Teachers like me, who are keen on the potential of educational technology to change schools are often the first to say “it’s not the technology that’s important, it’s what you do with it.” We also say things like, “It’s about creativity, collaboration and communication.” After all, I started this very blog as an iPad support site and spent the first 3 years discussing the wonderful things one could make on an iPad and how exciting all the apps and their technologies were. But regardless of how people are collaborating, creating, and getting excited, there’s one crucial thing to remember … technology makes no significant difference to learning.

EdTech output does not equal BETTER learning

To help explain where schools still often miss the point when talking about technology use, I’d like to mention two important educators.

John Hattie: A New Zealander who has been Professor of Education and Director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute at the University of Melbourne, Australia, since March 2011. He is the Author of “Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement.” an influential paper on what has a real impact on learning. In his list of nearly 200 influences on learning outcomes from an ever increasing meta-analysis of global educational research, you have to go to number 70 before you even get a mention of technology. Since it’s first publication in 2008, students self-reporting their own success has proved to be consistently the most influential indicator. This is something most schools don’t utilise at all whilst dedicating hours to training staff in technology.
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Derek Muller: An Australian who has had success in teaching through video and even has a PHD in doing so. His extremely popular video on why #edTech has little impact on learning has had more than a million views. In the video below, Derek takes you back 100 years and runs you through the history of the claim that “This will revolutionise education.” He highlights that if the goal and content of an activity is the same, the format makes no difference. His summary reminds us that the point of education is not to aim for particular output from students or simply deliver information, even new styles of input & output. “The purpose is to inspire, challenge and excite people to want to learn.” Another key point he makes is that learning is a social activity and is most successful when every individual feels they have a role to play within that learning. Teachers are only truely successful when focused both on the design of and the locus of control within a social learning environment. That requirement is what maintains teachers as so important.

Does tech still have a role to play?

Please don’t be confused and think this is an anti-tech post. There’s nothing wrong with using technology as long as the classroom norm is that individual students expect to evaluate their own outcomes (Just as Hattie’s studies indicate) and preferably against calculated targets for understanding and impact that the students devised or negotiated in the first place. All learning must include the questions below, if it does, technology only opens up further opportunities, if it doesn’t, then technology only becomes the distraction that many fear it is.
Click the infographic to the left for a nice history of EdTech.

Questions for all learnERS

1. Why am I learning this?
2. How will I measure my own success?
3. Who with and how might I best succeed?
4. What are my next steps?
5. How am I tracking my progress?

Technology will help answer all 5 questions but if they are absent from the mind of the learner, technology will not assist true learning at all. My primary concern as an educator now is who is driving the learning in my classroom, be they using tech or not.

I have covered many aspects of future education trends in my $16 book A Learner’s Paradise: How New Zealand is reimagining education. Here’s the Ad: