Education technology – or EdTech – is no longer the future thanks to Covid. Here, education expert and founder of Tassomai Murray Morrison gives us the inside scoop on how Edtech is changing schools, education and learning across the globe.
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As we’ve all seen – all lived in the past few months – education is changing. What we see our kids doing (and more importantly, how they do it) seems a far cry from the way we parents learned at school.
The coming year will see continued disruption to the normal model of classroom teaching in school and homework at home. Even if we do return to normal, the threat of disruption is going to hang over families and schools, requiring us all to be ready to adapt to circumstances as they change.
In true Darwinian fashion, those who are able to adapt quickest and best to the situation are likeliest to prosper, which is why schools and families are investing their time and resources more than ever into education technology.
So what’s really different about education technology?
It’s all too easy to mistake the medium for the message… the truth is that education technology- is nothing new at all.
Even in ancient Rome, they had EdTech – in those days it was slate and chalk and the abacus. In my grandparents’ day, it was the slide rule and the Parker pen. Our EdTech in the 80s and 90s would have been disposable ball-points, pocket calculators, whiteboards and – maybe – a pedal-powered 8Kb BBC Micro computer in the corner of the classroom.
EdTech is simply a means of delivering learning and helping students embed knowledge. EdTech seeks to make the process of learning as efficient and effective as possible. It evolves continuously, and always will. So while much of what we see our children doing seems alien, it’s simply a continuation of pedagogical science that promises to make our children acquire knowledge, understanding and skills faster than we might have done in our day, and extend their reach further.
What’s new about many current EdTech products is the ability to serve each learner with what they need when they need it. This is termed ‘personalisation’ and it speaks both to the ‘on-demand’-ness of platforms like BBC Bitesize, Hegarty Maths or Oak National, or the adaptive, intelligent practice engines of technology like Tassomai.
Consider the ‘job’ of traditional education
As an EdTech inventor/founder myself, I went through this process – and it’s instructive for any parent to consider when they think about what their child is doing too. What is really happening as a pupil learns in school?
Delivery – a new concept is explained, pupils listen and absorb knowledge or a skill
Practice – new knowledge is repeated, recited, put into practice or otherwise absorbed through experience
Synthesis – new knowledge is added and mixed with other knowledge to build a bigger picture and tie concepts together
Testing – the acquisition of knowledge/skills/understanding is tested to find out how well it has been taken on board
Feedback – where more help or work is needed, a concept might be re-taught another way or more practice required.
A simplistic model, perhaps, but essentially that is what has always been happening in learning models, however formal or informal. Where EdTech plays its role is in seeking to accelerate parts of this process, and reduce the workload to get a job done.
EdTech is not new; it’s a means of acceleration
Taking my product as an example, Tassomai does little to explain new concepts – that’s not its aim, though accidentally it does seem to have a marked effect on pupils’ ability to learn through something called the pretesting effect. What it does better than anything else out there is in supporting the rest of the process.
In my teaching and tutoring experience, lessons were spent largely repeating past material, round and round so that everyone in the class could move on to the next concept. Not only was that tiresome for everyone, it was terribly inefficient.
Tassomai is a software that makes personalised daily quizzes for students that specifically help them practice knowledge recall. In so doing, they correct errors in their knowledge and then, through confirmative practice, build confidence in their knowledge and synthesise knowledge (connect concepts) into the bargain.
A job of analysis and planning that would take dedication and time from a student and supreme organisation from a teacher or parent can be done automatically in the background: the student just opens the app and the practice they personally need is there and waiting for them.
Likewise, on the testing and feedback, as a teacher I knew it would take hours of effort, testing, marking and analysis to get some idea of where my students needed most help. And any work I did to build that picture would be unreliable and quickly go out of date. I built Tassomai to solve that problem, and the result was that, at a glance I could see exactly where the problems were and focus my attention. Not to mention I now had time to actually do something about the problems.
As we move towards a more blended/distance-learning approach for the coming year, tools like this will be increasingly essential for parents and teachers: what EdTech like Tassomai does is allow parents to plug-in-and-play – just let your child get on with it for fifteen minutes each day (or more, of course).
Not only will the technology fill in gaps and improve base knowledge, but also it will show you where they need to be doing more work. In concert with EdTech that helps deliver content, it’s even more powerful.
Replacing school
I’d never personally suggest that EdTech could replace learning: there is so much more to school than just the learn-practice-test-adapt model described above; but the ability of technology to improve those processes liberates the job of teachers, schools and parents to focus on enriching the experience around education.
In times when our access to traditional schooling feels at best precarious, it’s nice to think that EdTech might just about make life manageable whatever struggles we face in the months to come.
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