Mal Lee and Roger Broadie
You will want the school eventually to use the digital as naturally as it is outside the school walls today, it being so normal as to be near invisible.
You’ll want it to naturally underpin every school operation, teaching and administrative.
Only then will the total school community be in the position where it can truly begin harnessing the immense and increasing power of the digital technology and the school ecosystem and continually provide each child the desired education.
That said whole school digital normalisation is very difficult to achieve.
It is the reason why so few schools globally have reached that evolutionary stage. It requires in most schools a fundamental change in thinking, the creation of a highly supportive and empowering culture and the adoption of a mode of schooling befitting a digital and socially networked society. It requires a principal, a leadership team, a staff and a community that is prepared to dream, to take risks and to put in the years of concerted effort required to successfully address the myriad of human and technological variables needed to create the desired ecology.
It is the sixth of the school evolutionary stages for a very good reason.
With digital normalisation the school reaches the stage where it has finally shed its paper based shackles – its mindset, technological base, preoccupation with the physical site and its ‘within the walls’ teaching and practises – and is operating as a digital and socially networked school community thriving on seeming chaos, change and evolution.
When all within the school’s community have in their hands their personal digital technologies and are trusted and empowered to use their digital toolkit the school has reached the position where the doors are opened for it to take advantage of the evermore powerful and sophisticated digital base and thinking in the 24/7/365 schooling of the young.
An important point of clarification needs to be made. Digital normalisation occurs when the use of the digital technology across all facets of the school operations is so natural, so accepted as to be near invisible. It is not merely about issuing everyone with an iPad or a Chromebook, but rather is the stage when everyone is trusted to use their own kit and the focus is on the desired learning rather than the technology.
We are, in using the term most assuredly not implying that schools should only use digital technologies, or use the digital in all teaching but rather are suggesting the technology be used normally, appropriately and in a balanced manner – like we all use it in our everyday lives. Let the teaching situation determine what is the apt instructional technology or indeed increasingly mix of instructional technologies for each child.