Does digital technology ‘transform learning’?
Technology is a very useful tool in teaching and learning – that’s why almost every teacher in the UK uses digital technology to a greater or lesser extent…
A History teacher showing students Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech or the dramatic footage of the 1989 dismantling of the Berlin Wall• A Geography teacher playing footage of a volcanic eruption or how a dam works• A Science teacher using a YouTube clip about how the digestive system works or showing a video of an experiment •A Drama teacher bringing to students the video of how a great actor has delivered Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy, or playing back to a small group the performance they just gave to the class, to help them improve it• A PE teacher using live footage to encourage discussion of tactics in rugby, or using footage they have just taken of a student doing the badminton serve to provide feedback…
These examples are only limited by my own lack of specialist knowledge of specific subjects. In every subject, there are opportunities to use technology to enhance the students’ experience by doing something in a new way, bringing something to life, or making something easier and/or quicker to do.
Technology can also be used as an effective assessment tool. In many subjects, students can work through a task online at their own pace, getting instant feedback from the online programme on their performance (as you can in a computer game), and also providing instant feedback to the teacher through whole-class student response systems; these things are far harder to achieve without technology.
And the pandemic has taught us that delivering live lessons online to people who cannot be present in school, is far better than just setting work for students to do under their own steam for weeks or months on end – this is a good topical example of transformation.
So there’s no question that technology can, and does, play a useful part in teaching and learning in schools, but is it transformative? Yes, and no. Yes, in that its typical use alters the teaching and learning experience, and almost all teachers use technology a fair bit in the classroom, so the use of technology has transformed teaching and learning in schools. But no, because I think that when most people talk about the power of digital technology to transform teaching and learning, it feels like they are describing a seismic event that brings huge benefits that those not using it will be much the worse off without, and for me that is just not the case.
Here are three reasons why I think digital technology is not the panacea that some thought it could be: 1. How we learn hasn’t changed. We still learn by moving information from our short-term memory to our long-term memory; digital technology hasn’t changed what happens in the brain to bring about learning – it’s still very much a case that we learn what we pay attention to, and go over again and again. And clearly that happens both with and without digital technology
2. Teaching effectively includes matching the teaching technique or activity to the content. If we are studying Martin Luther’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, watching the archive footage on Youtube is a great thing to do; but practising adding fractions, planning and writing an essay, making a thing in DT, doing pair-work in Spanish, having a debate in an RPE lesson, and discussing the stylistic devices used in a poem clearly do not require digital technology, and using it for these things may even be a distraction
3. In those schools that have introduced 1 to 1 device schemes, there is no clear-cut evidence to suggest that the students have experienced a transformation in their learning, compared with schools that don’t have a 1 to 1 device scheme. Students’ outcomes, based on examination results in those schools, have certainly not been transformed, and it would not be unreasonable to suggest that transformed learning would also result in transformed outcomes.
I remember, when I was a deputy headteacher a long time ago, booking an IT room for a bottom set of 28 boys I was teaching French to, and setting them ‘a project’ to do on Paris. The huge amount of time many of them spent on their front cover – the title Paris with an image of their choice pasted from the internet – remains with me today, alongside the forgotten passwords and the other logging on problems and hardware issues. That’s just an aside, really, but I do think that the use of technology by students can lead to a focus on the wrong things, at times – the technology itself rather than the learning that the teacher is trying to promote – and we need to guard against that.
When teachers teach explicitly; when students behave well, are engaged and work really hard; and when relationships and care are strong, learning tends to proceed well, and outcomes tend to be at least good. Technology is a useful aid to teaching and learning, but it is great teaching that transforms learning, and great teaching can happen both with and without digital technology.
Mark Patterson
