In this episode, Claire meets with Lee Parkinson also known as Mr P, a part-time teacher, entrepreneur, technology guru and trainer. Mr P starts by explaining how he started his teaching journey as well as juggling his home life with triplets and a stepson!

Mr P and Claire explore the importance of technology within education today. He discusses how schools can embed and incorporate technology within their curriculum and how this can support to reduce teacher’s workload.

They discuss the challenges schools face with funding, society, accountability, workload, curriculum, social media and pressures of delivering technology lessons. He explains the various CPD and INSET training he provides to teachers and schools with technology and computing as well as support on how this can be integrated into the curriculum on a day to day basis.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Mr P has been teaching for 12 years.
• He explains how the headteacher at his school encouraged him to take leadership roles and advised him to take on PPA cover to enable him to broaden his experience across the Key Stages.
• His headteacher encouraged him to develop his curriculum area, which at the time was ICT.
• Mr P. explains how he progressed in his role as ICT co-ordinator and the challenges he faced with the lack of resources at his school.
• He asked the school for better technology and bought a class set of iPads. He then worked with each year group for a half term and looked at how mobile technology can enhance learning.
• He then started a school Twitter and Facebook page to help engage with pupils and the wider world. He saw a positive response from the social media accounts as there was lots of engagement from his audience.
• Julian Woods recommended that he should start a teacher Twitter account.
• He started sharing ‘How to’ videos and blog posts on the teacher page.
• In 2012, he created a Facebook page and by the end of that academic year he was asked to do training sessions.
• Alan Peat contacted Mr P because he was interested to bring someone on board who can look at technology. They both then worked together to build each other’s businesses and ideas.
• Mr P goes on to explain that he learnt a lot about the business side from Alan. They continued to work together and wrote a few books together.
• He continued providing CPD training in schools and shared blogs on his pages. He continued to see the success of this and began to create more videos including comical and light-hearted videos of life as a teacher.
• The growth and success of his blogs and pages was increasingly rapidly.
• He explains the advantages of social media and the support it provides to teachers. It opens the world for teachers to communicate and discuss issues that they be having as well as the opportunity to seek advice from each other.
• Nonetheless, he mentions the undesirable aspect of social media as people can be negative online.
• It is important that the curriculum is meaningful and purposeful for your school and pupils.
• Although Mr P has been working with developing technology within schools for the past 5 years, he doesn’t think it has moved forward as much as he would have liked it to.
• The main focus of his training is getting teachers to look at ways they can use technology and helping them to use it more efficiently. He would like technology to be used more creatively but this requires a big culture change as well as the time for teachers to develop and understand this.
• He believes schools don’t utilise technology enough to justify the cost.
• He narrates that a school has saved up to £10,000 in two years, by using ideas from the technology training which has ultimately reduced paperwork, printing and teachers’ time outside of the classroom.
• He believes there should be a lot more education and coverage on technology particularly social media.
• He believes there is a taboo around social media for schools, whereby teachers believe they cannot discuss or talk about social media with children as this may encourage them to use it. He disagrees with this as he believes we need to prepare our children as it is part of the world they are growing up into.
• He suggests that teachers should raise awareness of social media amongst children as well as help them to understand it. He suggests that this does not ultimately encourage children to use it.
• Mr P has moved his CPD online on to his website (see valuable resources for website link).
• Teachers and schools can subscribe to his website where he offers support and training on app tutorials, looking at ways at how apps can enhance the whole curriculum etc.
• It is not a resource website; it is a CPD website for teachers to access and understand how to use technology more effectively.
• He explains that teachers need to move away from using technology as a consumer i.e. browse the internet, watch videos, read e-books etc.
• We need to move from being consumers to creators where we can create videos, designing e-books etc. This allows us to go from engaging to empowering.
• Mr P focuses on children using technology to create and where this can be adapted in different ways.
• Book creator – an app that allows children to create their own e-book, embed video, pictures, auto-draw option. This app can be used for any topics across the curriculum.
• We focus on the what, not the why! Children need not only to be taught the what, they must be taught the why. The application of the skill is vital to ensure children develop a deeper understanding of the programme/context.
• Focus of a skill should be seen in context, whether that be in technology or within writing, mathematics or other areas of the curriculum.
• Technology should not replace what we are using rather it should enhance what we are using.
• Mr Ps social media handle has now become a hobby where he can engage with his followers.
• Mr P narrates a lesson he delivered to a Year 4 class where he filtered and edited his selfie on an app. He explains the changes he made to the image. He then explains the discussion the class had about why people do it and why people shouldn’t do it. Details about this lesson are on Mr P’s Facebook page.
• For most of the working week he travels to deliver training, CPD and INSET days to different schools. At the end of the week, he continues his role as a part-time teacher.
• He now offers a year group cluster training whereby schools can cluster up with local schools, book him for 7 days and receive training for each year group over the course of the 7 days.
• Mr P would recommend the following computing schemes: Barefoot Computing, Mr P’s website will also have resources available, Code it, Hour of Code, Code.org, Digital-Literacy, National Online Safety (see Valuable Resources for website links).
• The computing lessons that Mr P delivers in his schools focuses on the Computer Science (decoding, programming etc).
• The Digital Literacy objectives are covered with the rest of the curriculum. This work is then published on the school’s social media page which demonstrates how to be a positive, responsible digital learner in a purposeful way.
• One thing in education Mr P disagrees with is the accountability in schools. He suggests that is due to the society we live in and the ‘blame culture’.
• Leadership should let go of the accountability. Schools focus should move away from books and book scrutinies. This creates a mentality for teachers where they are led to believe it is all about the books and it also narrows the curriculum.
• The book scrutiny at Mr Ps schools is called a ‘Learning Review’. They look at the books and Seesaw app on the iPads. He states that Seesaw has the biggest impact on workload at his school because it works as a digital exercise book for children.
• Children can log in to Seesaw by scanning a QR code and evidence their learning using the app. This opportunity allows children to evidence their learning online which embeds the Digital Literacy skills.
• Mr P’s number app that he would recommend is Seesaw. Tutorials on his website (see link in Valuable Resources) are available.
• Mr P recommends that schools should buy every member of staff/teacher an iPad and for the first year they should solely focus on exploring and using the iPad to understand how they can use this within their teaching. How can it help them with their planning? How can it be mirrored to the board? How can the work be evidenced through Seesaw?
• Written text is an integral part of technology. All ideas must be written down for them to be developed and progressed into any form of technology.
• He believes that the reason why teachers are leaving the profession is due to workload. Workload is directly linked to wellbeing and because schools are not managing their workload effectively the wellbeing aspect has turned into a token gesture.
• If the labelling culture from OFTSED was taken away it would be a game changer.
• The three biggest changes he has seen in education; change in government, change in curriculum and focus on accountability.
• He would like education to be funded sufficiently, trust should be given back to teachers, get rid of OFSTED and technology should be used more effectively.
  
  

BEST MOMENTS

“I am so grateful for the support both him (Alan Peat) and Julian gave me in those early days. It was just incredible.”

“No matter wherever you are teaching in the world, there’s that universal life as a teacher that we can appreciate and have a laugh at. If we didn’t laugh, we would cry.”

“I am contracted to work to one day a week but if I am free, I’ll go in and help out wherever I can.”

“As teachers we only see the problem within our own school, we can lose sight and not appreciate how could we have got it in certain ways.”

“The curriculum is so unique to your school in lots of ways. One school’s curriculum is going to very different from your school.”

“Funding is the biggest reason why schools don’t make as much out of technology at the minute.”

“The Great Hack on Netflix is a must watch.”

“Data now is more expensive than oil.”

“You cannot be creative without knowledge.”

“If we don’t give children the opportunity to create and apply that knowledge creatively, what’s the point?”

“SATS isn’t assessment.”

“My must haves would be a TA.”

“Education is a political ball game.”

“Technology is not an overnight thing.”

“Don’t call them book looks because that winds me up, how you have got to make everything rhyme in education.”

“If it doesn’t have a direct impact on the kid’s learning, stop doing it.”

“Vlogging is such a powerful tool, we don’t utilise it enough.”

“Writing is the starting point to absolutely everything.”

“Writing is so incredibly important, but we can now use the technology to go a step further with the writing.”

“The only universal way to in which we can improve teachers’ wellbeing is to give them time.”

“Stop the faff, stop the nonsense.”

“OFSTED don’t raise standards. OFSTED check standards to their own subjective views.”

“Social media has an impact on teaching.”

“Technology is all about balance and making the right choices with it.”

VALUABLE RESOURCES

The Teachers’ Podcast: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheTeachersPodcast/
Classroom Secrets Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ClassroomSecretsLimited/
Classroom Secrets website: https://classroomsecrets.co.uk/
LIFE/work balance campaign: https://classroomsecrets.co.uk/lifeworkbalance-and-wellbeing-in-education-campaign-2019/
Mr P’s website:https://www.mrpict.com/
Mr P’s Podcast in a Pod: http://www.2mrpspodcast.com/
Simon Sinek: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4ZoJKF_VuA
Read Write Perform: http://www.readwriteperform.com/
Seesaw app Website: https://web.seesaw.me/
Alan Peat: https://alanpeat.com/
OFSTED Guidance: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/801429/Education_inspection_framework.pdf
Barefoot Computing: https://www.barefootcomputing.org/
Code it:http://code-it.co.uk/
Hour of Code: https://hourofcode.com/uk
Digital Literacy: https://digital-literacy.org.uk/curriculum-overview.aspx/#yr2
National Online Safety: https://nationalonlinesafety.com/

ABOUT THE HOST
Claire Riley

Claire, alongside her husband Ed, is one of the directors of Classroom Secrets, a company she founded in 2013 and which provides outstanding differentiated resources for teachers, schools, parents and tutors worldwide.

Having worked for a number of years as a teacher in both Primary and Secondary education, and experiencing first-hand the difficulties teachers were facing finding appropriate high-quality resources for their lessons, Claire created Classroom Secrets with the aim of helping reduce the workload for all school staff.

Claire is a passionate believer in a LIFE/work balance for those who work in education citing the high percentage of teachers who leave or plan to leave their jobs each year. Since February 2019, Classroom Secrets has been running their LIFE/work balance campaign to highlight this concerning trend.

The Teachers’ Podcast is a series of interviews where Claire meets with a wide range of guests involved in the field of education. These podcasts provide exciting discussions and different perspectives and thoughts on a variety of themes which are both engaging and informative for anyone involved in education.