Tread Carefully In The Edtech Sweetshop

We’ve long been engaged with edtech at Skipton Girls School, a selective 11-18 school in the north Yorkshire market town with 850 high achieving pupils. The students here study an academic curriculum, which is supported by a lot of technology. For the past decade we’ve had a One to One Laptop programme so all our students and teachers have a laptop. It means that technology plays an important role in teaching and learning – a role that has become even more integral over the past year and a half.

During that time, we have used three different learning platforms but we have settled on the Firefly platform for the last six years, mainly as a platform for blended learning during the school day.

Many subject leaders put their entire curriculum on our learning platform. It helps to drive a consistent approach between classes, and it gives our teachers confidence. Nearly all of our teachers are subject specialists, but the platform helps them ensure that students across classes get a consistent diet of knowledge for their ability level and that resources are pitched at the appropriate level of challenge. 

Firefly creates technology for parent engagement and learning continuity, helping schools reduce teacher workload, streamline administrative tasks and give parents a richer understanding of their child’s learning and experience of school. www.fireflylearning.com.

Schools can assess their digital learning maturity with a new tool from Firefly. The Digital Maturity Diagnostic asks a series of detailed questions in order to determine where a school is in its use of digital tools to support learning and parental engagement. The tool is available at https://fireflylearning.com/digital-diagnostic-maturity/.

Careful research is key

The adoption of this learning platform and its integration into our school has convinced me that there is a right way and a wrong way to buy edtech for your school. If you’re not careful you can end up with too many platforms. If the budget is there it’s tempting to buy lots of different edtech solutions. It’s human nature, really. When it comes to technology, if you see something new and shiny you can get excited. It’s a bit like being a kid in a sweetshop. 

For me it’s much better to have a strategic approach, making sure that you’ve worked out if the edtech solution you’re buying supports your objectives and will have a positive impact on teaching and learning.

My advice is to be conscious of the spell that shiny new edtech casts, moderate your initial excitement and take a hard-nosed approach by assessing whether something is going to meet your needs and have a positive impact on teaching and learning. It is, I believe, better to use a very small and carefully chosen selection of edtech packages – and check them out thoroughly before you commit.

When you are choosing a new piece of edtech it is important to take your time. We always take half a term or more to explore new edtech solutions. That time gives us a chance to research the main players in the market and then invite them into school to give a demonstration to staff members. There should be an opportunity to use the systems and play around with them, and then use them for a longer trial before making your decision.

Many edtech companies will allow you to try out their technology for free over an extended period. That was really useful when we were looking to replace our learning platform because it gave me the opportunity to give colleagues some time to assess the technology and then give me their feedback.

Sophisticated and timely assessments

Our teaching community has been massively upskilled over the past 18 months or so and we want to keep hold of that momentum. One of the areas that we are really developing in the use of edtech for formative assessment. This includes a variety of approaches, including multiple choice during lessons to check for misunderstandings.  

Traditionally, people have tended to do a lot of assessments on paper. For some subjects, such as English, geography and history, that often involves a lot of marking of longer pieces of work. It can be very time consuming to give high quality feedback so it doesn’t tend to be done all that regularly. 

That’s where audio feedback has made a massive difference. It is much quicker to talk to a piece of work so it saves time and leads to greater frequency in the feedback that can be given. And it’s actually of a higher quality because the accessibility of the approach means that teachers can record more detailed and sophisticated comments. 

Our learning platform is an ideal place to store and curate this feedback, allowing it to become integrated into schemes of work. This approach gives teachers richly detailed information about each student and makes it easy for them to analyse what the students do and don’t know. That can really help the teacher to work out how to adapt future lessons to the needs of individual learners. It also means that students can correct and improve their work more easily and our work scrutiny shows that their corrections are of a higher quality. 

Teachers and students say this assessment approach really helps. Our English team, for example, had a Year 7 cohort this year that had missed a considerable proportion of Year 6 because of the pandemic. The literacy learning of some students was seriously affected as a result, inhibiting their ability to engage fully with the literature being taught.

The teachers created resources online which the students accessed in advance at a time to suit them along with additional teaching either in school or online. The students were pre-taught content for upcoming lessons which meant that they could then join their peers more confidently in the full lessons.

Our English team reported students being more vocal in class and better able to participate. Their quality of written work improved and students reported finding the sessions very useful. In fact, students who weren’t originally invited began to ask if they could attend the extra sessions as the feedback from their peers had been so good.

With our edtech tools and our enthusiasm for new ways of approaching assessment we can precisely and quickly address that patchwork of learning loss. It’s really exciting to see your colleagues taking technology and lockdown innovations to heart, running with them and accelerating progress.