Your digital education transformation strategy

Principles for technology in schools

There's a lot in the news at the moment about mobile phone bans in schools.

But there is a wider issue about technology in schools which is also worth thinking about, and which is more complex than the phone debate. Every school and group of schools will have different requirements, but here are some general principles that can guide your specific strategy.

1. Focus on the problem, not the solution

This is a classic piece of advice for using technology in any sector. Don’t start by thinking about the technology. Start with the problem you have, and then think about how technology can solve it.

Here is what happens when schools focus on the solution, not the problem.

Wow, that interactive whiteboard / VR headset / LLM chatbot looks amazing! We need these in school!

A year later: whiteboards are being used without interactivity, headsets are gathering dust in a cupboard, chatbots have been quietly retired due to hallucination issues

Here is what happens when schools focus on the problem, not the solution.

We’ve got a problem: ChatGPT plagiarism. It’s stopping students developing essay writing skills. Let's introduce an after school homework club for years 9 - 11. Let’s host it in a computer lab with desktop computers where students can use word-processing software to write their essays without access to LLMs and without the distraction of other applications. We’ll need the space and devices to make it work. Let’s also purchase some computer monitoring software and train staff in how to use it.

2. Focus on learning, not performance

Performance is not the same as learning. The types of tech tools that professionals use in the workplace often depend on more fundamental skills that need to be taught first. For example, many jobs require you to do data analysis using tools like Excel, Python and R Studio. But before you can use these, you need to develop basic maths skills - and Excel etc may not be the best tool for doing so. (More broadly, this is the reason why even though data science may be a skill of the future, it doesn’t make sense to replace maths lessons with data science lessons.)

3. Use technology to enhance memory and skill development, not to replace them

There's a lot of talk at the moment about how AI means students don’t need to learn to write or do basic calculations, and that they should instead be learning how to prompt LLMs. And we’ve had 20 years of being told that Google means you don’t need to remember anything. But this isn’t true: you need facts in long-term memory in order to think. And in order to grapple with problems AIs can’t solve, you’ll have to work through problems they can solve. Some of the best ed tech software focusses on developing long-term memories.

4. Be aware of mode effects

“Mode effects” describes how students respond differently to content depending on whether it is on paper, tablet, desktop, mobile, etc. Mode effects are often much, much bigger than you might think. Students who took maths and reading PISA assessments on screen did six months worse than students taking the same assessments on paper. For assessments involving extended writing, our research at No More Marking shows that students tend to do better when they can type. But we also know that learning to handwrite helps reading, and that it helps note-taking - so we probably don’t want to get rid of it completely.

There aren’t just differences between paper and screen. There are differences between different types of screens. Oak National Academy (an online learning hub in England set up during the Covid pandemic) say that students stick with their lesson videos for 5x as long on desktop / laptop as on mobile, and 4x as long on tablet as on mobile.

5. Avoid distractions and multi-tasking

No-one can really multi-task. What we do when we think we’re multi-tasking is actually “task-switching”: switching rapidly from one task to another in a way that saps our mental capacity. Some devices and environments make these kinds of distractions more likely than others.

I’d argue that the great challenge for schools - and other organisations - is to design environments and systems that integrate the incredible strengths of technology whilst minimising the weaknesses. If we start with that as the problem, it might help us create some innovative solutions.