In 2020 every classroom became a digital classroom by necessity. Since then, we have seen a significant increase in technology spend at schools, with over £1 billion invested in digital learning tools in UK schools in the past five years. Instructure reports that students access, on average, 42 different EdTech tools in their learning environment. As a category it’s expansive, supporting the full spectrum from streamlined lesson planning to personalised and differentiated study aids.
Are we using technology to its full potential to improve learning?
You may have heard the expression, “pedagogy before technology”. This refers to the need for technology to act as a tool to aid teaching and not become the means of teaching itself. It is a reminder that we shouldn’t take the latest shiny technology and look for a reason to use it, but rather start with the pedagogy and adopt technology which enhances it.
Yet pedagogy itself is in service to the learning process. By ‘learning process’, I mean the cognitive changes that happen in our brains for facts, concepts and procedures to be understood, retained and usefully applied. For EdTech to make the biggest difference to learner outcomes, it is this learning process that we need to consider first and foremost.
We should ask ourselves:
- What is challenging about the learning process?
- What is challenging about the learning activities we design?
- How might we use technology to help overcome those challenges?