In the wake of the Bett Show 2019, there’s much anticipation of a future where robots will replace teachers, virtual reality will replace classrooms, and drones will remove the need to ever actually get off our backsides. It sounds like the novel Ready Player One at best or one of Philip K Dick’s darkest nightmares at worst.

In the shorter term, I’d like to suggest a few less-ambitious technologies that could really have an immediate impact on education. The best thing is that these simple, humble innovations are already widely available, they’re cheap and they could even save money.

What fantastical edtech am I dreaming of? LED lights. And thermostats. Strap in, readers; this is going to be a wild ride…

Quick read: ‘In the crazy world of edtech, some really do care’

In depth: How to get the best edtech - without breaking the bank (sponsored article)

Read more: ‘Are we finally seeing an edtech revolution?’

Taking comfort from better lighting

In the age of cheap LEDs, I don’t understand why anyone should suffer the pallid wash of a fluorescent tube ever again. They sap energy and emit depression. Learners and teachers would all benefit from some soft, warm-hued LEDs. My students hate the tubes so much that they genuinely prefer to work in the dark. I’m regularly tripping over furniture in full daylight, so it’s a major hazard for me.

I recently entered the office of a colleague who’d invested in a dimmable LED desk lamp and the comfort I suddenly felt, with an immediate easing of tension, reminded me of the sigh-inducing relief that came with reaching the sanctuary of a save room in 1990s zombie video game “Resident Evil”. Every classroom could feel like that.

LEDs are far more efficient than fluorescent tubes, so if you do a quick mental tally of how many light fittings there are around your school or college, you’ll see there’s potential for some significant savings.

Another obvious place to reduce energy consumption and save money is in how we manage the temperature of our classrooms. I generally find two extremes when I enter a room; deep freeze or deep fryer.

Cranking up the heat in classrooms

In the latter case, you open the door and are hit with a blast of stale, sweaty heat that almost knocks you backwards. The radiators are turned up to full, but that’s nothing compared to the couple of dozen nuclear teenage metabolisms burning up the air itself. It’s a race to get the windows open as the catches slip through your perspiring fingers.

At the opposite extreme, you’ve got ice forming on your eyelashes as you try to wrestle those same windows firmly closed. You try to teach with your outdoor jacket and your scarf on, but mostly end up finding excuses to hug the radiators.

This pattern repeats itself over and over as staff throw all the windows open to mitigate against sweltering heat and then the next member of staff in the room closes them all again and cranks the heating up to the max. There has to be a happy medium!

I know that, as a mere English teacher, I’m no expert in these things, but surely a thermostat is quite a simple piece of technology? As far as I can figure, it’s just a switch with a thermometer on it. Let’s get one into every classroom and save all the heat that escapes every time we have to open the windows wide enough to breeze-dry the full length of our damp, ageing teacher bodies.

Quick fixes

Those two quick fixes aside, I do think there is one area where some of the more futuristic visions of artificial intelligence could play a useful part in improving the educational experience. One of the current predictions in vogue is that AI will transform assessment as we know it and bring about the end of exams.

I think we’re some way off that in essay subjects, or English, considering I still have to disable my word processor’s weird grammar corrections that don’t seem to be any more accurate than they were in 1995.

But again, there are some straightforward technologies that already exist that could be used, not to replace examiners, but to ensure they are marking fairly and consistently. We can’t be too smug about the age of marvels that we supposedly live in while it’s claimed that nearly half of exam grades are wrong.

Marking the markers

Websites commonly analyse how long we spend on a page, our scroll speed and even which lines, images or adverts we have lingered over longest. Yet we hear horrific anecdotes of examiners blasting through hundreds of scripts per hour, making snap judgements on handwriting or the quantity written, rather than actually taking time to carefully consider our learners’ efforts.

Those same analytical tools used to figure out whether anyone was interested enough to read to the end of my blog this week could be employed to check that the flesh-and-blood examiners, who are so important in judging work that is nuanced and subject to almost-infinite variables, are giving our students due care.

Often our visions of edtech are as far-fetched as science fiction due to the potential cost, never mind the feasibility. It would be great to instead set our sights on using what’s already available more imaginatively and effectively.

Andrew Otty leads 16-19 English in an FE college. He is an ambassador for education charity SHINE