ICT action school development at Helen Parkhurst Dalton School

The paper presents the progress of the action plan for the improvement of the ICT usage at the Helen Parkhurst Dalton School for secondary education in the Netherlands. At the start of the described action period in 2007, the ICT-usage in education was assessed through a review performed by a group of European inspectors. This assessment formed the basis for a continuous development in the school for promoting and improving the usage of ICT to improve the effectiveness of education. We did this by addressing the observed weaknesses with special measures, and continuing the action plans which were already put in place. We kept loyal to our starting point that technology use has to be determined through a strong vision of education and not that technology determines our philosophy as is sometimes the case. It was determined that the curriculum that should drive the learning, not the technology. In 2009 we carried out an intermediate self-evaluation. We established a new vision for school development for the near future. In this vision there was much room for a growing role of ICT usage. Concrete plans for the future were made. In this paper, the third in a row, we will try to assess the full impact of this implementation for teachers, learners and the quality of the teaching and learning process by comparing the assessment of 2007 with a self evaluation on the same indicators in 2011.

1. The original European Framework for the Evaluation of ICT in Education was developed by the contribution of: Guy Ménant, Mireille Golaszewski, Michel Perez, Sven Borg, Peter Ekborg, Ken Dyson, Pádraig Mac Fhlannchadha, Iain Lowson, Wray Bodys, Kenneth Muir, Martin Uunk, Pieter Hogenbirk, Ferry de Rijcke and edited by Bert Jaap van Oel, the Netherlands

2. The Partners In Learning Program is sponsored by Microsoft and is aimed at new ways of teaching and learning by the net-generation. The Dutch site is: http://www.microsoft.com/netherlands/onderwijs/pil/default.aspx.

Authors and Affiliations

1. Helen Parkhurst Dalton School, Bongerdstraat 1, 1326 AA, Almere, The Netherlands

   Pieter Hogenbirk & Peter van de Braak

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Pieter Hogenbirk.

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