Learning Number in the Primary School through ICT

Information and communications technology (ICT), increasingly available at both home and school, offers new kinds of learning experiences for primary children. This chapter explores the distinctive contribution of ICT to learning experiences of students, focusing on those that are not readily available through traditional media of pencil and paper and organised practice of skills. According to a Becta report in the UK, arguments and evidence for using ICT in the number curriculum focus on the role of feedback, observation of patterns and relationships and the development of visual imagery. The chapter highlights examples that use virtual manipulatives on the Internet, other web-based experiences, and hand-held devices such as Apple's iPad® and iPod Touch® and modern scientific calculators. The focus of the examples is on the development and understanding of important ideas in the number curriculum, such as those related to number patterns, place value, decimals, fractions, factors and ratios, rather than to the refinement of arithmetical skills. New learning experiences using ICT demand a new kind of attention to the role of the teacher, in a variety of contexts, including individual ICT use, small-group use, whole-class use (e.g. through interactive whiteboards) and home use.