The impact of ICT in schools - a landscape review - nationalarchives ...

and who expect to have the opportunity to use
the technologies in their classrooms.
Prensky argues that there is an opportunity for
teachers to capitalise on the motivation that
mobile technologies generate. To do so, they have
to take the principles of gaming and combine
them with the content that they want pupils to
learn. Games, he argues, allow for multiple players
and encourage creative thinking, collaboration
and competition – all of which can be used to
enhance learning in the classroom. They can and
should, according to Prensky, be developed for use
by pupils on mobile phones. The key task is to
transform the features of games into educationallyoriented
transferable knowledge and to identify
ways this can be achieved across the curriculum.
For games, and for ICT use in general, the issues
around motivation, the translation of motivation
into greater understanding and, eventually,
attainment, appear to be more complex than this
might imply, as earlier discussion indicated. We
need to understand better how ICT interacts with
learning and how teachers can develop effective
pedagogic strategies to capitalise on the benefits the
different technologies bring. Increasing motivation
does not necessarily lead to improvements in
understanding and attainment in the longer term.
While much has been written about the potential
of games as learning tools, the evidence is as yet
limited. Valentine et al. (2005), as mentioned
earlier, found statistically significant association
between pupils’ out of school use of ICT for
leisure purposes and decreases in attainment. How
the technology was used appeared to be
important: the more time spent playing computer
games, the less time for other tasks, including
homework and study, with a subsequent
detrimental effect on achievement. While a few
parents argued that playing games on computers
or consoles supported the development of, for
example, thinking skills, Valentine et al. found it
difficult to identify and measure any such gains.
The evidence base has been strengthened through
the findings of the ‘teaching with games’ project
[www.futurelab.org.uk/research/teachingwithgam
es.htm]. The project was a partnership between
education and industry that focused on the use of
games within the formal classroom context and
aimed to provide practical and informed evidence
on the potential of mainstream computer games
in the classroom in supporting learning.
The findings indicate that the majority of
teachers, and students, thought that games could
motivate and encourage engagement with
learning (Sandford et al., 2006). Teachers
considered that the use of games could improve
pupils’ motor and cognitive skills, higher-order
thinking skills and subject knowledge as well as
developing their ICT skills. Teachers also expressed
some concern that the use of games could lead to
anti-social behaviour and/or the acquisition or
hardening of stereotypical views as a result of the
content of some games.
While the majority of teachers (72 per cent) never
played games for leisure, 82 per cent of the pupils
played games at least once a fortnight outside the
classroom, with boys more likely that girls to do
so. In the case studies, the use of games within the
classroom was found to be particularly motivating
when the pupils were given a degree of autonomy
Teachers also expressed
some concern that the use
of games could lead to
anti-social behaviour and/or
the acquisition or hardening
of stereotypical views as a
result of the content of
some games.
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