Back in 2008, the business professor Clayton Christensen predicted that by 2019, half of all US high school classes would be taken online. It’s now 2020 and this prediction has not come true, in the US or any other country. Why is this? Is it fundamentally impossible to get remote learning to work as well as […]
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What skills will be needed in the economy of the future? Suppose a friend came to you and told you they wanted to visit Siberia for the whole of next February. They want to prepare for their visit, and to do so they need a precise weather forecast. They want to know exactly what temperature […]
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Daisy Christodoulou talks about some of the important questions and popular ed tech ideas she explores in her new book, Teachers vs Tech? The case for an ed tech revolution. As long ago as 1913, people were predicting that technology was going to transform education. “Books will soon be obsolete in the public schools. Scholars […]
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Daisy Christodoulou’s new book, Teachers vs Tech? is all about how we can use technology to improve learning. In this blog post she considers the benefit of spaced repetition algorithms in helping students retain knowledge. Recently, I started flicking through a book I’d read about ten years ago, Juliet Gardiner’s The Thirties: An Intimate History. […]
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One of the easiest things to lose sight of in education is the original target you were trying to achieve. What are we trying to teach them, and how best should this be done? There are many reasons why this becomes marginalised: we assume it is obvious; inspectoral demands replace our objectives with visible metrics […]
Read moreWhat can be done to ensure that technology truly improves learning outcomes? Two thoughts for a complicated scenario. I started teaching in the pre-digital era, and moved into education technology as a professional when I discovered just how it could help improve the learning outcomes for my students. And these were analogue technologies that at […]
Read moreIn 1998 the dot-com bubble was expanding, the word “web” had slipped into common parlance, Windows 98 was being sold as an internet-ready piece of software and many of the students who entered our universities this year were born.
Read moreAfter years of introducing technology into classrooms around the world, and with previously unimaginable levels of internet access, there are few signs that technology is meaningfully impacting learning outcomes.
Read moreThere are few things which have the same potential to revolutionise teaching and learning as technological innovation. Many schools have been quick to adapt and integrate new technologies into the classroom. But with so many possibilities, the big challenge for schools has been how to harness them in ways that improve outcomes and don’t break […]
Read moreThe future classroom is alive with tech potential. Soon there will be talking (and singing?) robot teaching assistants helping children with their phonics and arithmetic in class. They will recognize each child by their unique voice pattern and adapt the training to their particular needs in real time: Jane needs more help with her five-times’ […]
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