Does technology enhance learning?

In recent years technology has become more and more important in education. I remember the early days of the Information Revolution in the 1980s and being told how it would change the world. It didn't!

Computers spread through schools but didn't really affect 'real' learning. They were nothing more of an interesting extra used by enthusiasts.

Then things all changed. I am not sure when this actually happened, and it probably varied from school to school. I am also not sure what single development, if any, was responsible. What is clear is that all good and outstanding teachers need to be able to make effective use of ICT in their teaching.

This all sounds obvious, but in my experience it isn't always the early adopters who actually make the best use of ICT. I have watched quite a lot of lessons where technology is being used, and which really doesn't do anything to help the children learn. In some cases the technology seems to get in the way.

Some of the best use I have seen has been Chromebooks used by some of the older members of the profession! In these cases ICT had to pass a by test before being adopted. Would it enhance learning? Early adopters don't usually apply this test in their enthusiasm to explore the possibilities of new technology.

Really skilled leadership needs to bring together both types of teacher and it would be great to pair them up. The challenge facing us now is making sure we don't spend all of our energy chasing every new app in the hunt for that perfect elusive one. What we need to do is make sure that we spend as much energy finding the best workflows for a smaller number of apps which can actually enhance learning. If they don't, they don't have a place!

GAFE Summit

Yesterday I was lucky enough to spend the day at the GAFE Summit at the Halcyon International School in London. What a great experience! It is always interesting to meet others who share my passion for the use of technology in teaching and learning and I now have so many things to try out.

In discussions at the event it was clear that people were in two camps: those who are always wanting to push the boundaries of new technology in their quest to improve all the time and those who love new technology but want to stand back occasionally and put energy into getting a wider roll out of ideas in their school. I am definitely in the second camp, but we clearly need the pioneers of the first group.

One thing I am struggling to keep up with at the moment is the large number of sites and services that I sign up to. Each time I feel that the new thing is going to be the best thing since sliced bread, only to find it going a little stale a few weeks later. A priority for me now is to settle on a few good services and really get them implemented more widely in my school.

As someone who often watches others teach I have certainly seen a few lessons where technology is being used for its own sake. This isn't a problem occasionally and I would encourage all teachers to experiment from time to time. However, there have also been a few lessons where the technology has actually got in the way of learning. This should never happen. When it does it always seems to be due to glitches in the technology. No amount of testing beforehand quite puts a system under strain in the same way that a class does so I suppose that this is inevitable.

Anyway, now to enjoy the rest of half term with just a little bit of experimenting with new ideas from the summit. Already looking forward to next year's event!

Using new technology

My teaching career has spanned most of the history of computers in schools.

As a pupil myself we didn't ever see a computer except for the one visit to a local company organised by our enthusiastic Maths teacher in the lower sixth. This was then followed by the excitement of actually creating a simple computer programme which we then punched out on cards. Days later the result came back - pages of old style computer printout and there it was "Syntax Error"...

This was the signal to give up for most of the class but a few of us then went through every card and found the error(s). Days later it came back - results so simple it wasn't really worth the effort.

As a student at university in the 1970s I hardly came across a computer, although we knew they were there and being used for research.

Then as a teacher in the 1980s we suddenly came across the BBC Model A and B and the idea of a school network had arrived. I can remember the talks at INSET days telling us how this was going to revolutionise everything. Little then changed for the next 30 years.

Until now, that is...

However, I don't really feel that it is a revolution. Nothing old is going to be swept away. It is more a case of evolution. Good, old-fashioned teaching isn't suddenly going to disappear, despite what OFSTED might want! What will happen is that good teachers are already beginning to develop new approaches and are using mobile technology to create new activities. This increases variety and engagement for many pupils.

What I think we are seeing is the beginning of the Information Technology Evolution, rather than Revolution as was so often mentioned in the 1980s and 1990s! As with evolution of species there are phases when progress is more rapid and I do believe we are in the early stages of this sort of time. Teaching is changing rapidly, but we mustn't lose sight of the fact that good teaching is still good teaching, and everything new only serves to enhance what is already going on in good schools with committed teachers.

The right style of feedback sandwich

I have recently been reading a number of posts and articles about the importance of good quality feedback as part of the learning process. As a teacher of many years experience this seems almost too obvious to be worth writing about. However, I want to look at one of the most commonly stated views at the moment: feedback should be positive and needs to focus on what a student can do better.

I do not disagree with the importance of praise as a key thing to motivate everyone, students and teachers alike, but there are many in the profession who have taken this to an extreme. A quite mediocre attempt at an assignment is showered with glowing comments which make it look like a contender for a literary prize. The feedback sandwich of congratulate - comment - congratulate has such thick slices of the congratulate bread that the all important comment filling is lost.

I wouldn’t want to eat a sandwich like this for my lunch and I don’t think it is that good for a student to have to consume this lesson after lesson. In teachers attempts to appear positive they are not really fulfilling their key role of helping students to improve.

The emphasis on praise has been such a feature of my whole career that it is hard to imagine what it was like in my own school days in the 1960s and 1970s where my teachers were quite ready to tell me that a piece of work wasn’t really good enough. This didn’t damage my self-esteem because by telling me this there was also an unspoken assurance that my teachers actually believed that I was capable of doing better. We all know that the best way of raising standards in education is to raise expectations.

My teachers were also showing that they believed that it was also perfectly normal to “fail”. This is something that, for a large proportion of the teaching profession, that is unthinkable. The main casualty in all this is resilience. Pupils, and their parents, look for every excuse when something goes wrong. It is never the responsibility of the pupil!

What I try to create with my classes is a climate where it is perfectly acceptable to find something difficult and a belief that, no matter how good a piece of work is, it can be better. I want my pupils to be comfortable with the fact that they have areas of weakness and to have a deep belief that they can get better. If I gloss over these weaknesses and concentrate surrounding the meat of my feedback with thick slices of congratulatory bread I am giving a message that there is a real problem with getting something wrong. 

Pupils need a good quality feedback sandwich with much greater emphasis on the meat in the middle than the air-filled bread of meaningless praise surrounding it!

Improving Feedback

This year I have been experimenting with a range of applications for giving feedback online to my classes. This started in a simple way, using Google Docs. Students would share their work with me and I would make comments. It was great to see how keen they were to act on my advice to improve the finished piece of work - even the normally less enthusiastic workers who see homework as a chore to get out of the way as soon as possible!

What was happening was that feedback was changing from being something that happened at the end of he task to an ongoing part of the learning. Even in the traditional end of task marking we are usually keen to make suggestions for improvements, but how often does this actually happen, if we are honest?

In teaching Maths I thought that opportunities like this would be quite limited. How often can students work online in Maths? What I hadn't reckoned on was how keen my students were to get earlier feedback. A few started sending me images of their work. Soon I was loading these into "Expain Everything" on my iPad and adding annotations and even verbal comments. Getting this back to the student was easy and just involved uploading the video to YouTube and sending them the link.

To make it even better I was able to keep the link to the file in another of my favourite iPad apps, iDoceo. I had wondered how inspectors will cope in this new age. The traditional work scrutiny, involving looking at student books won't really work as most of my feedback has happened online. In some cases there is little marking in the books at all n the traditional way!

I am in the early days of this, and, along with several colleagues, we are beginning to get requests for assistance from some of the normally less enthusiastic users of technology in the staff room. Hopefully this practice will spread. Watch this space...