-part-D6.1-Final-.pdf
[2] Survey of schools: ICT in education, Final Report for European Commission 2013, https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/news/survey-schools-ict-education

Keywords:

ICT in education, personal learning enviroment, needs analysis for ICT, survey for teachers and students.