Usage

Huge progress in IT infrastructure in schools over the five-year period is not surprising since the EMB Document analysis gives a very clear picture of the extensive amount of financial, advisory and training input, and support given by the EMB. As can be seen from Table 7.6 (School Heads’

Questionnaire item 13), the total budgeted expenditure on IT by the responding secondary schools for the academic year 2003/04 was approximately HK$90 million. The highest proportion of expenditure was on hardware, consumables and technical support. Professional development and training for secondary school staff received a very small sum from the school budget in comparison to the amount spent on hardware. However, as explained in Chapter 6, this low proportion of budgets allocated to professional development/training for staff is a consequence of other provisions having been made for this purpose and should not be misconstrued to suggest that this has not been given attention. Most of the school heads regard hardware as the most important element in the ITEd initiative and allocate more expenditure to this than to other areas.

Chapter 7: General Findings from Secondary School Sector

School Heads

Nearly all of the secondary school heads interviewed had their own computers in their offices. During the month prior to completing the questionnaire, the majority of school heads (98.6%) had made at least some daily use of computers at school (School Heads’ Questionnaire item 1e). 23.2% said they had used computers for less than one hour per day, 53.2% spent up to two hours per day and a further 28.1% spent two to less than four hours. Only 6.5% said they had spent more than 10 hours. The most common use by secondary school heads (School Heads’ Questionnaire item 2) was for school administration (94.3% using computers occasionally or always for this purpose), followed by researching or analysing school data (79.6%). 69.3% said they had used the Internet for inter-school communication and joint school activities. Just over half (52.3%) said they had used it for discussing teaching-related matters with teachers, but less than half had used it for communicating with students (46.3%) or parents (30.4%), or for teaching/training (45.7%).

The usage patterns at home are similar. Only 6% said they had not used computers at home at all during this period (School Heads’ Questionnaire item 1c) and 73.7% had used computers at home for up to 2 hours per day, 11.8% spent two to less than four hours, and 5.5% for more than 10 hours. More than 73% used their home computers for job-related tasks (79.3%) or for communication (84.3%) or browsing/searching (73.5%) for information (School Heads’ Questionnaire item 1d). Very few used them for other purposes like reading news, entertainment or personal matters like banking.

Teachers

The School Visits and Focus Group Interviews with teachers indicated wide variation in their access to computers for their own use in school. In some secondary schools, there are only three or four computers located in a small room for all the staff to share, whereas in others there is easy and abundant access. The School Survey (item 2b) revealed that 23.8% of the secondary schools surveyed had five or less computers in staffrooms and 55.3% had 10 or less. 13.3% of schools reported having 51 or more computers in staffrooms. In some of the schools observed, teachers are able to borrow notebook computers to take home. Some schools have implemented different policies to encourage teachers’ usage, like two teachers sharing one notebook (half a year for each) or the school subsidises a fixed amount of money for teachers to buy their own.

Regarding the purposes for computer use, (Teachers’ Questionnaire item 1e), 98.8% of teachers reported having made some use of computers at school. 28.6% of the teachers reported that, in school, they had used computers for less than one hour per day; 53.8% said they had used them for up to two hours per day and 23.2% had used them two to less than four hours. 9.6% reported to have used them for more than 10 hours. 85.3% said they used computers in school for teaching, 69.2% for browsing or searching for information and 63.6% for school administration (Teachers’ Questionnaire item 1f).

50.8% of the secondary school teachers reported using school computers for communication, but few for research on teaching.

At home, only 2.7% of the teachers reported having not used any at computers at all (Teachers’

Questionnaire item 1c), 58.2% said they had used them for up to two hours and 20.5% for two to less than four hours. 10.6% having spent more than 10 hours per day. The main reason for using computers at home (Teachers’ Questionnaire item 1d) was for job-related tasks (82.6%), followed by communication (71.9%) and browsing and searching (71.4%) for information. Similar to findings from school heads, reading news, entertainment and personal matters were not very commonly reported uses by secondary school teachers.

Students

70.2% of S2 students, 49.6% of S4 and 61.4% of S6 students reported having made at least some use of computers at school in the month prior to the data collection (Students’ Questionnaire item 2).

97.5%-98.5% of the students had made at least some use of computers at home over the same period, showing clearly that more secondary school students use computers at home than at school. 29.8% of S2, 50.4% of S4 and 38.6% of S6 students reported having no use and 52.5% of S2, 37.5% of S4 and 50.3% of S6 students reported having less than one hour’s use of computers at school in the month prior to the data collection. (Note that this question did not specify use at school outside computer lessons.) On the other hand at home (Students’ Questionnaire item 1b), 83.2% of S2, 87.1% of S4 and 82.1% of S6 students had spent more than one hour and around half of the S2 and S4 students had spent more than 3 hours per day, with a slight drop in S6 (36.4%). Regarding the nature of computer use, around 80% of the students said they had used computers at school and more than 85% (up to 94.1% of S6 students) at home for school or learning-related activities in the previous month, but with more than 65% doing this kind of activity for less than two hours per day (Students’ Questionnaire items 3 and 1c).

From Student Questionnaire item 4 (Table 7.7), it can be seen that the most common use for students of all grade levels is searching for information from the Internet – even more than learning computer skills themselves. The next most common use for all three grade levels is project work (21.4%-31.8%).

There is a slightly higher proportion of S6 than of S4 or S2 students searching the Internet for information (from 53.4% and 45.5% of S2 and S4 students to 56.9% of S6 students) and doing presentations (from 13.7% and 12.7% of S2 and S4 students to 18.7% of S6 students). Otherwise there tends to be a drop in the proportions of S6 students using computers for all other listed purposes and using learning software (from 7.4% in S2 to 3.3% in S6). There is also quite a sharp decrease in the proportion of S6 students using self-learning software. For project work there is a decrease from 31.8% in S2 to 21.4% and 24.3% in S4 and S6 respectively.

Table 7.7: Nature of students’ use of computers in school (Students’ Questionnaire, Q. 4)

Use S2

(N = 2071)

S4 (N = 2029)

S6 (N = 1840)

% % %

Searching for information on the Internet 53.4 45.5 56.9

Project work 31.8 21.4 24.3

Drilling exercises 4.3 3.9 3.6

Creative work 6.4 5.9 4.7

Presentations/PowerPoint 13.7 12.7 18.7

Learning computer skills 20.6 15.0 10.8

Self-learning software 7.4 5.3 3.3

Note: Multiple response items

Students from all grade levels indicated that the most common location for using computers outside of school hours is their own home (92.1%-94.9%), followed by other people’s homes (36.4%, 42.7% and 40%), and then their own school (33.4%, 26%, 41.5%). 23.2% of S2, 19% of S4 and 26.4% of S6 students said they use public libraries. (Students’ Questionnaire item 16). Relatively lower percentages of students reported using cyber-cafes (18.4%, 22.5% and 10.3%) and even fewer using community/youth centres (4.9%, 2.8% and 4.4%). As for the primary sector, very few students in the focus group interviews mentioned the use of community/youth centres for IT access.

The students were asked to elaborate further on the average time per day spent, outside school hours, on a range of activities (Table 7.8, Students’ Questionnaire item 17).

Chapter 7: General Findings from Secondary School Sector

Table 7.8: Average amount of time spent by students per day outside school hours on various activities (Students’ Questionnaire, Q.17)

S2 S4

% of students choosing % of students choosing

Activities N

None at all

< 30 min

30 min to < 1hr

1 to

< 2 hrs

2 to <

3 hrs 3 to <

4 hrs

≥ 4hrs

N

None at all

< 30 min

30 min to <

1hr 1 to <

2 hrs 2 to <

3 hrs 3 to <

4 hrs

≥ 4hrs a 2066 12.9 36.2 31.7 13.8 3.7 0.9 0.9 2024 17.6 38.8 29.2 10.9 2.4 0.4 0.6 b 2064 35.1 39.6 17.1 5.7 1.5 0.6 0.4 2021 38.1 38.0 15.7 6.1 1.1 0.5 0.5 c 2044 27.7 42.5 19.9 7.2 1.5 0.6 0.5 2009 33.1 38.7 20.0 6.5 1.0 0.5 0.1 d 2061 4.5 19.3 34.3 26.2 10.5 2.3 2.9 2024 3.9 17.1 31.9 30.0 10.5 3.0 3.6 e 2051 3.4 9.6 16.4 24.8 18.6 9.1 18.1 2016 3.7 8.8 15.5 27.3 17.7 9.3 17.8 f 2058 24.5 38.8 20.5 10.6 3.1 1.3 1.3 2011 22.8 42.3 20.1 9.0 2.8 1.5 1.7 g 2056 12.9 22.5 22.4 19.3 11.1 4.3 7.6 2026 9.2 18.3 25.0 21.1 11.6 5.1 9.8 h 2056 52.2 22.8 10.4 6.7 3.3 1.9 2.7 2014 56.3 21.8 8.3 6.0 3.5 1.7 2.4 i 2056 14.8 15.5 16.3 18.8 13.4 7.2 14.2 2019 9.8 14.4 15.8 21.0 16.0 7.4 15.7

S6

% of students choosing Activities

N

None at all

< 30 min

30 min to < 1hr

1 to

< 2 hrs

2 to <

3 hrs 3 to <

4 hrs

≥ 4hrs a 1834 10.1 37.4 29.7 16.7 3.4 1.3 1.4 b 1832 51.3 34.0 10.2 3.4 0.5 0.3 0.3 c 1822 23.3 41.2 23.0 9.0 2.4 0.4 0.7 d 1832 1.1 18.1 35.1 28.2 11.4 3.3 2.8 e 1834 3.8 14.4 22.4 28.3 16.7 5.7 8.7 f 1828 21.7 45.8 17.9 9.8 2.7 1.3 0.8 g 1833 10.2 27.7 24.8 19.3 8.7 4.4 5.0 h 1830 56.6 24.7 8.4 6.2 1.9 1.2 1.2 i 1833 7.1 19.7 20.4 25.1 12.8 6.4 8.6 a. Assignments

b. Using instructional software

c. Participating in other school/learning related activities d. Searching for information on the Internet

e. Entertainment

f. Downloading documents/files for learning g. Downloading music/movies/freeware

h. Communicating with teachers through E-mail/ICQ

i. Communicating with classmates/friends through E-mail/ICQ

Between 64.9% and 87.1% of S2 students, 61.9% to 82.4% of S4 students and 48.7% to 89.9% of S6 students indicated they had done at least some learning-related activities such as completing assignments, using instructional software, downloading documents or files for learning, or participating in other school-related learning activities. One of the biggest differences between S6 and the younger secondary students is in the use of instructional software, with 51.3% of the former not having used this at all compared to 35.1% of S2 students and 38.1% of S4 students. On the other hand, it is clear that entertainment-related activities such as downloading music or movies and using ICQ or email to communicate with classmates or friends are more popular with all secondary students, with about 85.2% to 96.6% of S2, 90.2% to 96.3% of S4 students and 89.8% to 96.2% of S6 students respectively having spent at least some time on these. 95.5%-98.9% of the secondary students reported having spent at least some time on searching for information on the Internet, which could be for either learning purposes or for entertainment.

From the student focus group interviews it was quite clear that entertainment was a dominant use of computers by secondary school students. However, their use is not solely for entertainment. Students seem to have reported higher use of IT for learning purposes in cases where teachers gave them some kind of specific learning targets such as on-line exercises/tests. The student focus group interviews reinforce the student questionnaire data that most computer use at home for learning-related purposes was to find information to support projects. The interview comments also confirm the student

questionnaire data that the junior secondary classes seem to have more project work than the senior classes, probably because of the latter concentrating more on preparation for exams. It is of particular interest to note that students often reported that when they are using computers at home they are frequently doing several school-related and entertainment-related activities at the same time, such as doing homework while listening to music and participating in ICQ (some of which is also for the purpose of doing homework or sharing information and which, the students claimed, often saves them the need to have face-to-face meetings to discuss homework assignments). This suggests, therefore, that the picture of students’ home use of IT might not be as bad as it seems at face value and that they are not using it solely for entertainment. Whether and how this multi-tasking would affect their learning is something worth exploring.

That older students had placed more importance on using computers for communication is also supported by the data about numbers of email accounts and personal websites (Students’ Questionnaire items 18 and 19). The proportions of students with at least one email account are 94.7%, 95.5% and 99% of S2, S4 and S6 students, respectively. 65.7%-76.9% of the students have more than one e-mail account. On the other hand, personal websites were not commonly reported by secondary school students. The majority of students in all three grade levels reported that they do not have any personal websites (66.5%, 67.5% and 72.2% for S2, S4 and S6 students respectively).

It can be noted that the usage patterns indicated by these data are similar to those shown by the students who completed the IT Activity Daily Log, as reported in Section 7.5. Parent data can also be used to triangulate the students’ home use of computers. The responses to Parents’ Questionnaire item 4b corroborate the students’ claims that the most common activity is entertainment, followed by searching for information on the Internet, communication through email or ICQ. There was a successive increase in all these activities from S2 to S6 in the proportions participating.