Sharing the experience
Mal Lee
Do you have a school, education authority, government review of how the school/s handled the COVID – 19 lockdown that we can share?
Indeed if you would like to publish a reflective on your school’s experience in going digital we’d be delighted to publish those thoughts.
Simply email Mal Lee at mallee@mac.com
The 2020 COVID – 19 pandemic obliged schools and their communities like never before to address the facility to move to a more digitally based schooling.
Notwithstanding we expect most schools, education authorities, teacher education institutions and governments to return as soon as possible to the standard model of schooling, still shaped by an analogue mindset, having no desire to go digital.
But we are also aware of notable exceptions worldwide that used the digital astutely, who grew as school communities during the pandemic and which will continue to grow as digitally mature organisations.
Our desire is to use this site to monitor and reflect upon the digital evolution of schooling.
Serendipitously over the last year Roger Broadie and I have been focussed on readying a new publication on the digital for ACER Press Australia.
The challenge given by the Publisher was to address the reality that a quarter of a century on from the world going online the use of the digital in most schools worldwide remained peripheral.
While the digitally connected young and their families globally had normalised the 24/7/365 use of the digital most schools had not.
Could we write a book that addressed that challenge, and assisted teachers and trainee teachers normalise the use of the digital in their teaching?
We’ve written a book entitled Digital Teachers. Digital Mindsets.
It will be released early 2021.
The book takes as its premise that every teacher, K-12 should in 2020 to be a digital teacher, shaping their teaching with a digital mindset.
It reasoned that most every teacher in 2020 shapes their personal lives with a digital mindset.
Teachers, like all of us expect to use our digital devices the moment desired, to connect instantly anywhere, anytime, at speed, 24/7/365, to use the personal devices they want, configured how they like, with the agency to use and learn with the digital as they desire.
The moment most of those teachers walk through the school gate they revert to using an aged analogue mindset. They assume learning with the digital must be tightly controlled, taught by specialist ICT teachers, with the students distrusted and disempowered, and needing to do and learn what the ‘experts’ believe best. The focus is the technology, and the ‘right’ technology at that, with all students mastering the same skills.
The aim of the new book is to assist every teacher, at every level, in every area of learning normalise the use of the apt tools of the contemporary world in their teaching, shaping the use with a digital mindset.
The argument is the thinking, an apt contemporary mindset not the technology per se must shape the teaching and learning.
Mid way through the writing COVID-19 struck, affirming the necessity of every teacher, in every school being able to operate from a digital base.
Tellingly the pandemic stress tested every facet of schooling, and in particular its ability to work digitally, remotely and with an apt shaping mindset.
While there were important notable exceptions most teachers, schools, education authorities and governments were ill-prepared.
The continued dominance of an analogue mindset, dependence on a century old ‘grammar of schooling’, focus on the basics and expectation that the digital would be used only within the existing organisational structures did little to ready teachers or schools to go digital.
As governments, education authorities, schools and education unions and professional associations review their performance during the pandemic and ‘stress testing’ we believe it important to make that thinking readily available and to critique the findings.
In the coming months – and likely years – we intend doing just that and monitoring the evolution of schooling, at the same time as we elaborate on the thinking within Digital Teachers, Digital Mindsets.
Below are links to two important pieces of research, both of which relate to equity of access to the digital.
The first is by Pew Internet, authored by Vogels, et.al – and released 10 September 2020 –
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/10/59-of-u-s-parents-with-lower-incomes-say-their-child-may-face-digital-obstacles-in-schoolwork/
Revealing is how few Americans believe governments should assist families in need with access to the digital.
The contrast with most developed and developing nations, and indeed the second study is pronounced.
The second is New Zealand, undertaken by the Greater Christchurch Schools Network. A copy is available at – https://www.gcsn.school.nz
It is an excellent comprehensive study of 150 schools all can learn from.
The study affirms New Zealand’s commitment to equity of access, but also highlights the exceptionally high level of digital resources and the very good connectivity in most student’s homes.