Edtech consultants have been circling the already-stripped carcass of education funding for the past few weeks, following education secretary Damian Hinds’ call for a technology “revolution in schools, colleges, and universities”. Meanwhile, teachers at the chalk face roll their eyes. We have already seen top-down strategies from interactive whiteboards to iPads divert funding and attention away from truly improving teaching and learning. A genuinely-beneficial edtech revolution would need to be led by those who naturally innovate and who understand teaching: Teachers.
Things have improved in recent years and perhaps those of us working in colleges are in an enviable position. Our scale means that we are able to recruit excellent, professional, IT support teams. It’s a far cry from the sitcom parochialism that was common in smaller school settings when I first started teaching.
Back before the dawn of cloud drives, my friend Tom decided to spend an afternoon of summer release time tidying up the network drive of the school we were both teaching in. After years of haphazard and indiscriminate dragging and dropping, it had become almost unnavigable. At first, all the various departments were extremely grateful that they could suddenly find the resources they needed. Then a few Powerpoints stopped working.
Stock explanation
It turned out that some of the links to images and videos relied on the old, incoherent file paths. From then on, IT support blamed any issues with Powerpoint on the fact that “Tom tidied the shared area.” It soon became the stock explanation for all manner of non-Powerpoint-related issues too.
My PC won’t log in. “It’s because Tom tidied the shared area.”
The projector in room A11 is a funny colour. “It’s because Tom tidied the shared area.”
This was before memes were a thing, but plenty of parody emails were flying around.
“There are leaves on the tennis courts. It’s because Tom tidied the shared area.”
“I was late to work this morning because Tom tidied the shared area.”
Until the day we received an email from IT support that, due to some erroneous capitalisation, made us laugh even harder but stop the emails out of pity. Subject line: “IT’s not funny.”
Stop and give thanks
As I say, we’ve come a long way and we need to stop and give thanks sometimes for the lightning-fast laptops we’re carrying around, the shared resources we can access instantly through the cloud, and the powerful databases that save us forests-worth of paper every day.
We’re in a relatively good place, so if Damian Hinds wants a “revolution”, it had better be one that fulfils teachers’ and learners’ genuine needs rather than a rush of faddy impositions. He could have followed the lead of charity SHINE Trust. They already support practising teachers to develop and implement their ideas for interventions in literacy, numeracy, and science, including many apps and effective uses of technology.
This year, Alice Eardley, Louise McGrigor and Christine Dawkins, English teachers from college group Activate Learning, will be running a SHINE project to support their GCSE-resit students using virtual reality and gaming systems. A few months ago I met Bruno Reddy, whose Times Tables Rock Stars website has been supported by SHINE since 2014 and is now accessed by hundreds of thousands of students. His passion for his subject and his understanding of the classroom were striking and clearly the driving force behind the website’s success.
So much more
Great tech can support teachers outside of the classroom too. Last year, I was introduced to the app Trello. At first glance, it’s just to-do lists. But you can make it so much more. Planning collaboratively? Create a “card” for each element, attach colleagues, set a deadline, choose a super-fun background image, and keep any dialogue about that one task in one place. No need to go searching back through countless emails.
Last year, I found it useful for quickly communicating grade boundaries after mock exams so that they were available on our devices in just one or two taps. Queries about marking could be illustrated with a snapshot of an answer and responded to by all team members in one place. More recently, I was introduced to Flock, a workplace messaging app that allows instant communication for remote teams. So far, I’ve seen its potential in how it is facilitating collaboration between myself and other English leads across the country.
“It’s allowed us to support each other in a more informal way and chat about potential ideas we can use to help students,” says Jonny Kay, head of English and maths at Hartlepool College of Further Education. “Also, I bother my wife less about work.”
“Yes, the support is good,” agrees Alice, who is Innovation Lead for English at Activate. “Being pretty new to the sector, it’s a good way of finding out what colleagues in other colleges are doing.”
So maybe the revolution is already happening thanks to imaginative and visionary teachers, supported by their schools and colleges, and charities. What would be truly revolutionary is if the politicians gave us some credit for it.
Andrew Otty leads 16-19 English in an FE college. He is an ambassador for education charity SHINE
