Educational technology thinkpieces must be one of the few journalism genres (other than war reporting) that manage to make everyone involved sound bad almost all of the time.

When they do not instantly embrace The Next Big Tech Thing, teachers and schools are accused of “resisting innovation” and “clinging to 19th-century forms of education” and (the big guns here!) “not preparing our children for the jobs of the future”.

Satan in a hoodie

And yet, within the same genre, you get the opposite, too: the creator of the The Next Big Tech Thing, for this side of the debate, is Satan in a hoodie, offering a cloud-based, on-demand platform that will sell student data to a multinational conglomerate and then do away with schools anyway, because “disruption is good”.

An outsider to the education sector would be forgiven for concluding that the debate today is nothing but the forces of anarchy and Ludditism locked in a death battle over iPads.

Peer deeper into the debate, though, and you do spy some nuance; for example, when it comes to technological interventions or support for children with special educational needs and disability (SEND).

I’ve been researching technologies for autism education for nearly eight years and always brace myself for negative reactions to this work but they rarely materialise.

I currently work on the DE-ENIGMA project, researching humanoid robots for teaching emotional skills to children on the autism spectrum.

Now that seems like a prime opportunity for some negativity or anxiety about robots replacing human teachers but, actually, I never hear it.

Capturing the imagination

The idea of a robot really captures people’s imagination, especially when it looks like a toy, not a Terminator.

DE-ENIGMA uses a commercial R25 “Zeno” robot body from Robokind (pictured), with the DE-ENIGMA researchers developing the programme of teaching activities along with the multi-modal artificial intelligence that drives the robot’s interaction with a child.

Over several rounds of development, DE-ENIGMA works to equip the robot with the capacity to process verbal, video and gesture input in real time, and then to use these to autonomously plan interactions with a child user around emotional skills.

Recognising and producing emotions tends to be difficult for autistic children compared with their peers, and has developmentally important knock-on effects on how they understand and communicate with others.

Right now, there are relatively few programmes that seek to teach autistic children about facial recognition and expression through any means.

None has been yet widely adopted. In other words, we don’t yet have very effective tools.

And interviews with autism educators in the UK consistently report low confidence in teaching about emotions and related social skills - and a high appetite for new strategies, including technologies.

It appears that, in this context at least, teachers already understand that DE-ENIGMA and other researchers working in their schools are developing digital technologies as tools for them and their learners, and that these will be applied to accomplish existing educational goals and meet unmet needs, not to dismantle the system.

I’ve completely stopped spelling out the “tools” bit to teachers because they look at me like I’m insane: how could we not need trained professionals supporting students and actively integrating these new technologies into the curriculum?

So, why might interventions around SEND that are technologically based be more acceptable to teachers than some of the more generic tech teaching tools?

Some of the most impactful technologies of these I see deployed in schools now are not novel, unfamiliar tools like DE-ENIGMA but, instead, elaborate on paper tools.

Tablet-based augmentative and alternative communication apps are a great example of this “upgrade” of existing, well-evidenced practices.

Apps massively increase the flexibility and power of symbol-based communication systems, which traditionally required binders full of laminated cards to represent vocabulary, and meant no one ever had all their words accessible at once.

That’s a very direct paper-for-tech swap, but others are trying to improve on whole educational or support processes through complex computation behind the scenes.

For example, my colleagues at the University College London Institute of Education are collaborators on the iRead project, developing personalised education technologies to help primary school pupils learning English as a foreign language, or who have reading difficulties and are at the risk of exclusion.

The recently concluded TARDIS project is educational in a different sense, and developed an interactive simulation to help coach young people not in employment, education or training about the job interview process.

Support for learners

Across the UK, there are dozens of projects all trying to support learners or aspects of education that are not currently well served by existing practices and resources.

For me, that is the best aspect of educational technology: trying to do what we couldn’t before, for learners at a disadvantage.

And in many ways, I think special schools are the best fit for educational technologies - but because of their culture of experimentation and problem solving, not their populations. I hear teaching teams being very frank about where learners’ needs are (or are not) being met, and a corresponding willingness to try new strategies of all kinds to meet those needs.

I see the most enthusiasm from teachers where they can envision technological tools “joining up” with their existing practices, and then suddenly also envision a jump further into planning new uses for those tools to meet more needs.

Fundamental goal

I think this should be the fundamental goal for developers of educational technologies and their adopters, whether they are in special education or not: the join and then the jump. If educational technologies are truly to be useful tools, they must provide a springboard for educators to creatively develop further practices around them.

I hope it means that even if Zeno the robot starts out as an emotion teacher, he’ll go on to have multiple careers in schools, after the DE-ENIGMA project ends.

That’s a much more encouraging and sustainable picture of technology in education - even if it is much worse journalism fodder than Luddite teachers and hoodie Satan.

Dr Alyssa M Alcorn is a postdoctoral researcher on the Horizon 2020-funded DE-ENIGMA project, based at the Centre for Research in Autism Education, UCL Institute of Education. She specialises in technologies for children on the autism spectrum