Part Three:
Evaluating the Use of ICT in Teaching and Learning

a. Evaluating the Lessons

In general, the following points should be helpful in structuring the evaluation of lessons involving ICT:

• Were pupils motivated by the work?
• What have they learned?
• What is it that contributed to this learning? - the activity, the resources, your whole class explanations and interventions, your individual help, prompting and questioning.
• Were any particular groups of learners disadvantaged by the type of work?
• Were there any difficulties in managing pupils' learning or behaviour?
• Were you able to monitor pupils' progress while they were working?
• Were you able to assess their learning from the results of their work?
• What influence did ICT have on the lesson?
• Could the contribution of ICT have been improved further?

The teacher felt that the lesson was very successful in motivating pupils, and that they had persevered better than usual. He also felt it was an excellent topic for developing their IT skills. However, he was disappointed with their learning in maths. Most of them needed a lot of help with the basic drawing and copying process, and didn't really get the idea of rotating and reflecting in order to make the shapes fit together.

And although they were willing to try out different possibilities, they didn't really manage to explore independently. They didn't use a systematic approach, and anyway they had difficulty in deleting mistakes, which made quite a mess of the screen until he came to help.

b. Evaluating the Resources Used