3 May 2023
Today’s students have grown up surrounded with digital technology. They know how to use it, but how can educators and parents help them to use it well and safely? Google for Education Government and Academic Engagement Lead, Chris Harte speaks to us about the positive potential of technology in education and the importance of learning good digital citizenship skills.
Show Notes
Transcript
Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach, a Podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name is Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education, and today I am joined by a man who has an extensive technological background technology in schools, technology around schools, ways schools can use technology.
He's the Government and Academic Engagement Lead at Google for Education. Mr. Chris Hart, thanks for joining us.
Chris Harte: Thanks, Dale. Lovely to be here.
Dale Atkinson: So first of all, what is the positive potential of technology in education?
Chris Harte: So I think one of the areas where technology can genuinely support is in personalising learning.
And I think that we've talked about like the promise of personalising learning for 20 years. How do we give each child an equitable shot at learning, at learning growth? How do we really ensure that they have what they need at the point in time? And technology has always like hinted at that possibility and never really delivered.
And I think that we're moving into a space and technology where the actual capacity of the technology to support the personalisation of learning is becoming a reality. If you tackle the big challenges around access to devices, access to connectivity and platforms and skill building and pedagogy, which have now made sound really small, but they're pretty big challenges once you kind of tackle those and you're in a space where young people and children have access to technology, as a standard piece of their learning. It's not like we're going to go to the lab to do an hour. They've got some access to technology over a long period, an extended period of time. Then I think we're in a space where technology is supporting personalisation and you know, that's through AI. I think it's through the ability to collaborate and to connect globally.
I think there are so many parts of that where we're kind of plugging into a learning ecosystem beyond just the classroom.
Dale Atkinson: So you must engage with a lot of schools out there in all sorts of capacities. What are you seeing nationally and internationally that is really exciting, you and animating sort of your work?
Chris Harte: I'm really so lucky. I mean, I spent 17 years working in schools as a, as a languages teacher in the school leader in the UK and also here in Australia. I should never pick a favourite school, so I'm not going to say a favourite school, but one of the schools I think that really inspired me and continues to inspire me is XP School in Doncaster in the UK.
XP School is one of those schools I worked very closely with a lot of the founding staff in that space, and it came from the tragedy of a secondary school burning down. And so, what do we do? It's actually a blank canvas for us to be able to do something brand new and XP School takes a very, very different approach to learning.
And even though, you know, I have a passion I guess for technology, the reality is that the technology at XP is probably quite invisible. It's just there. And it really is much more about the pedagogical approaches and the culture of personalisation. And it is a bit of a tagline, but it's really meaningful as they talk about the children and young people in the XP schools because there are now a number of them in the XP schools are crew, not passengers.
And so it's really about how do you empower the agency that the young people already have so that they are driving their learning with support, with scaffolds, with accessibility, with all of the things that the kind of grownups in the space have to put in to ensure that that happens. The reality is that that crew, not passengers, mantra, really feeds into everything.
So students drive their learning. They do take a project based, they're actually called expedition based. So that's where XP comes from, expedition-based approach to learning, where they will investigate through transdisciplinary approaches, some big challenging questions, but they connect to the local community as well.
And the walls both kind of physical and metaphorical, I guess, are really porous. So they're constantly connecting out to community, having community connecting in. And part of the technology piece is being able to connect to that global learning community and global learning experiences. So when I'm looking at something which is a very non-traditional model of a learner focused ecosystem, I think XP has got a really interesting story there, which is within the context that the school exists, it's within the physical context, the location, the community, and every school's different.
But I think there are some things that you can pull from that, which are really interesting to explore anywhere in the world.
Dale Atkinson: I'm going to make a big assumption here. Any parent of a child and teaches are, are similar in this dynamic, understands the plasticity of their little brains and their capacity to pick up technology is far more intuitive than perhaps it is for those of us as we get a bit older.
What are the challenges for educators in this space, and how do we encourage upskilling and building capacity in these areas for, for people who perhaps aren't the digital natives?
Chris Harte: Yeah, it's a, it's a really great question because I think there is absolutely a lot of truth in the idea that young people who have been surrounded by technology intuitively know how to access and use the technology, but they don't intuitively necessarily know how to access and use it for good. And in the sense of they don't like they can use the things, but there are still a bunch of skills around digital citizenship, around what it means to use the power of technology to advance learning, to do good in the world. I think that's a really important piece that needs to be deliberately designed by educators, um, and, and families actually, and parents to talk about, you know, what are the pros and cons of, of technology because there are. And the technology in itself is, is never at fault in the sense that it's just a thing, it's just a tool. But the reality is like how we use it, how we apply it. So while I totally agree that young people tend to know how to use the technology, whether they know how to use it well and safely, for the most positive impact, I think is maybe another question.
And to pick up on the, the kind of upskilling piece, there are lots of programs out there at Google we have a program called Be Internet Awesome. Which is a kind of game based, um, curriculum around for young people, which is freely available just in go and Google it. And that is really focusing in on how do I stay safe online, how do I look after my identity?
What does it mean to have a digital footprint, those kinds of things. So we do it through a game-based approach, which is great, and we localised it across the Asia Pacific region into many different languages now. So that idea of, yes, there is technology, yes, you know how to turn it on, you know how to do stuff with it.
But there is definitely learning and upskilling around that, the capabilities and the digital kind of citizenship skills needed to really make the most of it.
Dale Atkinson: So one of the big challenges for the schooling system over the last two or three years has been COVID-19, the impact on learning. What has it taught us about the positives and the negatives of technological opportunity?
Chris Harte: At the height of COVID, there were kind of 1.5 billion kids who were, you know, forcibly removed from their schools across the world. So there were suddenly kind of evicted and having to learn from somewhere else. And in many countries, you know, in Australia we were, we are very lucky, we're generally resource rich and able to do kind of remote learning and those kinds of things. For where that was impacted in many other countries, that was not the case. And I think what it has taught us, there are a couple of things. I think that technology in and of itself is never the solution that it has to be about how technology is used. So if you go personal anecdotes, I have a who's now a 17-year-old, but he was going through year 10, 11, and 12, some parts of 12 through COVID.
And day one, when he was sent home, there was a timetable set. He was online and he had lessons, you know, an hour long between 9 and 10 and whatever. And day one, he was sitting at the dining room table, you know, bright eyed and bushy tailed. I think after four days he was lying on the sofa with his laptop, and then probably after a week he's in bed with his hoodie on, camera off.
And there was something about that whole piece. I mean, it was a challenging time anyway, but there was something about that whole piece of we can't shift technology into the same structures. It'll only take us so far. So if we try and just take school as is and shift it online, then actually we're losing connection. We're losing that wellbeing aspect. You end up with a two-dimensional representation of your class where you might have some cameras on and some cameras off, and this isn't the best of circumstances where people have actually got technology and connectivity. I think there's something about that learning design is not the same, so you have to think about learning design hand in hand with technology. And why I think the, the kind of pandemic and the, the sessions of remote learning have, have really taught us is that to do learning really well with technology, we have to unleash learner agency. They have to have some level of autonomy, some level of choice and voice and responsibility and identity around their learning experience through technology.
Because if we just think, oh, I'm going to do my teacher piece, and then the kids are going to fill in some quizzes and, and that's okay. There's nothing wrong with doing that, but you're losing a huge amount of students’ engagement because it becomes such a passive piece. And you know, as a teacher, you're walking out of the room, you've got eye contact, you've got the ability to keep the dynamic in a room or in a learning space going, and you kind of lose that a bit with technology.
So the learning design has to be different. The learning design has to be focused on learners at the heart of a learning ecosystem, like how do I tap into this self-serve learning content? How do I tap into this lecture from an expert in, in the states on something else? And I think it's a much more dynamic and, and in many ways more interesting and personalising opportunity to take technology as an enabler of a different paradigm versus let's just pick up school, which we tried to do because that was, it was an emergency, right? You try to pick up school and put it into technology. So I think that that is a shift. My biggest worry is that we snap back to an older paradigm because we're all tired, like we're all sick of change. And you know, there's the real exhaustion out there. So I think that school's thinking about that and saying, what did we learn?
And in fact, asking the very question, Dale, that you just asked is, what did we learn about it? What can we take the good bit and how can we move that forward in our school, I think is a real opportunity.
Dale Atkinson: I mean, there are some fundamental things about the way, uh, education infrastructure is designed which are not future ready to the physical spaces, the furnishings, even the structure of the school day, uh, in many cases, which can sometimes be, you know, locked away in enterprise agreements and various bits of legislation.
These are very big challenges for us. What are some of the kinds of practical changes that schools, educators, leaders, can make now to kind of adopt some of these technologies in a really meaningful way for kids?
Chris Harte: I think that one of the really interesting pieces in this is that if we focus on an incremental shift on what we already do, then technology will be helpful. It'll be something that's useful for kids. It'll shift maybe instead of having a handwritten essay as a proxy for learning, we've got a, you know, a really dynamic video presentation as a proxy for learning, but it's still, at the end of the day, just a proxy for learning for, for something from a curriculum.
I think that the small steps are about how does this enable us to do something different and better than we would otherwise do. Like I'm a fanatic for post it notes and butchers’ paper, like I love it. I'm all about it. I want to be in that space. I want to be moving stuff around. And sometimes, you know, you can go online and, and you can go and do a Padlet, or you can do a Jamboard or something like that.
And it's a kind of that when we talk about sort of SAMR models and pieces like that, it's a bit of a substitute level. What I'm really interested in is yes, do that because that helps teachers to feel comfortable. It helps them to see that the technology helps a little bit. Look for things which are maybe more augmentative, things that are going to move learning in a different direction, but also really try and at the same time, and this is also the challenge, at the same time, in parallel, try and reflect on what would it fundamentally look like if we shifted something like the timetable.
So what does it look like when, which we did during the pandemic, often in many schools, what does it look like when students have extended periods of time where they are driving their online? And I think when we talk about agency and it, it sometimes feels like it's a student voice wellbeing place and it's like, oh yeah, it's about students being able to talk about what they want, which it is having some voice and having some choice.
But I think the reality with agency is that technology allows the students to access learning at times, which are more appropriate to them, and that will be different for every child. And technology allows us at this idea, again, of, of the promise of personalisation. Technology allows us to lean into personalisation.
So if you were to say to kids, okay, we, we are doing this for unit of work, and there's some content and there's some process and there's some product, one really simple thing with technology is to say, okay, the content is x, the process we're going to use over the next six weeks is this. The product can be whatever you want.
Use technology. If you want to go and do a video, do a video. If you want to do a beautiful poster, then do a poster. Like as long as whatever you’re creating demonstrates the learning outcomes. Great. And I think unleashing technology that way is a really small step that people feel comfortable with, but also then that helps learners and young people to really demonstrate what they know and what they can do and what they can apply in lots of different modes.
And I think that's a real joy of technology and I think it's that kind of, short, easy step to take.
Dale Atkinson: Yeah, it does take some bravery though.
Chris Harte: It all takes a little bit of bravery. I think that's the thing.
Dale Atkinson: Well, I think you've inspired all of us to be maybe a little bit braver in our thinking, um, as we move forward.
Thank you very much Chris Hart, for joining us to talk about technology and education.
Chris Harte: Thanks for having me.
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