Technology access: Resources wasted in computer laboratories

Abstract

The technological infrastructure of Finnish schools varies a lot. In some schools there are computers for almost every pupil in the classroom. On the other hand there are also schools with only a few computers in the whole school. The purpose of this paper is to study how teachers from different schools and school levels utilize technological resources in their teaching. The hypothesis is that good technological infrastructure does not guarantee the use of technological devices in teaching. The data was gathered with an electronic questionnaire in Fall 2002, in order to investigate whether pupils used computers more when the computers were placed in the classroom. Likewise teachers' use of computers for demonstration increased when the computers were placed in the classroom. The number of computers in separate computer rooms did not increase the usage. Thus the most important thing to be considered when planning schools' computer infrastructure is the location of computers. © 2003 by International Federation for Information Processing.