Why we need to be more imaginative about our use of computers across the curriculum
My niece has been staying with us over the weekend.
She’s a bright girl in Year 6 who will fly through her upcoming SATs but has just had to sit through six weeks of intensive (and boring) preparation, presumably because she only got 95% on the first practice paper.
Like George Best’s hotel porter, I asked her where it had all gone wrong.
While out walking the dog, we chatted about how often she used a computer at school; she likes technology and, unsurprisingly, is already very fluent with Tik Tok, Insta and Youtube.
‘Well, there’s one computer in our classroom but that’s only for the teacher. We’re not allowed to use that.’
‘So, when do you use a computer?’
‘If we finish a piece of writing early we get to go down to the computer room to type it up.’
‘And what do you do with it when you’ve typed it up?’
‘We print it out and stick it in our books.’
I’ll let that sink in for a moment.
Apparently, you can put a border round it in Microsoft Word and that makes you feel proud of your work.
I’m not having a go at the teacher here. He will be coping daily with a whole host of problems, the least of which is a classroom full of children who, infuriatingly, insist on working at different rates.
But it does highlight a couple of key areas where we simply haven’t got to grips with the potential of technology in our classrooms.
The first is to do with infrastructure. It’s twelve years since I first saw Sugata Mitri’s famous Hole in the Wall Ted Talk about what can happen when you give curious children ready access to a computer and the internet.
It can’t be right that a school in England, consistently lauded by Ofsted, offers such limited access. We all know about the funding crisis in our schools and expecting individual schools to solve it isn’t realistic but if the Rwandan government can have a 1:1 laptop policy, shouldn’t we be rather closer to that ambition in the UK?
The second issue is to do with our collective understanding about the impact we want technology to have on our children’s learning.
I’m not really talking about teaching computing here. I agree that coding is a vital skill. Raspberry Pi is an amazing initiative; one of many out there. Undoubtedly, there’s much more to do in this area but I’m confident that lots of clever people are talking about it.
I’m not sure so many people are talking thoughtfully about the way we use technology across the whole curriculum.
There are parts of the teacher’s job that will never be replaced by technology, parts that demand sensitive, nuanced understanding of a child’s progress and level of engagement. That requires a real human relationship and I can’t see that we will ever be able to replicate that with technology, nor why we should want to try.
But there are other areas where technology can be much more effective and efficient. For years, teachers have been the primary source of information in the classroom, their power contained in textbooks jealously guarded by Conan the Librarian.
Clearly, that is no longer the case. We should embrace, for example, the fact that well-focused video can be a much better way of disseminating information; the students can watch it when they want, wherever they want and however often they need. It offers much greater scope for personalising the learning, tailoring it to the needs of the individual, not the group.
Provoked by new technology, the role of the 21st century teacher will change in fundamental ways. Until we start really thinking deeply about what that new role entails, we won’t make much progress.
And we’ll just end up putting borders around things.
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