As is the case in other central European countries, the majority of German primary and secondary schools are half-day schools: a typical school day ends between noon and 2 pm. The unfavourable German results of the PISA 2000 study provided an impulse for a nationwide “all-day school movement” supported by major financial investments to establish all-day school programs. As a consequence, the percentage of all-day schools increased considerably: Today approximately one third of all German schools provide all-day curricula for their students. Moreover, this quota is continuously rising. With this extended learning time, the expectation of realising both pedagogical changes and improvements of subject-specific and general learning competencies has been increasing (Rollett, Holtappels & Bergmann, 2008). For instance, it is expected that all-day schools will provide new options to use digital media for learning purposes in innovative contexts, combined with the facilitation of innovative and supportive concepts and methods of learning (Tulodziecki, 2007; Schulz-Zander & Eickelmann, 2009). Moreover, the use of digital media should allow for strengthening firstly the link between classroom learning and extracurricular media-related activities, and secondly the link between formal and informal learning. The idea is to use the increase in school time to make the use of ICT more flexible and effective in terms of fostering media competencies as well as subject-related competencies. Especially those students with rare computer access at home or non-educational usage are supposed to benefit. Furthermore, the ongoing gender difference (in favor of males) in relation to ICT, as well as the gap between the male and female uses of and accesses to technologies should be diminished. This paper investigates the amount and the coverage of ICT-related activities at all-day schools on the basis of a representative sample of 373 German primary and secondary schools, emphasising whether and how the extension of learning time is used to employ digital media for learning purposes in innovative contexts, and whether extracurricular media-related activities promise to foster the improvement of media competence.

The data was gathered from the three waves of the longitudinal “Study on the Development of All-Day Schools” (StEG, http://www.projekt-steg.de, Holtappels, Klieme, Rauschenbach & Stecher 2007). The general aim of this study is to evaluate the development of all-day schools in Germany and to provide recommendations and “steering knowledge” for schools and school administrations. Standardized questionnaires were employed at each stage of the survey (2005, 2007 and 2009) in order to assess heads of school, teachers, all-day staff, parents and students.The focus of this paper is the report of approximately 30.000 secondary students (5th, 7th and 9th grade) concerning their use of computers within class and extracurricular activities.

Our analyses showed that extracurricular ICT-related activities generally increased after the all-day school programs where implemented. However, only a small percentage of students reported a frequent ICT use during their all-day activities. Schools with infrequent computer usage during classroom instruction did not venture to compensate this deficit within their extracurricular program. Schools with a selective computer use during classroom learning time seem to offer fewer ICT activities in the extra time. This might again lead to the conclusion that schools could only make full use of the potential of ICT (Eickelmann, 2010) through mandatory ICT-related school programmes. A positive trend could be seen concerning grade levels: ICT-use in class rose from the 5th grade to the 9th. A similar but weaker trend could also be found within the extracurricular activities. Starting at fifth grade, boys reported a higher degree of ICT use than girls and this difference rose with grade level. This finding might lead to the interpretation that the present arrangement of extracurricular activities within all-day school in Germany increase gender differences in media competencies rather than reducing them. Further analysis presented in this paper addresses how ICT use within extracurricular activities corresponds to the socio-economic background of students.