For those who couldn't be there, what follows is the script of my keynote address at the 4th ICT and Languages Conference (#ililc4) on Sunday 9th February. You can watch the recording of the livestream here.
From Queen to
Sinatra
Putting the
Pedagogy into the Technology
Under
pressure to conform
Pressure,
Pushing down on me,
Pushing down on you,
No man ask for.
Under pressure.
We are all under pressure. Under pressure from many angles. Under pressure to conform to an ideal, do our job in a certain way, to be a
certain kind of teacher. We are under pressure within our own schools, from our line managers, from the
senior leadership team, from the governors. We are under pressure from constant assessment, from marking, from exams. We are under pressure to make GCSE interesting. We are under pressure from the new curriculum, its challenges and the planning
that it requires. We are under pressure from our students, and we are under pressure from their
parents. (Well, some of them!)
We are also under pressure from “the outside”. Under pressure from he-who-cannot-be-named the Secretary of State for Education
(and my! hasn’t he been busy this week!) and his desire that we should “stop
using gimmicks and educate children properly” (Telegraph, September 2013),
among other things. We are under pressure from Ofsted, and, however much we agree or disagree with
their inspection regime, from what the result of an Ofsted inspection means for
our school. We are also under pressure from business and the wider community to stop this
“vicious cycle of monolingualism” to quote The Guardian. And we are also under pressure to work even harder, to dig even deeper, to
enable our students to overcome their preconceived notion that languages are not
useful and that they are difficult.
I expect you can see now why I have chosen the title
of this address, at least the first part.
I’ll be taking you from Queen to Sinatra, with a little nod along the
way to The Buggles and Kelly Clarkson.
That’s got you all wondering, I expect!
Framing things with music is a natural thing for me -
music frames my life. I have always been
a producer and a consumer of music, of diverse styles and formats. A former colleague and dear friend once came
into my classroom at lunchtime and caught me rocking out to Jamiroquai. I had plugged my mp3 player into the
whiteboard speakers and turned it up pretty loud. Jamiroquai finished and, as my mp3 player was
set to random, Abba came on next, then, coincidentally, David Bowie. “You have a very catholic-with-a-small-c
taste in music,” he said. It’s
true. Wait and see.
So Queen and David Bowie wrote and performed a seminal
song called “Under Pressure”. We are all under pressure, as a collective, as a profession, from many sources. I’m sure that you, like me, are under personal pressures too. Allow me to share some of mine with you.
For half the week I am a peri. Not a
periwinkle, nothing to do with a periwig oh no.
I am a peripatetic teacher. If I look up the word “peripatetic” in the dictionary, it tells me that I am
one who walks about, who is itinerant, unsettled. A teacher who works in more than one school, and who then, once in those
schools, works in more than one classroom is definitely those things. I am under pressure because I have no base, because I have to remember to bring
everything with me each day, and because I can never guarantee that everything
will work as I want it to. Yes,
photocopier, I’m talking about you. You
too, internet connection.
I feel like this little bird on South Shields beach. I’m running along on wet sand, dangerously
close to the water, aware that at any moment a big wave could come along and
make me wet, and that would spoil all my plans.
In the other half of the week, when I work from home
and other places too if I’m asked, I am also under pressure, to have new ideas,
to make new and innovative resources, to keep abreast of everything that is
happening in the world of education, because that is what I am known for,
that’s how I earn my money when not in the classroom. All these bring other pressures, on my family life, on my free time.
I suppose I am under considerable pressure from
technology. I rely on it for so much in
my work. When I started teaching in 1995 I had an OHP and a Coomber. That was pretty much it as far as technology
was concerned. If I needed a worksheet, I got out my scissors, glue and black pen. The challenge was to see how small I could
write and how much I could get onto one sheet of paper. When I left my secondary job in 2009 I found
some of these worksheets languishing in the back of my cupboard and wondered
what on earth I had been doing. I started typing worksheets on our home computer and printing them out in
1996. CGTimes font, no pictures. It was to be a number of years before I had a
computer in my classroom.
Things are very different now and therefore the challenges also are very
different. I do a lot of things very differently now, and technology helps me a huge
amount. But there are also many things I
do the same as I did way back in 1995.
Technology
and teachers – a complex relationship
Technology exists.
The new gadgets exist. We feel
obliged to use them. To be a good teacher, we feel, we should buy into the technological revolution,
embrace it, give ourselves over to it. The school expects it. Shape up or ship out. Indeed there’s not much that technology can’t do
nowadays. It’s revolutionised the role
of the teacher in not very many years. Could technology replace teachers? They tried it in Japan five years ago, but all has gone strangely quiet on that
front since then.
In the 1960s, big, brash, colourful, loud TV put an end to the golden age of
radio broadcasting.
Pictures came and broke your heart,
Put the blame on VTR.
Yes, apparently Video Killed the Radio
Star. We don’t want technology to kill the teacher’s star. We need teachers’ charm and quirkiness, their
personality and their art. I told you there’d be a nod to The Buggles.
So our relationship with technology, as teachers, is a
complex one. On the one hand we want to use it in our lessons because that’s what everyone else
seems to be doing, while on the other hand we don’t want to make ourselves
redundant.
In an attempt to find out about teachers’
relationships with technology and to gauge the lay of the land, I asked the
#MFLTwitterati, via SurveyMonkey, the following questions:
-Name one thing that you, as a language teacher, can do better than computers
or other technology.
-Name one thing that computers or other technology can do better than you in
language teaching.
Those of you who responded online or who followed the
survey’s progress on Twitter will know that I was after 100 responses, which I
got, so thank you so much to everyone who took the time to submit their
answers. Why 100 answers? So we can play Pointless
of course! Or would Family Fortunes be
more appropriate – this is my dilemma! The most popular answers will give us a clear indication of the feelings of
this sample of teachers, hence Family Fortunes, while the pointless answers are
always going to be more individual, to indicate an individual’s relationship
with technology and how it impacts on their own particular teaching style. Anyway, I’m going to tell you the answers and some interesting facts about them. It’s Pointless just cos I really like Pointless, as most of you doubtless know,
and because Pointless always strikes me as more intellectual, like your good
selves. I’m sure that in a round about
Famous Franks your answer wouldn’t be “Swiss Franc”….
To break with Pointless protocol, I’m going to tell you the top 3 answers
first, in reverse order. Keep track of
how many points you would have won.
In joint 2nd place, 11 people said (and I
bet they were chuckling as they typed this first one) translate accurately and speak. The most popular answer, with 13, was personalise
learning/adapt to students’ needs. Computers are brilliant in lots of ways, but they can’t see the group of
children we have in front of us, who have come in for the last lesson of the
day from the wind, the rain and a PE lesson, and know exactly what they will need
for the next hour.
Here are some other answers that received more than 1
vote:
Interact
with students
|
8
|
Build
relationships with students
|
6
|
Explain
|
5
|
Give
feedback
|
5
|
Make
students laugh
|
5
|
Listen
|
4
|
Praise
students
|
4
|
|
Engage
|
3
|
Enthuse
|
3
|
Teach
|
3
|
Empathise
|
2
|
Encourage
|
2
|
Inspire
|
2
|
Smile
|
2
|
The remaining answers received one point each:
Assess
oral work
|
1
|
Be
emotionally intelligent
|
1
|
Be
flexible
|
1
|
Create
a learning atmosphere in the classroom
|
1
|
Do
actions
|
1
|
Give
students real life experiences to relate to
|
1
|
Help
students to make connections to content
|
1
|
Manage
behaviour
|
1
|
Non-verbal
communication
|
1
|
Provide
context
|
1
|
Recognise
talent
|
1
|
Teach
grammar
|
1
|
Understand
when a student has mastered a skill or concept
|
1
|
Work
for 12 hours without having to reboot
Yes – teachers still work when there is no electricity or internet
connection!
|
1
|
Now what leaps out at me on seeing these results, is
that most of these things are things that only humans can do. It’s not that we do them better than technology, it’s that technology can’t do
a lot of them at all. Many of them are
the very things that make us human, and that make us decide to become teachers
in the first place. Nearly 20% of respondents used the words encourage,
enthuse, explain, empathise, engage, inspire, motivate and praise. About 40% of respondents mentioned something that is innately human.
Now the second question. The results are equally as interesting while being more diverse.
Here are the top 3 answers, again in reverse order. In joint second place with 7, we have give
instant feedback and vocabulary
drilling and the top spot, with 9, is create
engaging games and resources.
I’ll comment more on those later.
Here are some more responses which received more than one vote:
Be
accessible 24/7
|
6
|
Authentic
material
|
6
|
Repeat
|
5
|
Pictures
/ visuals / graphics
|
5
|
Authentic
audio
|
5
|
Grammar
drilling (interestingly lower on the list than vocabulary drilling)
|
4
|
Connect
with culture
|
4
|
Authentic
video
|
4
|
Record
|
4
|
|
Motivate
students
|
3
|
Assess
quickly and accurately
|
3
|
Engage
students
|
2
|
Store
data
|
2
|
One-to-one
work with students
|
2
|
Access
to up-to-date language
|
2
|
Different
voices for listening
|
2
|
Promote
independence
|
2
|
Allow
students to work at their own pace
|
2
|
Find
facts quickly
|
2
|
There were again a number of responses that received
one vote, which I’ll quickly run through for you. Remember that these are things that teachers think technology can do better
than them:
Entertain
students
|
1
|
Be
creative
|
1
|
Spreadsheets
|
1
|
Reinforce
|
1
|
Record
and playback
|
1
|
Pause
and rewind
|
1
|
Present
and rework a text
|
1
|
Variety
|
1
|
Organise
|
1
|
Check
unknown vocabulary
|
1
|
Reach
all kinds of learners
|
1
|
Assess
all learners simultaneously
|
1
|
Listen
to all learners and record them simultaneously
|
1
|
Media-rich
content
|
1
|
Although the answers to this second question were more
diverse, there were some striking common themes. 12 people mentioned speed. 10 people mentioned feedback. 9 people used the word authentic. And 8 people mentioned student independence.
All in all, 30% of respondents alluded to the convenience and to the
labour-saving and time-saving aspects of technology. So does technology do these things better than us, or just quicker than us, and
for more hours in the day? It certainly enables us to reach more students at a time, to spread ourselves
more thinly, to record 30 students at once, for 30 students at once to practise
a certain point and get feedback on it.
One interesting comment made in a response was that students will take
repeated negative comments from a computer but not from a teacher. And this reminds us of the theme of the answers to the first question, which
were all about human interaction, relationships and emotion.
Do it your
way
The consensus of opinion appears to be, then, that technology saves us time and
allows us to reach more students at once, and not necessarily during school
time. It can instantly access authentic materials, so important to bring our subject
to life, that it would take us many hours and trips abroad to collect. It can also be seen that teachers provide the human touch, the nurturing and
caring side, that, however advanced computers are now, they can still not provide. Our teacher-pupil relationship is unique and cannot be replaced by a
machine. As teachers we interact with our students on a personal level, and we also
enable students to interact with each other.
Using technology is often more solitary. Students need teachers to start them off on their learning journey, to point
them in the right direction and, of course, to select the right tools to
enhance and enrich their learning, whether those tools be tablets or Tarsias.
Technology can, and has, opened doors, expanded minds,
and changed the world. But it’s just one part of our toolkit as teachers. I think it’s important to use low-tech and other toys as a respite from
tech-fatigue. Will Death by PowerPoint give way to Death by Technology? It all comes down to what can technology do better
than a teacher, rather than instead
of a teacher? We need to use it to enhance our skills and our favourite
activities, not to replace them.
Here’s what I think I can do better than technology and what it can do better
than me. I don't use it for the sake of
it, but because I think it makes my job as a teacher easier and better. My relationship with technology is indicative
of my teaching style. I will try to
split it into the two distinct areas, but there always going to be some grey
areas and overlaps.
What can I do better than technology?
I can admire the children’s photos and souvenirs from Spain and the handfuls of
Euros that they bring in to show me. I can give them a high-five when they have a particularly good lesson. I can cheer when they finally get it. (I
remember playing Cluedo with a lower ability Year 5 French class, and it was
taking a long time to get the answer.
They finally got it right and I shouted “Yeeeeeeeees!” just as the Head and a visitor walked past.) I can give them a hug and a smile when they are feeling down or when they draw
me (yet another) picture. I can make them laugh, like when playing Kim’s Game with Year 2. All I did was pretend to shoot the numbers
away – 1, 2, 3, bang!
I can speak the language better than technology. I am a living, breathing language speaker, the closest that the children are
likely to get to a real French person or a real Spanish person. I can speak it spontaneously, I can slow down when necessary, I can repeat when
necessary. I can carefully structure our class speaking activities to be clear through
repetition of core phrases. However, in the primary sector especially, there are colleagues who do not have
the same confidence. There are many computer-based
tools out there that will help them to improve, or in some cases do the
speaking for them. There’s one of those
grey areas I was talking about.
I can plan better than technology can. I know what suits the children in the class better than some generic,
off-the-peg plan. I know what we did last lesson, what they found easy, what needs more
work. I know what sort of activities the children like and don’t like. As long as Year 4 French get to play Round the World they are pleased. Year 5 Spanish yearn to work in groups. The more singing Year 2 Spanish do, the happier they are. I can select resources that I know are suitable for the children in the
class. Not what a publisher says are
suitable for the children in the class.
I can explain better than technology. I have learned during these 19 years of experience how best to explain the
concept of gender, for example. Just
groups of words that behave differently, it’s Latin’s fault, the words
masculine and feminine are just labels, they could have other labels. And Year 3 are happy with that.
I can answer all those little questions that they have while they are working,
tailor the explanation to the individual child, knowing what they already
know. More often than not, I get them to
explain it to me, and they find out they do really know the answer after all. If the children are working at the computer, it’s more often than not still the
teacher who has to do the explaining, n’est-ce pas?
I can sing better than technology. And I don’t stop halfway through to buffer. To cough or sneeze, yes, but not to
buffer. The only problem is, though, that I don’t play the guitar. I would love to be able to play the guitar –
just imagine all the singing I could do in class then! But stringed instruments and me have never got along. I much prefer anything percussive. In the late 90s we had a very talented secondary teacher in Sunderland who
could take a karaoke track and put her own French words to it. The students would then sing it and do all
sorts of fabulous choreographed moves. Inspired by this, I purchased a karaoke cassette (yes, cassette) and set to
work on creating my own masterpiece. The first track on the cassette was Gina G’s Ooh aah Just a little bit, and I think I got as far as
Je me lève a little bit
Je me lave a little bit more
before I gave up. So thank goodness for Songsmith, a downloadable piece of software which enables
me to go about it in a different way, and accompany my own songs without the
need for a guitar. You need some knowledge of keys and chord progressions to make it work, but you
get a really professional result. I make up a lot of my own songs, but I also use plenty from elsewhere. Where would we be without YouTube, Momes.net and all the other websites that
are such a rich source of authentic music? But we must always remember that technology can’t do whacky actions and look
like a goon in front of the children and make them laugh.
What can technology do better than me?
As I’ve already mentioned, I don’t use much tech during lesson time at the
moment, as I can’t guarantee that when I get there it will be working. Here is the kit that I carry around with me all the time:
USBs for all the computers that aren’t up to date enough to cope with Box and
Dropbox
My trusty camera for photographing children’s work ready for my records and for
the school blog
My Flip camera (usually attached to my Gorillapod) ready for recording puppet
work and so on
My beaten-up Olympus voice recorder, with built-in USB, often used for
recording the children singing
You’re probably thinking, “Oh, how delightfully
quaint! I would use my phone/tablet for all such things.” Well in both my schools teachers aren’t allowed to have their phones on in the
classroom, and anyway I wouldn’t want my emails and tweets pinging up while the
children are working! I have just
started experimenting with using my ancient Android Vega tablet in the
classroom (they aren’t getting their hands on the Xperia!), but not enough that
I can speak about it with any credibility here.
This tech is better than me at recording the
children’s spoken work (given that I can’t record it at all!) and photographing
work is much easier and quicker than scanning or colour-photocopying endless
pieces of paper. The children are used to me doing this, so much so that one Year 6 boy said
just this week, “Miss, I want to take this mini-book home. Can you take a photo to put in my book?” So technology enables me to record the children’s work, to celebrate it and
keep it for assessment evidence. It’s much easier to store mp3 files and jpgs than it is a pile of cassettes
(dossiers sonores, those were the days….) and pieces of paper.
Technology is infinitely better at bringing culture into the classroom than I
am. I can’t be the only teacher who, in the olden days, went on school trips abroad
or on holiday and went into frantic-teacher mode, picking up anything and everything
with French writing on it, raiding the discount catalogues at the supermarket,
swiping estate agencies’ brochures and buying large quantities of
postcards. Strangely, most of it ended up being unused. The internet helps us to see real life in the countries whose languages we are
teaching, often in real time. We can have face to face contact with a classroom of students in another
country via Skype. We can send information to penpals far away at the touch of a button, at no
cost, with no extra stationery. When I first started Comenius projects in 1998 I never dreamed that this would
be possible.
Technology is much better than me at keeping track of all the useful websites
that I find or whose links I am sent. I used to paste the URLs into a Word document, usually with few or no words
about what the site was about, and then come back to it and find it impossible
to use. Delicious, the online bookmarking site, enables me to save and easily retrieve
all such links. It makes my work quicker and it is much more convenient than a Word document. And I actually use it, regularly.
Are you a head of department? You wouldn’t want me in your department. I’m the one who has all the crazy ideas and makes all the resources, but also
the one who never keeps up with marking and who is rubbish at record-keeping. I’ve been trying extra-extra-extra-hard since September to keep on top of it
all, and am doing much better. Not
brilliantly, but much better. Mainly
down to a new and improved way of recording what the children can do.
Now that we are level-less, I use a series of “I can” statements to assess what
the children can do.
When you hover over the black boxes at the top, it shows you which I can
statement it is. If I have one piece of evidence that the child can do that, I enter a “1” in
the box. The box turns red. If they do it again, I put in a “2” and the
box goes yellow. 3 times and the box
goes green. This shows me also what is harder to assess and record. For example “I can count from 16 to 31” has
no records. It has obliged me, though, to think of a way in which the children can peer
assess this so that I don’t have to listen to all 30 of them individually. In just one hour a week I simply don’t have
the time.
Technology is better at drawing than me and can do it much quicker. I’m not a bad drawer, but I can make better images
using my computer which are then easier to use and manipulate. I can make a series of faces, for example, in
the same time that it would take me to draw by hand and scan just a couple.
Technology can make better resources than me.
Well, that’s not exactly true. The
computer wouldn’t know what to do if my brain didn’t have some kind of input at
the beginning of the creative process. I’ve already described my ancient handwritten worksheets. Creating a resource on the computer makes it
so much nicer, and, if you’re me, so much more legible. You can add pictures, fancy fonts,
illustrations… And even better, you don’t have to store them in a filing cabinet! You don’t have to have huge lever arch files
full of pieces of paper in your cupboard!
My hard drive not only stores resources better than me, it files them and
arranges them better, as long as I am sensible enough to give the file a recognisable
name and put it in the right place when I save it. Using various online and downloadable pieces of software I can make games for
the children to play at home and in school.
Content Generator, Australian Languages Online and Quia are invaluable and easy
to use.
And last but by no means least, technology is better
at sharing than me. It’s not that I was no good at sharing earlier on in my career, it’s just that
the only people I could really share with were the people in my department, by
giving them a copy of the worksheet I had just made. Thanks to the wonders of the World Wide Web and Web 2.0 I can, and do, share my
resources with teachers from as close as Durham or as far away as Sydney. I love Twitter and the support and camaraderie offered by the
#MFLTwitterati. I mentioned to Lisa not very long ago that Twitter is the only place where
people share with me as much as I share with them. Just about every resource I’ve made since 2004 is on MFL Sunderland, freely
available to anyone who wants to download and use it. What do you do with yours? Everyone has something that somebody else will find useful, so blog it, tweet
it, upload it, share it!
Conclusion
And now, the end is near,
And so I face the final curtain.
My friends, I’ll say it clear,
I’ll state my case of which I’m certain.
So that’s me and technology, and our complex
relationship. If I didn’t have modern technology to help with me with my work, I’d still be
able to do it, but it would be a lot harder, a lot less fun and a lot less
interesting. If I were Kelly Clarkson I would sing to technology:
My life would suck without you.
Technology and I help each other to get the job done. My teaching style is the way it is because I use technology judiciously and
sensibly when it can do things better. The things I can do better, I still do.
You know what works best in your classroom.
We all have our own style. So we all need to have the courage of our convictions and resist the pressure to
conform to someone else’s ideal. We should have the confidence to stick with our own style and to add technology
only as we see fit. Only if it will do the job better than us.
Only if it will enhance our own natural, shining ability.
Magpie whatever you can and wherever you can, and most of all, in the face of
all who put us under pressure, have the confidence to say:
I faced it
all
And I stood tall
And did it My Way.
Thank you.
