Gerard Kelly (“Tech without teachers is cloud cuckoo land”, 12 July) quotes research by the Education Endowment Foundation. But, in my opinion, he should have read it more carefully. It appears that he cannot resist scare stories about the impact of technology in education, treating it as “just another gimmick... that promised so much and delivered so little”.
The research says that, on average, “ICT has moderate impact but there is considerable variation”. In other words, some schools are achieving high impact with ICT, while others achieve only low impact. Note that online learning environments can also make the high-impact interventions of feedback, meta-cognition and peer tutoring much more powerful.
Perhaps if Mr Kelly and other commentators were less cynical about technology in education and more engaged with the many schools that are radically improving learning with ICT, then those schools that still don’t know how to use it well might learn how to.
We would be pleased to introduce Mr Kelly to some of the schools that have gained the Naace 3rd Millennium Learning Award. Their students would soon put him straight about the huge impact that ICT has on their learning.
Mark Chambers, Chief executive, Naace, association for ICT.