The COVID-19 crisis raised many issues about the purpose(s) of schooling, views about what should be learnt and what learning looks like, and who is responsible for young people’s learning. The rapid move from face to face to online schooling involved some amazing and some terrible uses of digital technology. Perhaps most glaringly was the difference between those who tried to maintain formal schooling, with virtual lessons interspersed with ‘independent learning’ (which in practice often meant filling in worksheets) and those who used it as an opportunity to spark young people’s intrinsic curiosity and capacity to learn. In both cases digital technology was critical. However, in the latter case so too was having a digital mindset. ...continue reading "Trust, Empowerment and Learning with Digital Technology"
Tag: teachers
Trust and empowerment of teachers
In any school, some decisions are made for you by your headteacher and some decisions you inherit from your students and their beyond-school lives. However, many decisions are completely down to you. Let’s take a look at why you have more decision-making power than you may think. ...continue reading "Trust and empowerment of teachers"
What can you do in practice?
So, what changes do we need to make to our current practice so that we too can adopt similar Digital Mindsets? Notice the language used by these headteachers (taken from the previous post in this series):
- “I don’t hear my teachers talking about the difficulties that students are facing, I hear them talking about what they are doing about those difficulties”
- “I only ask that they look at the students in front of them and think about how they are moving those students on”
Their focus is on ...continue reading "What can you do in practice?"
Trust and empowerment of students
Some of the most important changes you can make relate to the nature of your relationship with your students and the degree to which you treat them as responsible and capable young people. The table below provides some examples of changes in ...continue reading "Trust and empowerment of students"
But I can’t because …
You can probably think of lots of good reasons why you can’t use digital technology in the ways we have been suggesting in the previous posts in this series:
- We don’t have enough devices
- I would have to totally change how I teach
- I’m not very confident with digital technology
- The students will be distracted from learning
Concluding the series
Encouraging students to bring their existing expertise – from other classes, from their home and social worlds, into our classrooms expands possibilities (Twining et al., 2017), but also removes another bottleneck: ...continue reading "Concluding the series"
Online learning – there is nothing remote about it
Bob Harrison responds to official comments (in England) about 'remote learning'
As I judged the entries for the Learning Reimagined Awards – which celebrate the most inspirational uses of technology for learning around the world – I could not help reflect on how incredibly quaint and outdated these innovations make the Department for Education’s (DfE's) remote education efforts look. ...continue reading "Online learning – there is nothing remote about it"
COVID-19 and the future of schooling
Around the world governments are taking action to contain the spread of COVID-19, often in ways that are quite revealing about the purposes and practices of schooling, and the scope to which unchallengeable norms in education can actually be overthrown. ...continue reading "COVID-19 and the future of schooling"
Helping students to ask questions
This post attempts to summarise a Twitter thread about how to encourage student questions which went viral in August 2018. @MrsSasser ’s initial post explained how apparently small changes in the way she asked students if they had any questions had a massive impact on the number of questions that they asked. ...continue reading "Helping students to ask questions"
Gove departs just as disaster looms for computing in schools
This article was originally published in The Conversation on the 17th July 2014
Back in January 2012, the now-departed education secretary Michael Gove said, “ICT in schools is a mess”. He went on to argue that what was needed was a rigorous computer science curriculum. Now, from September 2014, when the new national curriculum ...continue reading "Gove departs just as disaster looms for computing in schools"