Nearly 78% of teachers in NZ support bring your own device to class...

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Paul O'Leary dropped me a line recently, with the results of a recently conducted survey of 280 people in the education sector on the use of ICT in schools across New Zealand (a joint venture between Adobe and Interface Magazine). Paul wrote "The survey results provide insight into the thoughts of educators in New Zealand on technology in education". There is a superb accompanying infographic (but, unfortunately, it's in .pdf format so I can't embed it, but I can link to the .pdf file here). Paul provided a neat summary (see below), and you can access a fuller online Interface Magazine summary at http://bit.ly/IoRHX4. It would be interested to hear your thoughts and responses to the survey results - anything surprising there? Anything jump out and grab you?

Research highlights

• 68% of respondents think ultra-fast broadband will change the way they currently teach.
• One in five schools (21.8%) operate a Bring Your Own Device policy. A further 42.1% of schools are currently considering introducing a BYOD policy.
• Three quarters of teachers surveyed (75.7%) support the idea of students bringing their own device to class.
• Lack of funding is the most common barrier to using new classroom software and devices for teaching with almost 7 out of 10 teachers (69.3%) citing this as a problem. The next most common issue was lack of time with half of teachers listing this as a barrier.
• Only 1 in 4 teachers (25.4%) notice a digital divide between themselves and students in terms of knowledge about software and devices used in the classroom.
• Seven out of 10 teachers think there are opportunities to apply the teaching technologies that already exist in school differently to produce better education outcomes.
• Three quarters of teachers (75.2%) think that it is valuable for students to learn office productivity tools in preparation for entering the workforce. 65.5% of teachers view learning creative and design software as important for students in preparation for entering the workforce.
• Communication and critical thinking and problem-solving are seen as the top real-world 21^st century skills for today’s learners with nearly all respondents rating them as important or extremely important (97.9% and 97.5% respectively).
• Collaboration follows closely with 94.6% of teachers rating is as important or extremely important as does self-directed learning (92.8%).

Related articles

• BYOD - What is it? Can we do it?
• Beyond BYOD: Mobility Without Compromise
• Yes, BYOD, but fix it yourself.
• BYOD Pilot Readying for Takeoff