Education: Free of IT

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Had an interesting topic of discussion, is IT a major negative point in Education.

I have to say I was quite impressed with this post (some good, some bad).

I’ve said quite strongly in other posts that Schools have no sympathy from me if they fall in to a financial mess because of the waste I’ve witnessed.  I’ve fallen out with and argued with a lot of people that IT is not a magic bean.

IT is simply there to make your life easier.  Likewise for home where we get to watch what we want, when we want and how we want because of IT not because of blackboard with chalk.

So what points were raised:

·         Registers reverting back to paper

·         Blackboards instead of projectors

·         Normal boards instead of IWBs

·         No devices in classrooms

·         Only ICT have IT

·         10 years ago we managed

Registers

This is the easy one to defend, a register can be done and dusted in a matter of moments.  When I was a kid a lesson would settle down and be seated then it was time to say “here” while the teacher did the register.

Now this entire process would take a few minutes including the time it took for us all to sit down and be quiet.

This entire process wouldn’t take no longer than it would today using IT – a teacher can logon and be ready in the time it takes for the class to be seated and settled.

That register once saved is then able to be processed to see who is absent first thing.  As a result the attendance office will also be able to contact the Parent using the same register system (with name, addresses and contact numbers).  The reasoning on that absence can also be logged in the same area.

In the event that during a later lesson and a student is marked absent, again this has the ability to flag up on the attendance office who can contact the parent and/or emailing/phone the houses (support staff) to find out where this child is.  It’s useful to note that email is also used in this process which can go out to “All Staff”.

Without this system the School would have to employ more attendance officers to keep up with this demand.  Not to mention who will deliver a paper register? The Student who should actually be in lesson learning not delivering a piece of paper.

Blackboards > IWBs/Projectors

I’ve made this clear in other posts how easy it is to produce work anywhere in the world on a piece of IT and bring that and place on a screen within a minute. 

You can store that and use it later, can email it to share with other staff or save it to a general area.  A piece of work produced for a projector isn’t simply rubbed off a blackboard.  You can show pictures, videos and even use other software packages to make work “more fancy” which in all honesty I don’t fully agree with.  What I do agree with though is saving a year, 2 years or even 10 years’ worth of work to be reused.  I’ve witnessed teachers actually plan their next 12 months of curriculum which makes it easier for them and also allows the ability for a cover teacher to have access to that work.

I’ve slaughtered IWBs and rightly so – they cost around £1000 each.  Half the time they are not used effectively enough but I have to say I’ve seen an increase in this lately.  Which in all honestly this allows me to see why they benefit the teacher.

A teacher can stand in front of the classroom making live changes to something and get the kids focused on the front.  The teacher no longer needs to be sitting at the PC.  There’s additional features that allows a teacher to make live notes which can be quickly saved and revert back to for the students to see.  This enables them to ask questions and answer quick fire ones.

All this is about making things easier and simpler.  I produce all kinds of reports and documents on IT in a saved area.  In the event something happens to me someone else can take over and not the end of the world.

No Devices > Only ICT have IT

Now this is where a focus feels like it’s aimed at which I too have grumbled about.  Those pesky devices in classrooms from laptops to iPads where generally they are not really thought through.  I think this goes back to the whole “be careful what you buy” and have a purpose for it before you even test/trial it.  I completely agree it’s a waste of money to buy iPads when there are cheaper alternatives to browse the internet.  I completely agree that buying a classroom full of laptops for 15 year olds isn’t the best way forward.

To completely scrap IT though? Is quite a naive thing to say especially if you are not experienced enough to understand what teachers do all day.

10 Years ago

When I was a child there was a lot of differences to education:

·         No phone call first thing in the morning for an absence

·         We had to white down what was on the blackboard quick so the teacher could rub it out and write more

·         Schools didn’t have 30 students per class

·         Schools were not suffering with a lack of classrooms

·         Schools had plenty of teachers

·         Teachers had plenty of free periods to do their marking etc

·         No Teacher shortage

·         No mass budget cuts

·         Less Ofsted requirements

·         Less data tracking

·         Curriculum changes

Unfortunately this has nothing to do with IT, this has to do with over expectations of our Schools and effectively “mass” educating the “masses”.  I once visited a School I was taught in and I was impressed but also disappointed in the changes.  It went from having 150 Students per year to 250.  It went from not having a sixth form but to having one with another 200 Students.  I was disappointed at the fact that it only gained one new building of classrooms.  That’s around 750 increased to 1450 students yet the site itself didn’t look like it changed much.

When you look at the state of education in a decade it’s changed an incredible amount.  I’ve worked and spent plenty of time with teachers some of whom are retired.  They told me about many of these changes how they were no longer “teaching” but doing endless amount of data inputting, reports, tracking and marking.  They would tell me about the endless amount of meetings, briefings and CPD expectations that again they were no longer “teaching”.

Again, this has nothing to do with IT but how education is run.  This is not something anyone but the Government can change and let’s face it with all the protests by teacher unions having made a positive impact (no it hasn’t) where do we go?  If these unions can’t change education what hope do any of us have.

The above list shows that IT is not the fundamental issues in education.  IT regardless if some choose to purchase an iMac instead of a Windows PC just to use Office/Internet has nothing to do with the major issues in education.  IT regardless if some one chooses to buy a bunch of tablets is not a major issue in education.

IT is there to make your life easier and if it’s not – it’s failing and should be scrapped.  I am fully aware of the IT spending including staff – we’re talking around 150K per year.

That’s 7 NQT teachers or 5 experienced teachers which still wouldn’t help cut the work load.

As mentioned before this all stems from a need instead of a want.

So let’s pick some more specifics:

Media Tool Access

They can have portable interactive screens with laptops attached. Not in the classroom, and only a few, say one for every four classes. But lessons would be planned generally as much as possible to not rely on them.

So lessons wouldn’t be planned to rely on them – This is an issue you can’t simply walk backwards without IT.  You’ve got to come up with better solutions for that replacement.  When it comes to students sharing equipment this can cause a problem because a student may not be directly taking part.  You can’t share a musical instrument with a group of 4 students.  You effectively give 1 student 5 minutes each and the other 15 minutes that student isn’t actually learning nor taking part.  Plus “portable screens with laptops” – Scrap IT but not completely? …..

Thing is teachers create a plan and that must be adhered to – anyone who knows teaching will understand this.  Even though I completely believe a teacher should have a plan B in the event of failures but this shouldn’t always be the case.  When you go down the route of “changing” things you also have to create a consistency.  Every class should be the same this allows every teacher who uses that classroom to use the IT effectively and quickly.  I believe every classroom should have the same setup which cuts down problems and cuts down training requirements plus the time it takes to turn it all on.  Within 2 minutes a class + the IT should be fully ready regardless what it is.  You also have to remember that the classroom may not be assigned to an individual teacher, it could be 10 or even 20 teachers in that room every two weeks.  Again – do teachers have the time to be fully trained up on everything? No so instead you create consistency.

Sharing of Work

This is not something I see as valuable to teaching I.T wise. I think teachers have regular meetings where they can discuss etc and go over good methods, it depends what type of collaboration they are doing. If it's teaching techniques, meeting face to face is surely better.

Sharing is a fundamental part in Education and although face to face has great benefits.  What happens when you found a very good presentation that can be used by your department?  You have to wait till you have a free lesson and photocopy it.  Then provide that to the rest of the department instead using technology you can email it to everyone or save it to shared area.  That resource is also permanently saved.  I’ve met some teachers who have resources dating back 12 years (no joke).  You only have to spend time in a classroom to see how many resources are being used in a single lesson usually 2-4 files per class.  When you add that up to a day just for a single room – potentially there can be 100s of open resources a day.  The same logic of the internet you can apply on the day to day usage of projectors/sharing those resources.

One thing that’s been ignored is when do teachers have more time to “meet”, they are already swamped by a single department meeting a week and School briefing once a week.  This doesn’t include their monthly CPD evening sessions.  They have little to no free periods which they have to spend marking, assessing and data tracking (all on paper without IT).  So when do they have time for this?

Teachers

In terms of registers, I can only speak from my experience. Teachers tend to mess about taking time to log on to the computer, then onto the student system, then loading up the class. A piece of paper is much quicker for the teacher, the back office might get the hump.

Libraries are closing because the internet is a much better information resource, it's practical to access information via the internet rather than going to loan a book. I don't think it's practical for I.T to be used to widely in education. It's easy to "throw" an iPad at a class.

How long before the teacher is done away with, or the state schools ditch a large number of teachers to a system where students are taught remotely.
I never said not using computers was the answer, students would need to learn how to use computers for practical uses, "a couple of times a week" suggests this. I would expect the I.T curriculum to cater for this, I know the primary one does.

Interesting this one, sounds like the person has a bit of a “gripe” towards teachers and to be fair at times so do I.  I can also praise them hard like I have done in other posts.

Why is a teacher messing about taking time to logon? I’ve seen classes and the teachers spend very little to barely any time logging on and getting ready to teach.  Then again we are a School aiming to be outstanding which requires total behaviour and total focus by the teachers/students.

Libraries are closing thanks to IT, it’s fact – simple as that.  Internet access has great resources and you can find nearly anything – using IT.

Then the last part – “I never said” strange the topic started off about IT shouldn’t exist outside of ICT.  That means only ICT can use the internet to research, ICT are the only ones able to produce work to put on a powerpoint presentation.

It’s either ICT has IT and that’s it or is it – non ICT use what’s needed.  And considering this person has said that paper registers are better.

Using Tablets

You can get systems where you can put paper through a machine and it detects the marks (like a lottery ticket), however I guess a compromise could be reached on registers whereby staff are supplied with a small tablet purely for admin purposes. But I would prefer paper only if I had my way.

It sounds like your school thinks for itself and does not follow trends. A good thing in most cases.

Right this is a very interesting one now we are getting a little bit on the silly side.  We are now talking about not scrapping IT but perhaps completely doing something different just to prove a point.  Looking through the responses now it seems other ways of doing things that “work”.

Switching a system from one to the other can actually increase costs.  A tablet at £100 struggles to last two years unless really looked after.  A PC costing us just over double the price could potentially last up to 8 years with SSDs (we currently have SSDs in our 7 year old equipment and they are running almost as good as new machines).  Although it will be interesting to see how those 7 year old PCs last with the SSDs it certainly makes things viable for cutting down long term costs.  We’ve finally removed all 8+ year old equipment because their specs were simply too low to make a major difference with SSDs.

Then you have to think what can you do with that tablet? Well our full version of SIMs doesn’t work so we would have to use Sims Teacher App (which doesn’t allow everything SIMs Windows does).  We would have to scrap the majority of our department software including our full version of Office 365 Live (because Windows versions and even their online one doesn’t do everything).  Those tablets will not connect up to your projectors, IWBs or even to some of the electronics/science and DT equipment which are Windows only.

So to replace all the PCs with tablets we would be looking at £65,000 including cases. 

We would have to replace the majority of our software (we have done tablet BYOD schemes so we fully know what’s available and it’s not much).  Meaning potentially more thousands spent and some of it is annual software.  We would have to get model specific tablets to make sure they connect up to our projectors (our ones are not compatible).  That would be an additional £40,000 based on a £400 projector or TV that’s compatible.  And before anyone mentions we don’t do £300 projectors because we require a certain brightness and like a projector that can handle being turned on nearly 8 hours a day 5 days a week.

So an estimated of over £100,000 has already been spent making our current system compatible with “tablets” and that’s before we purchase Apps plus create a system that manages them.  You also have to consider the teacher would have to logon to the internet every day instead of just click and go – because our filtering system doesn’t allow it to be any other way.  Every staff member would have to receive training and again because we did tablets we’re fully aware of the issues surrounding them.  We suffer black spots in areas as a result of a fire alarm system so we may have to consider boosters in those areas.  Then there is damages, accidents where even though not many staff had tablets we stil had to replace 5 of them which although is a low number it’s still ¼ of what we had in.  The charging ports are also much easier to damage.  If you consider a broken keyboard or mouse for a PC costing £5 a set it’s certainly not a major if they get broken (which happens often).  To repair tablets you’re looking at an average of £50 per repair or simply replace them for another £100.

You also have to consider the likes of “flash, shockwave, java” which don’t fully work on tablets – again as we found out.  Some websites still are not fully compatible with tablets – we can’t find alternatives because they don’t exist we know we tried.  So again we’re at this place where someone has made a crucial decision without looking at the wider scope making the same mistake as those who choose “let’s get iPads or iMacs” why? Because they are pretty….  Getting tablets for the cheap as chips option is just the same level mistake.

We would have to make sure that site wide coverage of Wi-Fi also was setup at the moment we are about 90% coverage in the areas needed.

There’s also software like Adobe Cloud which is professional media software and the free versions available are not good enough for high quality work.

I will say this, I am going to look at how much we spend towards IT every year and see what the costs would be if it was all scrapped.

Support Staff
An increase of support staff which even I hadn't actually considered or remembered.  We're in a situation where the MIS and cashless catering system makes the School life easier.  This means only a part time and one full time person is needed for attendance (plus other tasks) likewise for the exam officer and data manager.  So for those jobs we're talking about 3 and a 1/2 people.

Straight away we would be looking to employ 2 additional staff to keep up with the missing MIS after all the DFE requires the information and all that data is presented to staff.  A lot of this is about moving forward - in fact it's a huge debate at the moment if all the extras are no longer required only the DFE requirements.  One of these changes occurred recently September 2016 - this is fact.

We would also have to employ another restaurant worker due to the cash system returning where as at the moment each person is scanned through the system almost instantly.  We have one person less than most Schools in our area - in fact I think it's two less while still providing a very good quality service while still turning a tiny profit which goes towards on improving the sourcing of food.

Re-prographics currently has no direct member of staff and without projectors etc we will see a rise in photocopying.  This means another member of staff - who's going to do all this work?  We do all the prospectus etc internally which again is a money saver by the School.

We have a business manager who works hard to prove we are not wasting money.  Everyone under the School BM understands this and also works towards saving money.

So we know we would have to consider employing 4 staff at least to recover just the basics in our School which adds up to £80,000.  This isnt just a guess this is evidence as a result of current situations where at times those departments struggle.  Any extra work load would require more staff.

Who will do it? Teachers? When they currently have no free time. This means even more teachers would have to be employed who cost more than those support staff.  We're talking £25,000 each meaning an additional 4 teachers would cost £100,000.

Sadly the person has made it clear not only will he not change his mind - to be fair he is very young and his posts are not only contradicting him self but refusal to see the bigger picture.

This kind of goes back to why I don't always get along with my own profession who have a habit of reacting quicker than they think.  They lack the experience and general knowledge to realize the bigger picture.

As some one that once used to say "go back to the black board" I can honestly say this is no different.

This is why young people generally don't run Schools and why it takes decades to gain that kind of experience.  You need to see the bigger picture if you will change your mind or not.