The use of technology in the classroom is often promoted as being able to reduce teacher admin and workload. Products boldly claim to reduce teacher stress by including assessments, progress reports and feedback. Homework can be set, and marked, at the click of a button, and progress reports can be generated without having to trawl through mountains of exercise books.
However, if all these claims were easily achievable in the real-life classroom, teachers would be crying out for more EdTech solutions. But this is not my experience. The teachers and school leaders I speak to have a number of reservations about adopting new EdTech products. Conversations revolve around several common factors:
- Teachers don’t trust the tech to work and perceptions of problems from logging into the system, to keeping track of students’ progress, can mean that teachers keep paper backup copies of everything, thus actually increasing their workload.
- Teachers have been burnt in the past by sub-standard products, which have not been fit for the age, stage and demographic of the students in their setting.
- School leaders have previously invested in products which are under-utilised by teachers and end up being forgotten about, wasting precious school budgets.
- Everyone is sceptical about the claims made by platforms about reducing workload.
If EdTech is going to be used by teachers consistently in school, to support them and students, and to raise standards, platform developers must address these concerns. My experience is that often the people who develop EdTech solutions are more on the ‘tech’ side than the ‘ed’ side and there is a lack of understanding about pedagogy, teachers and the schools in general.
The role of the educator in product development is crucial. Products need to have valued input from teachers at all stages. Educators are often present at the conception of a product and then discarded once the content is created. Teachers, with recent teaching experience in the relevant types of settings, should be sense-checking and adding classroom insights at every point. Many tech people have not been in a classroom since they were students themselves, so are not aware of the needs of today’s students and schools.
In order for an EdTech product to be successful in reducing teacher workload and facilitating them spending more time actually teaching and engaging with their students, there are non-negotiables in EdTech platforms, and here at 21st Century we put these to the forefront with our platform.
As far as possible teachers should be left to teach: the EdTech product cannot replace the relationships and trust built up between teacher and student. However, teachers face pressure with an ever-increasing burden on paperwork takes them away from their vocation and core motivation of sparking interest and scaffolding students’ learning. Technology solutions should genuinely reduce the admin tasks that a teacher would normally have to do, such as setting and marking homework, generating data on progress, as well as being a rich and varied bank of high-quality resources. Any platform should provide intuitive links between the different elements of teaching, and teachers should be supported to use all the capabilities of the platform.
Another issue with Maths teaching in UK schools, which is becoming more acute, is the lack of qualified and excellent Maths teachers. This is only going to become more of a challenge for school leaders, and their Maths teachers are being increasingly spread more thinly across departments, supplemented by supply teachers, inexperienced teachers, or even teaching assistants. The impact of this is not only on the students who may have poor Maths teaching during some crucial school years, but it also increases the pressure on the experienced, qualified Maths teachers. Edtech products should try to alleviate these pressures. At 21C we understand these issues, and the sensitivity around them. Our platform is a ‘wraparound’ solution for schools under pressure. We provide not only excellent and comprehensive bite-sized videos to explain each and every concept within the GCSE Foundation Stage syllabus, regardless of exam board, but we also provide a transcript and very detailed teacher notes. This ensures that less confident teachers have the tools at hand to deliver high-quality lessons to all students. Lessons are also linked to games, and a vast bank of linked activities and homework resources, meaning no more searching for the most appropriate homework for the lesson that has been covered in class. Of course, these homeworks are automatically marked, misconceptions identified, and data fed back in an accessible form to teachers. When considering teacher workload, we don’t pay lip service to improving it, we realise that fundamentally teachers want to teach, and tech should be there to allow that magic to happen. School leaders should be asking whether their current EdTech products even touch on addressing the issue of so many students being taught by non-experts.
Linked to the time pressure that teachers find themselves facing, is the challenge for teachers in learning how to best use a new platform. There is precious little time for training for teachers; term times are jampacked from start to finish. 21st Century has used a two-pronged approach to tackle this: we have kept the platform as straightforward to use as possible. We provide comprehensive teacher training and on-boarding, as well as on-going support, to make adoption of our platform as smooth as possible. There is no point in buying into an amazing platform if the teachers do not use it.
Platform owners and creators should actively research and listen to school leaders and ‘coal face’ teachers and constantly be looking to ensure that their products are solutions to actual challenges faced in schools. At 21st Century we have a core education team who consist of teachers who work in Maths classrooms on a day-to-day basis, and school leaders who manage staffing and budgets. This keeps us in a great position to ensure that our platform will be loved by teachers and students, raise standards, reduce teacher workload, and will prove incredible value for money.
