It’s Taken A While, But Self-Confessed Technophobe Julie Murray Reckons She’s Finally Got The Point Of EdTech
It’s About The Access, Stupid!
- by Julie Murray
I’m fairly happy to admit I’m a Luddite. I suspect it’s a little bit of hereditary, a laziness to get to grips with new contraptions, and a genuine love of analogue things like paper and pens.
I’ve never really understood the rise in video calls on phones for instance. Each daily commute will offer up a fellow passenger complete with phone extended at arm’s length, walking down the stairs of a bus, happily chattering away to their buddy.
To be honest I find the whole thing pretty nauseating – but then, I’m rather a miserable person.
A more open world
However, today I had an epiphany. I walked past a woman, gesticulating eagerly into her phone as she made a video call in the corner of a train station. As I neared her, it became clear she was signing, and that either she, or the person she was calling, was deaf.
It hit me like lightning, and with some degree of shame, that regardless of what I felt about the technology and the uses I could make of it in my life, for this woman or her friend, technology was revolutionary – it had entirely changed the way they interact with people and understand the world. A relatively small, everyday innovation had given her access.
I think that’s how we need to view EdTech. Putting aside personal feelings of ‘gimmick’, but also dispassionately considering ‘to whom will this give access?’; whose education will this revolutionise?
Not what, but when
I’ve been to BETT for the last two years, of which I (bizarrely?) knew nothing when I was a teacher. There’s so much there, from resources to teaching tools to software to VR headsets.
What strikes me most as I wander the miles of stands is that we need to stop trying to find the technological silver bullet in education – we’ve got them all. Instead we need to focus on when to deploy the different bullets for maximum impact.
I now kick myself that I didn’t use screen recording software for instance, to record explanations of the next KS3 assessment, so that students – and indeed parents – could look at the recording at home, rewind and replay it, until they understood what was needed.
Trending
Not only would I have saved half a lesson going through the mark scheme, but might have received higher quality essays in return – which I could then discuss with parents who were better informed and had a firmer idea of what I expected in my assessments.
It’s not just about access for students, but for teachers too. I hate that I made so little use of Microsoft Office. If I’d known how to properly use pivot tables, and mail merges and track changes, I might have saved myself a whole heap of time monitoring data or emailing parents or getting students to improve essays.
Would I have had to spend hours trawling the internet for resources if I’d known how to put together a basic animation in PowerPoint that would perfectly and visually explain the pendulum of the Tudors or the swing of each Reichstag election in Hitler’s rise to power?
Everyday innovation
So, my technophobic view of edtech is essentially this – can we drop the ‘ed’? Technology companies that sell to schools seem to have come around to knowing that tech is the means not the end – it has a place in the teaching toolkit but not supremacy over it.
I’d like to see things go a step further though.
Rather than focusing on bespoke and specialised devices fulfilling one or two functions (lordy, when I think of those voting pads which languished in the cupboard year on year!) – and which in their own way encourage technophobia – could we instead invest in training teachers up to use everyday tech more effectively? And always to ask, when adopting a new device, resource or approach: to whom will this give educational access?
Julie Murray is an ex-head of history & politics, who still retains a keen interest in education.
