Every pupil in a Year 3/4 class at Oughtibridge Primary has been given a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) for the academic year 2005-06, allowing them to use cutting edge technology in the classroom.

The purpose of the project is to look at different ways the PDAs can be used in the classroom, and see how useful they are as a tool for learning. Y3/4 teacher Claire Stimpson said, “The children are really motivated by having the PDA’s. They really enjoy any work which involves them.” 

Extra homework

The PDAs have allowed the children to access the internet, which has enabled more individual research, and also give the children more experience of using search engines.  As well as writing poems and stories and research, the children have been able to record plays, record musical compositions, record adverts and we have used Excel for graphing work in science.   

The pupils take the PDA’s home each night and are able to do homework in the PDA’s and send it to Claire’s laptop to print. The children have shown their parents how to use them and parent feedback has shown that many of the children make up their own extra homework so that they can use them.

More confident

Claire said, “We will be able to see if they have impacted learning when we complete our QCA tests, as there are 3 parallel Y3/4 classes so any impact will be clear. However, it has already been noted that the children are much more confident in using the computers in our ICT suite and some of the children are showing a real flair for ICT.”

In July the PDA’s will be returned to the CLC for use in similar projects in the future.

If you would like to get involved in a PDA project contact Andrew Bush at the CLC on 0114 285 5586 or email