That’s the way we want to learn!” ICT workshop at a primary school

Education is a key ingredient of any knowledge-based society, and ICT will be a key enabling factor to cope with the new strains on our education system. Recently TNO, the Dutch Organisation for Applied Scientific Research, experimented with different existing ICT technologies in a real-life primary classroom. Our ICT for education project had four main objectives. First, we wanted to investigate how we can tweak existing technologies to make them useful within an educational context. Second, we wanted to research the willingness of children to embrace ICT tools within their learning process. Third, we wanted to test whether it is feasible to develop ICT tools for education through participative research. And finally, we wanted the input from school management on practical ICT innovations in education. Our workshop consisted of six different educational activities. In this paper we describe these activities, as well as the feedback from the children, teacher and school director and we list the conditions for success for such a workshop. After discussing relevant follow-up activities we put the results of the workshop in a broader context