Who remembers universal indicator? Comparing that little strip of paper to a colour chart to determine the precise acidity of the solution you’d dunked it into? That’s a thing of the past at the Bohunt academy chain of schools. There, students use an electronic sensor, plugged into a tablet computer, to record the data. Add another ingredient to make the liquid more acid or alkaline, and the difference is automatically plotted in a graph on the tablet screen.
It’s an example of the continuing technology transformation in schools. For hundreds of years, teaching mostly involved standing in front of a class of students and talking. But the past 20 years has seen an unparalleled degree of innovation, enabling teachers to experiment with new models of learning. Progress first took the form of an ICT suite for almost every school, plus interactive whiteboards in each classroom. More recently, many schools have adopted virtual learning environments (VLEs), in which teachers can provide resources, and students can submit assignments. This has been helped by the availability of free cloud-based services for schools.
Some of those early advances did little more than offer technological support for traditional ways of teaching. But these days, teachers are discovering that technology can enable them to do so much more: provide imaginative new learning experiences for students; inspire students to study independently; and enable teachers to work together and learn from each other.
At the five Bohunt schools (in Liphook, Portsmouth, Petersfield, Wokingham and Worthing), teachers and students are using technology to collaborate more easily: language students, for example, can record themselves speaking a language and share that file instantly with their teacher through Google Drive.
But the technology is also used to fire imaginations, opening students up to sights and sounds that they might never experience in the real world. Geography students at the Worthing school, for example, use virtual reality apps to visit landscapes beyond the reach of any field trip, such as Rio de Janeiro. The school is also experimenting with green screen technology that enables students to imagine they’re visiting the Berlin Wall or conducting a full orchestra – an experience that will be introduced to music lessons in the near future.
Tablets have multiple uses at the Bohunt schools: in maths, for example, students use an app called Desmos to plot graphs; and on geography field trips, they use them to take photos and record data. Students at the Liphook school in Hampshire even created an iPad band, shelving “real” instruments in favour of the GarageBand app. This led to a musical collaboration with a primary school, in which pupils learned to play six different pieces over the course of a week. “It was amazing to see people who had never seen each other before, totally different age ranges, collaborating, producing something very impressive,” says Nigel Wright, the trust’s lead for data and associate head at the Liphook school.
At secondary schools throughout the country, classrooms are ditching the traditional. Alongside the increased adoption of cloud-based sharing technology, the big change is a shift away from ICT suites towards mobile devices. Research in 2015 found that 76% of secondary schools were using tablets in class.
One of the most exciting transformations, however, has been the flipped classroom. Instead of having a lesson, then being set homework on what they’ve learned, students do the relevant preparation work at home first – the lesson is spent dealing with the questions that arise. The aim is to improve students’ engagement and their ability to learn independently. For teachers, it offers the ability to find out exactly what their students do and don’t know, so that every moment of the time spent teaching is used productively.
At Shireland Collegiate academy in Smethwick in the West Midlands, the flipped classroom has been in place for 10 years – long enough to enable the school to perfect the model. Teachers post their schedule of lessons, along with resources and a discussion forum, on a shared site, so students know in advance what they are going to be studying. The idea is to make sure class time is used wisely – rather than watching a video, for example, which could be done at home. Shireland students might be asked to read a document or watch a video for homework, and then post on the forum three things they didn’t understand and one thing they could explain to someone else.
At the start of class, teachers can talk to students about the gaps in their understanding. “Suddenly, you get a very honest and incredibly helpful narrative about a small nugget of work. You get much more from those 20 minutes and that dialogue than we’ve had from homework for decades,” says Sir Mark Grundy, the school’s CEO.
The flipped learning model also makes it harder for students to find excuses for not completing their homework, he adds: “You will do it because all your friends will do it – homework has a visibility it never previously had.”
Despite being based in an area of economic deprivation, Shireland students excel academically. Its last Ofsted inspection, in 2013, was glowing. It received an outstanding rating, and inspectors described it as an “exceptional” school. Students, it said, “are encouraged to see their potential, work hard and aim high.” Its Progress 8 score – which judges students’ progress in year 11 relative to their starting point – is 0.45, which means the average student makes nearly half a grade more progress than the national average, across all subjects.
At the Nottingham University Academy of Science and Technology (Nuast), design and technology (DT) students use the same kinds of software as they will encounter in working life, creating designs using Autodesk Fusion 360, a computer-aided design (Cad) tool, and then outputting them to 3D printers. Assistant principal Jim Smith says it “gives the students the ability to design and manufacture really high-end industry-standard outcomes, which they would not be able to do if they were doing it by hand”. One student has won a place on a prestigious Rolls Royce engineering apprenticeship –partly due to his ability to use industry-standard Cad software.
At Radyr Comprehensive school in Cardiff, students have learned to use tools such as laser cutters, 3D printers and 3D scanners, and acquired skills such as blue-foam modelling, thanks to a partnership with scientific technology firm Renishaw. Students have designed and manufactured everything from titanium rings to speaker cases, and there’s been a big uptake in students – especially girls – taking DT at GCSE and A-level. The real benefit, says assistant head Richard Jenkins, “has been the exposure to the technology and this can-do mentality – if you can draw it, we can make it”.
The introduction of technological tools means that teachers, like their students, keep on learning. At Radyr, the partnership has enabled teachers to hone their own expertise, says Jenkins: “That exposure to technology and the modern manufacturing industry has had a massive impact on their professional standards – they want to use the experiences they’ve gained from Renishaw.” The school has now bought its own 3D printers, so students can manufacture their designs.
But technology doesn’t have to be expensive to make a difference. At the Weald Community school in Kent, students did a maths project that involved sending questionnaires electronically to schools around the world and analysing the data they received – the connection with one school in the US led to an exchange visit.
While students are reaping the benefits of new technology, it’s also having a transformative effect on teachers’ workload. Using the environment of the TeachMeet website, for example, teachers can share best practice and find out what other teachers are doing in a way that was never possible in the past. Shireland has gone one step further, using innovative software to change the way teachers plan and deliver lessons. Seven years ago, it created a resource bank of lesson plans, designed to a fixed template: every member of staff has to contribute a set number of plans each week. There are now 72,000 lessons in the planning bank, which staff can tailor for their own particular class. “Every time somebody takes one of those lessons for next week and makes it better and posts it back up, the whole of that team knows: there’s a cracking lesson for photosynthesis; there’s an amazing lesson for the Somme; there’s an incredible lesson for Of Mice and Men,” says Grundy.
This increasing use of online resources, mobile devices and free cloud technology is precipitating a shift away from a classroom model that has prevailed for 200 years. Schools like Shireland are at the vanguard of a revolution that will see technology enabling teachers to focus on students’ individual needs – and students enabled to take charge of their own learning.
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Photography by Simon J Evans – Bohunt school; Gary Williams – Shireland Collegiate academy; Steve Hughes – Radyr Comprehensive school; James Pike – Weald Community school; PR.
