Wolverhampton's e-confident pupils win accolade from Minister
Released: 10 January 2007
Government schools minister Jim Knight has praised pupils at St Alban's Primary School, in Wednesfield, for their use of information technology in the classroom.
Mr Knight told a national conference last week that he had been hugely impressed when he visited the school in December and saw 10-year-olds using portable handheld computers to support their learning. St Alban’s is part of Wolverhampton's Learning2Go project.
Speaking to delegates from all over the country at the North of England Education Conference last week, the Mr Knight said: “Last month I saw the fantastic use of handheld PDAs (personal data assistants) in a Year 6 class in Wolverhampton.
Children producing animations of their science experiments, publishing their own e-books and getting podcasts in the iTunes chart. The technology was great, but more importantly, the way pupils and teachers were learning from each other was spectacular.”
Councillor Christine Irvine, Wolverhampton’s cabinet member for children and young people, said she was delighted that the minister had recognised the work of Wolverhampton schools. She added: “It's great to see our pupils and teachers gaining the recognition they deserve. This exciting initiative has so far involved more than a 1,000 learners and their teachers from 18 schools across the city.
It is in the lead, nationally and internationally, and shows how successfully mobile devices can be used to give children and young people access to their learning anywhere, anytime. With their PDAs, learners, parents and teachers are developing new and exciting learning pathways both in and beyond school”.
The Learning2Go project is co-ordinated by Wolverhampton's E-Services Team for children and young people and is led by Dave Whyley, the city's information and communications technology headteacher consultant.
Mr Whyley was equally impressed by the pupils' ground-breaking work. He said: "Everyone attached to this project gets a real buzz when they see the children working together using their PDAs. Their enthusiasm, imagination and self-confidence is infectious."
The Learning2Go project also attracted more national attention last night (Tuesday, 9 January 2007) when pupils from St Jude’s Primary were shown using their PDAs on the BBC’s 10 O’Clock news programme.
It follows a demonstration of the project to the Secretary of State for Education and Skills, Alan Johnson, when he opened St Jude’s last November.
Adults and children involved in this and other local e-learning projects will be participating at this week’s national BETT exhibition at Olympia in London.
BETT is the world's leading educational information & communications technologies (ICT) event, attracting 600 educational suppliers and over 28,000 visitors.
It brings together the global teaching and learning community for four days of innovation and inspiration).
Issued by the press office.