In Digital Strategy, Education, Educational Technology

What every school needs from a digital strategy —Supporting teaching, learning and an all-round education

Last September (2013) I started my new role as Assistant Principal at Surbiton High School. My brief is the school’s digital strategy. Now, I’m not the first to be appointed to lead a school’s digital strategy – there have been Directors of E-Learning or Directors of ICT elsewhere for some years, but I am one of the first to be appointed directly to the Senior Leadership Team with the specific purpose of devising and implementing a digital strategy to support teaching and learning. And I won’t be the last. Here’s why.

Technology supports teaching

Research shows that lessons are most effective when they are structured thus:

  • An initial review of prior knowledge
  • A formal presentation
  • Guided practice
  • Initial feedback
  • Independent practice
  • A follow-up review

All of these aspects of a lesson can be supported by technology. From this perspective, a good digital strategy ought to take into account how lessons are most effective and put in place the means and support to enable teachers to use technology in such a way that the quality of teaching and learning in their lessons is improved by the use of technology, when it is possible and appropriate.

There is a great variety of tools that claim to support teaching and learning, some of which are more effective than others. Too often, teachers are presented with tools that portray technology as a spell-binding elixir or a magic solution to all their problems. It is neither of these things. This does not mean that we should disregard out of hand the important role that technology can and does play in education.

This silver bullet portrayal of technology has done much harm to teachers’ perceptions and has created large pockets of vociferous cynicism, hardly any of which is sufficiently well informed. Teachers need an informed voice that can guide them past this cynicism, as well as a not insignificant amount of unsubstantiated enthusiasm, towards technologies that can really make a positive impact to outcomes for their students. In my view, this voice has to be that of a teacher. A teacher leading on digital strategy would ensure that teaching and learning determine the shape of the school’s IT network, not vice versa.

Technology supports learning

Ask your students and they’ll tell you that what they want from school is this:

  • Teachers with excellent subject knowledge
  • Feedback that is delivered sensitively and effectively
  • Resources that are media-rich and engaging

These student preferences are supported by research findings in cognitive psychology. And all of them can be supported by the use of technology, which, by the way, your students do want you to use. However, the current prevalent discourse often presents technology in opposition to academic rigour, as if you can have one but not the other. This is, clearly, nonsense and does not stand up to any form of serious scrutiny.

In addition, technology enables learning to take place more easily outside the classroom. Many, on both sides of this argument, insist in viewing this as an alternative to learning in school. It isn’t. A good digital strategy would ensure that learning in school is extended and supported by the use of new technologies that enable students to continue learning beyond the school walls, and would act as a link between formal and informal learning. Face to face contact is always preferable, though not always possible. We do not have to choose between preferable and possible, both are allowed.

Behaviour matters

The social aspect of the internet has revolutionised the way we communicate. Hidden amongst all the sensationalist headlines decrying how we are alone in a sea of constant, inane chatter is the fact that we are writing, reading and communicating with each other on previously unprecedented scales. This presents us with both opportunities and challenges.

Opportunities because we can now use these communication tools to enable teachers to network and learn from others wherever they may be in the world in previously impossible ways; to support teachers in passing on their subject knowledge to learners; and to add a new dimension to the process of feeding back to enable learning to progress.

But also challenges, as bullying and other kinds of inappropriate behaviour are released from the confines of the school corridors onto our social networks, which to this day remain vehemently a no-go area in most schools for this reason.

However, a problem has arisen when many schools have confused controlling access to social networks with total disengagement, thus depriving their students of models of appropriate behaviour, so children only have each other as models. Paradoxically, we then often accuse children of not behaving appropriately online when it was our job all along to educate them well in this respect. Every school policy that does not help students to learn to communicate appropriately should be read as admission of failure.

The problem is compounded by the fact that many of the adults involved in education simply lack the experience and skills to be appropriate role models in the use of social media. This is why a greater, more concerted and more constructive involvement of schools in the digital lives of their students is necessary if we want our students to understand how to be good all-round citizens. Simply ignoring this other dimension of pupil behaviour seems to me to be grossly irresponsible.

This post will be followed by more as I continue to write and develop a digital strategy for Surbiton High School. I would really welcome your thoughts, comments, advice and critique. Please do not hesitate to add to the discussion, below.

Photo credit

In Digital Strategy, Education, Educational Technology

Digital Strategy – Digital Learning Spaces Taming the internet to support teaching and learning in schools

Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people – George Bernard Shaw

Most of you stumbling your way into this blog post will be assiduous blog readers. Some of you will probably have blogs of your own. Whether you are a prolific blog writer or a prolific blog reader, you understand how a blog can be a powerful tool for reflection and sharing of practice.

Most of you will probably be teachers too, but, despite your understanding of how useful a tool a blog can be, only a minority of you will use blogs with your students. And even fewer of you will encourage your students to blog for you.

Earlier this year, in Valencia, I asked a 400 strong audience of Spanish teachers of English (as a foreign language) to put their hands up if they used the internet daily. Unsurprisingly, all hands – as far as I could tell – went up. I then asked them to keep their hands up if they thought their students used the internet daily. The same hands stayed up. Finally I asked them to keep their hands up if they used the internet with their students. Most hands went down and only a handful of teachers kept their hands up, nervously looking around for the like-minded few and far between.

For many reasons, we find that using the internet to its full, social potential does not fit in well with our model of education. We teach students in particular places at particular times. We may actively seek to find resources on the internet but we then tend to print them out and photocopy them, effectively stripping out the technology so that they can be used in our classrooms. If you think about it, it’s much like yoking a horse on to a car.

As I say, it’s not that we don’t understand that blogs can foster independent learning; provide both extension and support; be a showcase pupils’ work; be a reflection and peer assessment tool; bridge the gap between formal and informal learning; develop a  greater understanding of digital citizenship; disassociate learning from a particular time at a particular place; encourage collaborative practices; raise the profile of subjects and departments; and even serve to gather and record evidence of learning and progress over a period of time.

No, it’s not that. It’s just that we’d much rather these technologies adapted themselves to us.

The rise of the tablets

As the internet makes its way relentlessly into our lives and, whether you approve or not, into our classrooms, there might come a point when you realise that what was previously inconceivable is now not only possible, but beginning to become the new normal.

Mobiles devices have been clandestine presences in our classrooms for years now. As we get round to accepting, albeit reluctantly in many cases, that there might be some potential and benefit in exploring the use of tablets to support teaching and learning, we have begun to grudgingly acknowledge that some of the fears were unfounded and that some of the other fears had nothing to do with technology and all to do with behaviour management and high expectations. But that’s another story.

Tablets in the classroom are already becoming as standard as an exercise book. In fact, the most remarkable thing I come away with from visiting schools who have already embraced mobile devices is just how normal having one is. I come away thinking: what is the fuss all about? Increasingly, those teachers who distastefully and unprofessionally joke that the only tablets their students need are “those their psychiatrists prescribe” are beginning to find their audience is shrinking and it is they who are beginning to sound ridiculous.

How we react to the realisation that tablets are normal will define the path we follow as teachers and schools. If you think you need not change anything because you get fantastic results with the sole aid of some old photocopies then, fine, carry on as you are. No major works required. However, if you think that fantastic results is only a portion of what means to be educated, then you have the work cut out.

Digital Learning Spaces

So what if blogs weren’t just blogs any more? What if blogs had grown up into a fully fledged, device-agnostic, tablet friendly and responsive content management system? What if they became digital Learning Spaces?

When your students have tablets they are given access to resources they didn’t have before. Some this see this as a problem to be tackled. I view it as an opportunity: iBooks and e-books are all well and good, apps are great and some are truly brilliant, but online resources that can be curated, updated and accessed easily and conveniently by both teachers and learners are key to the successful adoption of tablets as a means to support teaching and learning.

Take WordPress, my blogging platform of choice: it’s free, it’s easy to install (our IT support team installed it and got it operational the same afternoon I mentioned in passing in a meeting), intuitive to use and it allows for unlimited multiple blogs, giving schools the opportunity to give a voice – a digital Learning Space – not only to individual teachers, subjects and departments, but also to year groups, forms, interest groups, clubs and, of course, individual students.

This has been an option for a long time. Nothing new there. But now, as WordPress has become a responsive and tablet friendly platform, it has essentially began to behave like a mobile app that provides access to content and resources of your making and/or choice to your students, regardless of what the device being used is.

This is what we are trying to do at Surbiton High School. As the Science Department  encourages independent and super-curricular learning; as the Languages department shares support and extension resources and encourages peer-assessment; as the English department showcases students’ work; as the Geography department begins to experiment with the flipped classroom concept; and as our Student Laureates and the Surbiton High Times find an audience for their creativity, these digital Learning Spaces are quickly becoming the cornerstone of our Digital Strategy.

We don’t plan to begin to bring in tablets until 2014. But when we do, we’ll have put the means in place to make sure they are successfully implemented in support of teaching, learning and a damn fine education.

Photo credit

In Education, Educational Technology

Some myths surrounding e-safety Moving on from porn and stranger danger

In the opening lines of his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Stephen Pinker establishes that “believe it or not – and many people do not – violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence”1.

He then reaches the conclusion that “no matter how small the percentage of violent deaths may be, in absolute numbers there will always be enough to fill the evening news, so people’s impressions of violence will be disconnected from the actual proportions”.

I wonder to what extent we are seeing a similar effect when we scrutinise the kind of discourse that surrounds the use of technology by children. The very name e-safety conjures a negative discourse in which we focus on the dangerous aspects of using technology, generally communications technology, and ignore the huge potential technology can offer education. As a result, very often schools’ provision of e-safety advice is coloured by the perception that dangers lurk only a click away.

Whist this may seem to be true a priori, in most cases, adults and children alike manage to make perfectly good and appropriate use of technology without any problems. However, as Pinker discovered in his study of the our perception of the levels of violence, cases of something-terrible-happenned-because-of-technology are quick to hit the headlines, whilst cases in which technology is successfully used to support teaching and learning are seldom, if ever, featured among our daily narrative of catastrophes, accidents and disasters.

A short history of misaprehension

Prior to the introduction of pillar boxes, sending and receiving mail used to be a very public affair. Senders had to take their letters in person to a receiver at a Receiving House or to a Turnpike House where their mail waited to be picked up by the Royal Mail coach. Receiving a letter was the same procedure in reverse. Who was posting or receiving mail was therefore very public knowledge.

When the first pillar boxes were introduced in 1850s, many worried that here was a way in which letters could be sent anonymously by slipping them surreptitiously into the newfangled pillar boxes. The contemporaneous introduction of the Uniform Penny Post, complete with postman deliveries, ensured that receiving mail became a simplified, but also a private business2.

Many voiced concerns about the consequences of allowing the public to send letters anonymously and cheaply and nobody would know who was writing to whom and for what mischievous purpose. This clearly couldn’t add to the greater good. However, as we now know, the ensuing revolution in interpersonal communication heralded, not the collapse of civilisation, as some had feared, but the dawn of a new era of democratised transmission of information.

In the early 20th century, early motor cars were often boycotted in rural areas of the USA because they “posed a danger to stock, horse drawn traffic and even crops”3. In some states cars were forbidden to drive faster than a man’s walking pace, in others a man waving a flag had to precede the car on foot in order to warn other road users that a motorcar was approaching.

In a more recent example of fear and misapprehension, John Birt, former director general of the BBC, remembers how when he first started considering using the internet as a broadcast medium, the move was met with formidable opposition by the different departments within the BBC4 who feared that the new medium would clash with and even end traditional broadcasting. However, Birt pressed ahead with his reforms and, with innovations such as the iPlayer and making programmes available as podcasts, the BBC was able to reach new audiences, changing viewing and listening habits forever as a result4.

Every time a new technology begins to disrupt the status quo, loud alarm bells ring in society. But is such alarm warranted? Are some of the assumptions we make about the internet, its use and its content accurate reflections of reality?

What about all the inappropriate content?

There is no doubt that there is a considerable amount of inappropriate content on the internet. Interestingly, however, exactly how much is another example of how we can assume the worst. When I first started taking an interest in using the internet to support the teaching and learning that went on in my classroom, numerous voices warned me that I should be very careful, as most of the internet, apparently, was porn. Estimates varied, anywhere between 80% and 40% of websites on the internet was of a pornographic nature. However, the fact is that the actual percentage of websites that contain porn is around 4%, perhaps even less5. Of course, if you want to find porn, you will.

Unless you are in a school. Schools are, by and large, protected by robust and effective systems that filter out such content. If a child deliberately bypasses the systems to find pornographic material, how is this different from the child that smuggled a dirty mag on to the school premises when the internet didn’t exist? This is clearly a behaviour problem, not a technology one.

What about sexual predation?

The phrase stranger-danger is one that I hear often in connection with e-safety as we know it in schools. It’s catchy and snappy. It’s also wrong. According to US department of Justice6 93% of physical sexual abuse cases in the States (I couldn’t find reliable UK figures, though I have no reason to believe they would be too dissimilar) are perpetrated by people the children already know, a whopping 47% of children sexual abuse cases in the States are perpetrated by the children’s own family members. So much for stranger-danger.

The percentage of children who are actually sexually abused as a result of online solicitation is 0.7%, which is almost statistically insignificant. (There is no percentage actually given, I worked this out from the fact that there were 129 cases of internet-initiated sex crimes in a total of 1.8 million cases of sexual assault). Another interesting fact is that most of the sexual solicitation that goes on in social networking sites, which these days is more likely to take the guise of sexting, does not occur between deviant adults and children, but rather between children and other children.

With this in mind, is it too far-fetched to conclude that we have been getting it wrong? Whilst the current e-safety narrative fits perfectly with our assumptions about stranger-danger, when you compare it to what actually goes on the advice we are giving children may be woefully inadequate.

What’s wrong with online relationships?

If we are to take the stranger-danger inspired advice to its logical outcome, we should say to students that they should not speak with anyone they don’t actually know. Yet I don’t know anyone – not one person – who uses online means of communication and has met in person everybody they are in contact with through blogs or social networks. On a daily basis I dialogue with people I don’t actually know. And I learn and reflect and generally improve as a person as a result of it.

We all do this. Is it fair therefore, or indeed fruitful and even scrupulous, to tell our our students – for whom being online and participating in the social media environment are a by-product of living in the developed world7 – to behave in a way that we ourselves are unable to model?

As Simon Finch, from the Northern Grid for Learning, puts it “telling young people not to talk to strangers on the web is no more helpful than ‘you must never go into the park’”. What if we need to redefine and reexamine the nature of online relationships? Are there new kinds of relationships we should be teaching our students about? Are there new kinds of relationships we should be encouraging our students to establish?

What about cyber-bullying?

This one’s easy. There’s no such thing as cyber-bullying. There’s bullying; deal with it as such.

When is face to face best?

The facile answer is always. In fact, it isn’t always. It’s sometimes. The main reason schools give to ban the use of mobile technologies (sigh) is that they want to promote an environment in which face to face communication is encouraged. To me this is based on a number of shaky assumptions. Firstly it assumes that pupils will enter a trance like state in which they will stare at a screen forever ignore the physical world around them. This simply does’t happen in my experience. Kids use on online communication as well as face to face communication, not instead of. Secondly, they assume that face to face interaction trumps any other kind of interaction all the time. Only it doesn’t.

Let me explore this last point further. An initial consideration is that face to face interaction is not always possible, therefore some kind of interaction may be preferable to no interaction at all. Furthermore, there are occasions in which online interaction is preferable. Studies have shown that asynchronous online communication, say in through a blog’s comment thread or a forum, for example, is very beneficial as it allows for greater reflection and engages the reader/writer in deep thinking and consideration. In addition, telephone conversations can sometimes be preferable to face to face conversations, for a variety of reasons, as are emails or text messages. That’s why we send so many.

So, telling our students that face to face communication is what we should always aspire to is, at best, disingenuous (incompetent at worst), as there are clearly occasions in which other kinds of communication are preferable. So, what are we doing to teach our students to use these means of communication appropriately? How do we expect our students to engage in reasoned, polite and productive asynchronous dialogue if we do not provide opportunities in which it can happen for academic purposes? Why do we then throw the book at them when they get it wrong, when it is our fault that we didn’t teach them any better?

A curious statement of belief that I hear often is that the art of communication is dying, this at a time in history when we are communicating with each other at a scale unprecedented at any other time in human history. I wonder what Pinker makes of that.

Please feel free to leave your two-penneth and shoot me down if there are any flaws in my arguments or if there is anything I’m overlooking. I feel is tremendously important we get this right.

Photo credit.

  1. PINKER S (2011) The better angels of our nature, London:Penguin ↩
  2. BBC, The people’s post – a narrative history of the Post Office ↩
  3. Horseless Carriage Days (2006) Retrieved March 10, 2012 ↩
  4. BIRT, J. (2012) interviewed in “The Media Show”. Broadcast on March 7, 2012 ↩
  5. WARD M (2013) Web porn: Just how much is there? ↩
  6. US Department of Justice, Facts, Myths and Statistics ↩
  7. SHIRKY, C (2010) Cognitive Surplus, London:Penguin ↩
In Education

Ten questions to ask about your own school

In his book What’s the point of school? Guy Claxton suggests that young people “need […] the temperament to cope confidently with difficulty and uncertainty”1. Schools are therefore exhorted to encourage pupils to take responsibility for their own learning and provide the opportunity, choice and and challenge to explore and learn “real, difficult and meaningful things”.

Claxton also urges parents to take responsibility for their children’s learning by talking to teachers more frequently about their child’s progress, exercising what he calls “parents’ pester power” and ensuring that their schools “are developing their children’s ability to cope well with real life challenges?”. He highlights 10 questions any parent ought to ask their child’s school:

  1. What have you noticed about my child as a learner outside lessons? How much do you know about my child’s interests?
  2. What are you trying to capture in the way you write reports about my child? How do you know if you are being successful? When will you ask for my feedback about the way reports on my child are written?
  3. Is there a good spirit of learning in the staffroom? Do teachers ask and offer help to get better at their jobs? Do staff mainly talk about learning, or about troublemakers, at coffee time?
  4. Do you value education as a preparation for lifelong learning? How have you demonstrated this value to the pupils today?
  5. How do you demonstrate to my child and me what you genuinely value more than exams and good behaviour?
  6. How do you encourage children’s curiosity outside the set curriculum?
  7. Is PE more about winning or learning? How much do pupils design their own coaching?
  8. How much real responsibility do my children have to choose what, when and how they are learning? How much part do pupils play in determining the core business of the school?
  9. How much opportunity does my child get to help teachers improve their teaching?
  10. How do you check whether your intention to help children become better learners is being realised? What do you know about the lives of your past students after they have left your school?

But it also strikes me, as I change roles from one school to another, that these are good questions to ask a potential employer in order to ascertain what kind of school you might end up working in. Wouldn’t it be interesting to hear how your new prospective headteacher tackles these questions?

So, next time you’re asked at interview if you have any questions for them, go ahead and ask away.

Photo credit: Ethan Lofton

 

  1. Claxton G (2008) What’s the point of school? Rediscovering the heart of education, Oxford : Oneworld ↩
In Education, Educational Technology

On bandwagons and innovation The importance of school culture

I was recently at a conference where I met a newly appointed school leader who had heard of my work in technology integration. As we were introduced, the expression on his face gradually changed from your-name-rings-a-bell to ah-I-know.

He was interested to know what the latest trend was in technology in education and quick-fired some questions about using technology in the classroom, answering quite a number of them himself with a lavish sprinkle of the latest buzzwords.

He was, it turned out, on the look out for “the latest innovative practices”. As if innovation was a product you could purchase wholesale at conferences.

What I really wanted to say to him was that innovation is a culture that needs to be fed and allowed to grow and flourish, that he should encourage and celebrate the innovative practices already existing in his own school and that he didn’t need to be anywhere near computers or the internet to be innovative.

But it soon became obvious that he knew all the answers anyway, so I told him what he wanted to hear. I told him to get some iPads. He agreed enthusiastically.

After remarking on my accent, he revealed that he’s always been a great fan of Fawlty Towers and we shook hands good-bye.

Many thanks to Tim Lauer for the fantastic photograph.

In Education, Educational Technology

Our own worst enemies

Language is a defining feature of people. We are unique in Nature in being able to turn physical objects and abstract concepts into words and thus share ideas1. The Internet provides our innate propensity for communication with means to engage in social interaction beyond the constraints of time and space, allowing us to engage in synchronous or asynchronous discussions that would be inconceivable otherwise.

The potential of this type of communication for education is already evident. Teachers and students had embraced blogs, online chats, fora and social networks to share and disseminate commonly interesting knowledge.

As a learner – and who isn’t? – blogging in particular has been instrumental in my own learning, which is continuously being constructed, modelled and re-modelled by reflecting on the social interaction provided by blogs such as this one and then feeding the newly constructed knowledge into further interaction, enabling me to learn in a divergent manner by providing the stimulus that allows me to pursue new ideas and explore new threads in a creative way2.

So far, so good. But there are some problems. Firstly, linguistic communication relies on a plethora of visual and non-verbal cues and clues – a slight change in intonation or the raising of an eyebrow – that are simply absent from computer mediated communication.

These can be overcome by using emoticons and such like but, if – like me – you don’t populate your blog posts, tweets or comment contributions with smilies and LOLs, there is always the constant risk of misinterpretation.

Secondly, we employ social conventions when interacting online that differ widely from ordinary social conventions and to which, shockingly, we seem to be growing accustomed. On the internet – as the old adage goes – nobody knows you’re a dog but it also allows everyone to adopt a different persona.

Anonymity is arguably one of the Internet’s main strengths and freedom of speech is one of our most revered rights, and quite right too. However, the distancing effect of anonymity allows many to debase online discussion and debate by emboldening them to interact with others in such a way that would be very unlikely in real life, as is perfectly illustrated in this video:

Rudeness has become an inherent feature of online discussion. This is a shame. The ability to explore and discuss topics in a dialectic manner, in which views are challenged constructively, is being sapped away from discussion boards, online newspaper comments threads and blogs by rude people, often though not always with silly pseudonyms, who say things online they would not dare say to your face.

I find it very peculiar we should let behaviour go unchallenged online that would not be tolerated otherwise. I can’t imagine any of them being that rude to you face-to-face or even over the phone. They’re probably really nice people in person.

There is no need for any of this. There is an alternative to the current, ever less acceptable model. We need to create an environment that fosters exploratory talk, in which participants challenge the opinions of others with their own ideas and opinions. An environment that stimulates higher order processes, such as self-reflection, knowledge application, decision making, criticism and revision of concepts and solutions3.

We don’t need thoughtless belittling, rudeness, ridiculing and abuse. We ought to know better. No wonder then that schools feel so uneasy about the social Internet, if the very people our students look up to aren’t able to provide them with appropriate models of behaviour. We are our own worst enemies.

Many thanks to Bisgraphic for the photograph.

  1. Pinker, S. (1999) Words and Rules. London: Phoenix ↩
  2. Atherton, J. S. (2005) Learning and Teaching: Convergent and Divergent Learning ↩
  3. Anderson, T. and Rourke, L. (2002) Using Web-Based, Group Communication Systems to Support Case Study Learning at a Distance. In The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, Vol 3, No 2 ↩
In Education

Education as a Science

Science is defined as “the intellectual and practical activity that encompasses the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment”. Science relies on the accumulation of previously acquired knowledge. Scientists collaborate and learn from one another. They observe, test and experiment so that new knowledge can be obtained.

Now contrast that with Education. When it comes to Education, dogma trumps evidence and strongly held beliefs win over testing, experimentation and innovation. Whereas in Science they tinker, tweak and fix, in Education we prefer to say “if ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.

As a result, it is very sad to think that whilst Science is taking us on a marvellous and unceasing voyage of knowledge and discovery, Education remains stuck somewhere in the 1940s.

In my view, Education needs to take a leaf from Science’s book: we need to encourage research and experimentation so evidence can be obtained on which to base our practice. There really ought to be no room for dogma or belief, however strongly held. We can do better than this. We have to do better than this.

Photo credit

In Education, Educational Technology

Blinkered by the here and now Why we ignore the potential of new technologies

In our age, when men seem more than ever prone to confuse wisdom with knowledge, and knowledge with information, and try to solve problems of life in terms of engineering, there is coming into existence a new kind of provincialism, not of space, but of time; one for which history is merely the chronicle of human devices which served their turn and have been scrapped, one for which the world is the property solely of the living, a property in which the dead hold no shares.

In this passage, TS Eliot denounces what he termed temporal provincialism, a phenomenon by which we undervalue past experiences in favour of the present and the instant gratification it promises.

Teachers opposed to the embracing of new technologies and the adoption of modern computer mediated means of communication often use similar arguments against those who propose the transformation of teaching and learning by exploring and exploiting the potential these new technologies may have to offer.

The internet is often criticised by teachers for prizing information over knowledge and for being a capitulation to what they perceive as a lack of academic rigour and preference for immediacy among the current generation of students. Similarly, the use of social networking sites is often disparaged and even vilified for infantilising young people’s brains and reducing their ability to communicate face to face 1, as if social networking were a substitute for face-to-face communication.

Such received wisdom may well be full of common sense, but it is actually unsupported by research? Upon closer scrutiny, it reveals itself to be based on assumption, misunderstanding and preconception. Actual research on the subject suggests that even the humble internet search is a valuable meaning-making activity that supports the acquisition of knowledge, the creation of remote associations and creative development2. And internet searches are just the tip of a very large iceberg of untapped potential.

TS Eliot’s temporal provincialism condemns the overestimation of the present’s importance. However, I would propose that today we suffer from a kind of temporal conservatism, whereby undue relevance is being given to present, more traditional methods of teaching and learning whilst the future potential of promising new technologies is being largely ignored by schools that are blinkered by the here and now.

  1. Wintour, P. (2009), ‘Facebook and Bebo Risk “Infantilising” The Human Mind,’ Guardian (London) ↩
  2. Howard-Jones, PA. (2010) Neuroscience, learning and technology (14-19), for Deep Learning Project, BECTA, 2010. ↩
In Education, Educational Technology

It is about the technology! The teaching is important, but so is the technology

One hundred years ago, crossing the Atlantic took five days and travelling to the other side of the world took weeks, if not months. So, one hundred years ago, you could not have said to your friend in New York See you tonight or See you tomorrow to your friend in Sidney, because seeing them so soon just wasn’t possible.

But then came the technology and with it the ability to do the seemingly impossible.

One of our favourite adages in education has always been that technology is just a tool, that the technology doesn’t really matter and what matters is the teaching. But the technology does matter and it isn’t just a tool because, as history shows, technology has made possible the impossible time and again.

If we don’t place technology at the heart of our strategic planning and understand its transformational potential, then we’ll forever have to make do with the possible.

It’s not just about the teaching, it’s also about the technology. And let’s not forget that. Don’t you think?

Photo credit.

In Education, Educational Technology

Why Schools Must Teach Social Networking Separating the notion of safety from that of appropriate behaviour

Following my response to Sir Michael Wilshaw’s call to ban mobile phones from the classroom, further questions need to be asked about the direction we are taking regarding the way our students communicate and the means they use to do so. Drawing from previous posts and subsequent comments, I’ll set out below why I think schools need to deal with the real reason why smartphones have become ubiquitous in our classrooms: social networking.

The use of social networking is increasing in all areas of society but, although students have been active in social networking for almost a decade now, during this time, schools and teachers have largely ignored their students’ clear desire for peer interaction and communication outside the classroom.

Even though the time has passed when students entering secondary education do not remember life before social networking, many schools continue to ban, block and firewall its use, failing to grasp the important role that social media plays, not only in the private lives of their students, but also in the wider school community.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this alienation has resulted in what many teachers describe as sporadic and unspectacular engagement with technology, thus proving in the eyes of many sceptics that social networking is unfit for academic purposes.

However, as an increasing number of schools and faculties are beginning to open accounts in social networking sites – principally in Facebook and Twitter – to take advantage of the benefits of the networked and transparent transfer of information, and as students continue unrelenting in their use and enjoyment of social networking sites, a greater understanding by both parties of the educational potential of these services is beginning to emerge.

Students have discovered that learning is no longer bound to the confines of the school building and schools are beginning to realise that teaching students how to use these technologies effectively for academic purposes is essential if they want their students to engage in the use of social networking appropriately, less sporadically and more spectacularly.

The rising importance and availability of online social networks and their popularity among young people are undeniable facts. The use of the internet is becoming an ever more integral part of young people’s lives and, as a result, they are communicating with each other on an unprecedented scale.

In my view, teaching and learning need to reflect these social changes and conform to the needs and expectations of today’s young people. Using ICT with a focus on the C for Communication allows us to bring the learning online and to blend the use of traditional tools such as textbooks or dictionaries with more up-to-date, relevant and authentic multimedia materials from the web. Technology itself may not be a motivating factor, but familiarity with the technology certainly is.

Online social networks provide teachers and students with a platform in which they can interact beyond the constraints of the school walls, and with which the teacher can provide personalised feedback, peer review, assessment and support beyond that which is possible with the already existing virtual learning environments, which, in my experience, quickly become repositories of institutionally approved teaching materials and effectively discourage cooperation and interaction among students, fostering instead less meaningful, transactional interaction such as the setting or handing in of student work or the communication of assessment grades.

However, there remain many preconceptions regarding the use of online social networking in education and there is a distinct lack of an alternative, more positive discourse highlighting the many benefits modern means of communication can bring to education.

Thus, those of us considering the use of social networking tools are often discouraged by sensationalist horror stories in the media. Sadly, the teacher-got-the-sack-because-of-Facebook headline is all too common and, as a consequence, most schools and teachers have decided that online social networking sites are simply not worth the trouble.

Am I saying that it is ok to be friends with pupils on Facebook? Let’s answer that clearly: no, it isn’t. Your private life should remain private. Being friends with pupils on Facebook is not ok as it exposes you and your pupils to unacceptable risks.

That is not to say, however, that we shouldn’t use social networks to enhance teaching and learning – by establishing school or departmental pages, for example – or, indeed, that we should tarnish all the internet’s potential for social interaction with the same brush.

The vast majority of teachers using online social networking tools manage to do so perfectly appropriately, pedagogically soundly and safely, improving learning outcomes as a result. Sadly, they seldom hit the headlines for these reasons.

Furthermore, traditionalist approaches to institutionalised education have continued to assume that knowledge can only be obtained within the school’s walls. Modern technology has shattered this notion and has presented us with a different paradigm: the information is everywhere and it’s freely available.

Handling all this information has suddenly become one of the most precious skills we can hope to pass on to our students. How teachers and schools react and adapt to this new paradigm will bear direct consequences in the future success of their pupils, for remembering facts and figures may not be as important to them in their lives as being able to successfully acquire, manipulate and exploit information. I don’t buy into the skills vs. knowledge argument. It’s not one or the other: it’s both.

The adoption of social networking could conceivably provide the school community with a low-cost / high-value platform in which teachers and learners can remain in close contact and interact beyond the constraints of the school walls, and within which the teacher would be able to provide the learner with further personalised feedback and support to that already provided in the physical learning environment. A social network expands the learning environment to wherever the learner happens to be and acting as a bridge between school and home, between formal and informal learning.

With this in mind, an obvious symbiotic relationship between social media and learning begins to become apparent. It then becomes relatively easy to imagine the transfer of this kind of communication, collaboration and cooperation to the school context, where students and teachers can share information transparently using social media and networking sites to filter internet content and where teachers can direct students – or vice versa – to relevant, commonly interesting material.

Personal experience supported by well-established learning theory has shown me that learning from one another is one the deepest forms of learning our students ever experience. When social networking is effectively implemented, it allows our students to continue learning from one another, under our guidance, beyond the school’s walls.

This is why it remains perplexing to me that schools have generally reacted by blocking social networking sites and social media, effectively abandoning children to learn about their use on their own, without our guidance and without appropriate models of good practice.

Schools ought to separate the notion of safety from that of appropriate behaviour, allowing them to tackle these issues independently so that the pedagogical potential of social networking can be explored in depth.

Photo credit