With the Department for Education showing a renewed interest in technology but school budgets getting ever tighter, 2019 could be a key year for edtech.
With Bett 2019 – the world’s biggest edtech show – opening in London this week, Tes talked to a UK edtech success story about issues facing the sector, and what the future may hold.
Bruno Reddy founded Times Tables Rock Stars to help improve his pupils’ recall speed with their times tables. Over the past eight years, it has been used by more than 12,000 primary and secondary schools worldwide.
Here is what he has to say:
How would you describe the role of edtech in schools in England today?
"Interactive white boards and PowerPoints are probably the closest thing to ubiquitous. I think visualisers are making a popular return.
"In terms of cloud software, in a secondary school at least, of all the subjects using cloud software, it’s probably going to be maths teachers just because the nature of maths lends itself to simple edtech cloud platforms that can ask questions and auto-mark them for pupils and teachers. Probably less in the humanities.
"There was a big deal about 12 years ago for virtual learning environments, but they were so tedious and difficult to maintain that I don’t think many people are using those nowadays."
What do you think edtech will look like in UK schools in 10 years’ time?
"I don’t think there is anything that is going to be significantly different within the next 10 years.
"There’s a wide-open space probably for virtual reality headsets if there were lowers costs and there were more options available.
"I think the scope to transport pupils in classrooms to places they couldn’t access otherwise – whether that be in geography to faraway places or whether it’s biology, standing in a blood stream watching red blood cells go past – I think there’s a huge amount that could be done with virtual reality headsets, or even virtual reality on a desktop.
"I think [the classroom] will largely look the same as it is now: whiteboards, textbooks, PowerPoints, pens and pencils, pencil cases, exercise books."
What are the biggest barriers to schools and teachers using edtech effectively?
"Simply having the time and the energy is probably the number one barrier.
"If it’s a cloud platform, you probably need to set up your users, so the first barrier after you’ve logged in is having a spreadsheet of your class, and not everyone has a spreadsheet of their class, so that might immediately stall them.
"With Rock Stars, the schools using it most successfully have buy-in from all the teachers in the year group, so it’s like trying to align all the planets because you have got to have all the teachers having capacity and being prepared to give the time to it.
"The more effective use of classroom edtech is going to be where the original spark has come from a teacher. They’ve seen a problem, they’ve found a solution, and they’re going to be the ones prepared to put in the time to make it work.
"Whereas if your multi-academy trust chief executive says, ‘Right, everybody needs to have a subscription to Times Tables Rock Stars tomorrow,' then it’s not going to have the same take-off.
"It might get there in the end, but more things need to happen.
"The trouble is that it’s at odds with cost-saving. Of course, the benefit of being part of a MAT is economies of scale – at the trust level you ought to be able to buy things for less – and so that’s why the chief exec thinks everybody should have this tomorrow, because we can cut a good deal, but the reality is that you don’t get the same outcomes."
A lot of edtech companies say it is hard to break into England’s fragmented school system. How did you do it?
"It is fragmented. Life has been easier in Wales, where they are still operating under six education consortia, and they can make decisions for six counties at a time, whereas in England, where most schools are no longer under local authority control, everything is down to trust level.
"But in that, there are opportunities. More MATs are wanting cloud providers like us to have a MAT dashboard where they can see impact across the trust, so they are more data sleuths.
"How have we done it? Very patiently, and without doing any overt marketing, not standing out there and saying, ‘Look at us.' We don’t run adverts in magazines, we never exhibit in trade shows, we never run Facebook campaigns that say, ‘Like us and we’ll enter you into a competition.'
"We just let the product be good enough for people to want to speak about it. The edtech people who are doing well are probably the ones who have been a classroom teacher themselves.
"They have forged something while they were in the classroom, they’ve sought money, like us, from Shine – from the Let Teachers Shine Awards – and then there’s just a lot more credibility behind the whole thing."
How can schools and teachers get the most out of edtech?
"It just depends if there’s a genuine problem and if edtech is the solution for it. Don’t use a hammer to crack a walnut.
"To start with, Rock Stars was a paper-based solution to the problem I had. It doesn’t have to be edtech for it to be the right solution.
"If it is, it should be like a glove fitting a hand. It should be easy to see the impact, and therefore it’s self-sustaining.
"It was Shine that helped me make the crossover from no-tech to low-tech, and that was prompted by a child in my class saying, ‘Hey, we’ve been doing this on paper, but we could turn it into a game that we could play on a tablet.' It was kind of driven by the children."
How do you respond to critics who accuse edtech firms of peddling snake oil to schools?
"There are snake oil peddlers in any industry and sector, and that is bad.
"If there are any snake oil peddlers in the edtech sector then they are doing a disservice to those people who have a lot of integrity and who have a product that makes a difference. That’s unhelpful practice.
"But it’s up to teachers and headteachers to be less gullible, which I think they are these days.
"I don’t think it’s as easy to pull the wool over a headteacher’s eyes any more. They have got to be a lot more frugal. They are likely to ask questions like the difference it is making and say, ‘Show me the data that it’s making an impact.'
"Snake oil peddlers are probably going to find it harder and harder."
Do you think there is enough research about how to use edtech effectively in schools?
"You can make anything work in the classroom if you put the time into it, if you gauge the reaction. If you see it’s not quite working, you iterate, you use it in a slightly different way, whatever it might be.
"I’m not sure we need more research. I’m tired of this whole research bandwagon, to be honest. If teachers are using edtech and it’s making a difference in the classroom, isn’t that all the data they need?
"If it’s not working then they should be introspective enough to figure out why it’s not working, but no amount of external research is going to make it work any better in the classroom.
"You have got to be the one on the ground putting it into practice, and if it doesn’t work, maybe you aren’t using it in the way it was intended, or maybe you have used it in the way it was intended and it’s not a good fit."
Shine helps to develop new ideas to improve the educational attainment of disadvantaged children. Its Let Teachers SHINE competition will reopen for applications today. Click here for more details.
