What Do Students Want in Schools?

Looking for ideas on how to spend federal stimulus dollars to enhance educational technology? Project Tomorrow has a suggestion: Listen to what students say they'd like to see in their schools.

The nonprofit organization is touting the results from its annual Speak Up survey as a means of giving lawmakers--as well as state and local education leaders--some guidance on how stimulus funds can be used to improve teaching and learning.

Project Tomorrow highlighted the results from this year's survey during a March 24 briefing on Capitol Hill. According to the group's report, students can be viewed as a digital advance team: They are early adopters and adapters of new technologies, creating new uses for various technology products to meet their sophisticated needs.

"What kinds of technologies are students using, and which are the types of things that students can use in school?" asked Julie Evans, chief executive officer of Project Tomorrow. Those are questions many educators are now asking as well--and the survey's results provide some answers.

More than 280,000 K-12 students, 28,000 teachers, 21,000 parents, and 3,000 administrators responded to the online Speak Up survey between October and December 2008.

The report focuses on five areas where schools can better incorporate technology: increasing the use of mobile devices, creating different types of spaces for learning, incorporating Web 2.0 tools into daily instruction, expanding access to digital resources in the classroom, and getting beyond the classroom walls to explore careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines.

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