‘We weren’t aware that alternatives existed. We were happy enough using printed textbooks’, says Julian Baker, the IB Coordinator at Box Hill School, a GCSE and IB/A-level school in Surrey. They were among the first UK schools to fully implement Kognity, the digital publisher of GCSE and IB intelligent textbooks, and, after a couple of years, are now looking at the option of completely phasing out printed textbooks for their IB students.
The printed textbook has been at the core of learning for centuries, and one that many schools still hold a traditional view on. However, in the face of evolving content, technology, and pedagogy, challenging these views in UK schools is important to ensure a seamlessly integrated and enhanced learning experience. Box Hill School provides an interesting case study on how challenging the traditional view of textbooks came about in their school, and the impact switching to intelligent textbooks has had.
Are textbooks connected to a digital strategy?
Julian from Box Hill School isn’t the only person unaware of other options to using printed textbooks. In fact, I’ve met between 300–400 schools around the world, and I can count on one hand the number of schools who have been looking actively to change from the printed textbook. Very few think that there is anything missing from their traditional textbooks until they start to realise what the alternative is, and what the impact could be. As Julian notes, they only started thinking of a different way of doing things once they had seen an alternative. It got staff thinking about how studying can be very book-based and it would be good to also have something more interactive to suit different learning styles. ‘We were relying on what we had always used.’
This is a view I fully understand. In all my meetings with schools, very few have an actual strategy for how to incorporate technology and its advances into the learning environment. Most equate technology with hardware, which in my opinion, is missing most of the potential of a digital learning environment. Having 30 chromebooks and a 3D printer is not a digital strategy. The strategy only starts to formulate when you look at the next step—what is the pedagogy this hardware will support? How will this tie in to the work that teachers are already doing? How does this fit in with the curriculum? How can we use this to foster some of the things that schools are accused of stifling, such as creativity? How will this help my teachers teach, and my students learn?
I can understand why this gap in strategy has arisen—even for me working within EdTech every day, the landscape is noisy and confusing. There are so many products, solutions and services out there. Many market themselves as doing versions of the same thing. Many are isolated solutions, serving only one part of a learning environment (like an admin tool or quiz app), or generic products not geared to any curriculum. Many do not have proper training for their users, and are not very user-friendly. What annoys me the most is when EdTech products imply they want to ‘revolutionise the classroom’, when they do not understand what intricate ecosystems schools are. My view has always been that some sectors are able to be revolutionised, but some need to be ‘evolutionised’. Education is definitely one where we need to deliberately work to incrementally improve the existing ecosystem, rather than radically disrupting it.
And of course there is the question that I’m so happy comes up more and more often—what actually works? However, school management often puts the responsibility of figuring this out on teachers, who are already stressed and not equipped to take on that ownership. Therefore, most hardware ends up being underutilised, teachers are frustrated by technological systems they aren’t trained to use, and we see a generally negative view on technology in the classroom—tech becomes ‘yet another thing’ rather than a core solution to learning challenges.