• Have you actually seen the software/ device/tool being used for teaching, learning or assessment? Do you have independent evidence (i.e. not from the sales team) of its practicality, its usefulness? Is use of this product sustained over time?
• What outcomes for students (or staff) could be enhanced by implementing this digital addition? Is it genuinely beneficial to learning? Would students and staff be worse off without it?
• Which outcomes might be affected detrimentally? Will it be a distraction or cause disruption in class? Will it make behaviour management more difficult? Splitting the focus, adding in another layer of complexity is often just not worth it (Kirschner and De Bruyckere, 2017).
• Can it be scaled? How many devices, licences etc. are needed for your team, your institution? Can it be afforded? Does it require regular investment of money? If it’s good enough for you to develop, then be prepared to scale it. For successful implementation of a new idea, long-term change is required. This needs investment in staff development time and leadership. The Jisc Digital Capabilities Framework (Jisc, 2018) and the Education and Training Foundation’s Digital Teaching Professional Framework (ETF, 2018) are useful reading.
• If you’re not paying for the product, how does the company survive? Will the free version soon be too limiting? Does it require students and staff to give away their data by creating freebie personal accounts? IT teams are rightly wary of freebie software and potential safeguarding concerns.
• Does something similar already exist that could or should be used? Are you duplicating existing systems? The current, institutional version might be more secure, supported and long- lasting. Investing in the existing kit
• ResearchED. (2020) Working out what works.
https://researched.org.uk/
• Selwyn, N., 2016. Is technology good for education? Cambridge: Polity Press
• UK Government. (2013). What Works Network.
www.gov.uk/guidance/what-works-network
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might be a better use of your time.
• In your busy teaching life, is it replicable? Is it quick and easy to implement, to update or repurpose? Are the investment costs (usually your time) worth it?
• Is it your idea? Are you the digital advocate and the shining light of IT? If/when you leave the institution, will this idea just be forgotten? (If so, is it really that useful?) And, crucially:
• Is it part of your planned pedagogy or a distracting oddity? Working out what works in education is now a thing. See, for example, ResearchEd’s Working Out What Works and the Education Endowment Foundation’s Teaching and Learning Toolkit. On a daily basis, the materials and strategies that seem to be working, might just be “poor proxies for learning” (Coe, 2013, p.12). Separating the useful from the lacklustre remains tricky. Keeping curriculum time focused remains essential. In our digitally connected environment it is now much easier for companies to market directly to us, but also for us to ask these pertinent questions. Lively discussions occur daily via Twitter and other social media, and the more open nature of these sites, and the lack of formal hierarchy, can quickly lead to interesting conversations. You might rapidly find as many reasons not to implement the technology as you find in its favour.
Roy Halpin is a teacher educator working at various institutions across the north of England including ScarboroughTEC, the University of Huddersfield and Leeds Beckett University. He co-wrote, with Dr Cheryl Reynolds, a chapter on information and communication technology published in PCET. Learning and Teaching in the Post Compulsory Sector which is published by Learning Matters. See book review on page 36.
THE BIG IDEA
By Sue Lownsbrough
We are hearing much about Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) in the educational press, partly because of Ofsted’s focus on CLT in developing the new Education Inspection Framework. CLT is based on the idea that we are only able to process limited amounts of information in our short-term, or working, memories before we need to commit it to our long-term memories as learning. Bruner’s Spiral Curriculum approach
to teaching and learning is one way to address this issue and it can help learners to master topics by: • breaking learning into small steps; • teaching and consolidating basic underpinning knowledge – the first small steps which learners have not yet mastered;
• revisiting to develop knowledge, with each step getting progressively more challenging over time;
• moving on only when the learner is ready. The benefits are that learning is
reinforced and consolidated each time the topic is revisited; there is progression from simple to complex; learners need to continually refer back to prior learning over the length of the course and apply it to more challenging learning. When planning, ask yourself “Am I
overloading the learners?” and “Can I break this down into smaller steps, building on what they have mastered?” Key words to remember in the spiral curriculum are revisit and develop.
Sue Lownsbrough is the Education and Training Foundation’s maths and English regional specialist lead for the North West.
For more information on Cognitive Load Theory visit
bit.ly/HowWeUseCLT For a useful outline of the Spiral Curriculum visit
bit.ly/SpiralCurriculumOutline
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