My aim in attending this event for educators and academics was to experience a bit of a deep dive; immersing myself in the debate and walking in the shoes of teachers with a view to get some sense of the challenges they face as they begin a new school term.

This blog covers three of the speaker sessions I attended. I created my agenda from the expansive programme around a theme of technology in the classroom and online tools for teachers and schools, and spent some time reflecting on how Made by Many works with educators.

Natalia Kucirkova, iPads and tablets in the early years

One of the things I took away from Kucirkova’s presentation (read her article in full here) was that those teachers who were given time to try out tablets and directed to online resources and help were able to make a judgement on their value before making an investment in purchasing them. It made me wonder if there should there be more opportunities and events for teachers to explore using tech before these new items are thrust upon them, with the expectation they can be shoe-horned into their lesson plans?

Wayne Holmes, The lure of the next miracle cure - the evidence base for educational technology

In response to this bombardment of ed-tech developments, Wayne Holmes warned about the risk of technology being presented as a miracle cure, here to ‘transform education as we know it’.

Holmes wants developers in ed-tech to give some clarity about what they mean by learning (ie. what type of learning they are talking about), because "learning is complicated, with lots of different elements that come into play". He believes it is important that ed-tech developers consider these things, and understand what actually goes on in classrooms, what teachers want to do and what they find important.

This makes a lot of sense to Made by Many because that's the way we try and approach a problem. We’re committed to investing in design research, gathering insights through listening to and co-creating with users, enabling us to gain deep understanding before developing new digital products, and throughout their iterative development.

The Skype in the classroom platform has been built based on ideas that originated with teachers, such as Mystery Skype, and we continue to work closely with teachers developing the product iteratively around their needs. For example, our new search and discovery UI was co-designed with teachers using paper prototypes to make custom home pages.

Bob Harrison - Is Will investment in digital tech improve learning outcomes? the wrong question?

Bob Harrison’s talk was part lecture and part stand-up comedy, complete with Stewart Lee “for those of you at home” asides to the live-stream camera. I highly recommend looking over the slides from his talk, or watching the video which will be coming soon to the ResearchEd site.

Again, I had an opportunity to reflect on why Skype in the classroom can work so well. When teachers use Skype video-calling to connect their students to other classes overseas or to ask questions directly to expert guest speakers, learning can take the form of problem-solving, inquiry, conversation and collaborative learning - and produce some unforgettable moments. For our teachers it is about running interactive sessions that are relevant to the curriculum.

I think my own learning at Saturday’s conference worked so well for many of the same reasons: the rich moments of new understanding for me happened during the lively debates, Q&As, and break-time conversations with teachers.

I thought rather than explain more about our Skype in the classroom platform (education.skype.com) this video would be much better at bringing it to life.