In this episode, Claire meets with Nathan Ashman, who is a Lead Teacher for New Technologies at St Wilfrid’s Church of England Academy in Blackburn. Despite having a secondary background, Nathan was delivering a session aimed at the primary-age range at the Lead Learn Lancs 2019 conference, which was where Claire met with him.

Nathan didn’t originally plan to go into teaching (an action hero was his dream occupation as a child!). After studying Theatre, Film and TV at university, and coaching rugby, Nathan discovered he was natural when it came to working with children and so made the decision to go into teaching. His initial plan was to go into primary teaching but his old school offered him a post teaching English and media while he was trained on the job. After completing his employment-based training in Kent in 2005, training in both English and media, Nathan’s career progressed until eventually, he ended up becoming a head of a film and media school in Oldham.

Through his teaching of media, Nathan experimented with different ways of using technology effectively in the classroom. He talks with Claire about using technology, specifically iPads, effectively in the classroom to lessen the workload of teachers and improve learning experiences. He talks about technology and the ways it should be embedded into teaching, rather than just being an add-on or a gimmick.

By sharing examples of what he has seen to work in his own school, Nathan gives lots of practical advice on how technology can be used by both primary and secondary teachers to not only help promote a healthy LIFE/work balance (by reducing overall workload), but to further enhance and cement learning that is already happening in their classrooms.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Bringing familiar technology into the classroom can enhance learning opportunities.
  Using technology that the children are already familiar with enables teachers to demonstrate how to use this technology in a productive way that improves the quality of learning.
• Technology can be used to improve assessment.
  In an ideal lesson, teachers should be able to use iPads to get immediate responses from the children in order to gauge levels of understanding. This can be an effective Assessment for Learning tool.
• Inductions can help every child and teacher make the most of using technology in the classroom.
  By training children to use the iPads in a meaningful, productive and safe way, they are then able to utilise the iPads as part of their ‘toolkit’. They can be used to complete whole or part tasks in any lesson. By training teachers to see the opportunities for which iPads can be used, using technology in lessons becomes much less of a token gesture. Nathan stresses the importance to move away from the idea of solely having an ‘iPad-based lesson’ and instead, the use of iPads in class should be a fluid transition where both the child and teacher have a choice in using them in specific scenarios when suitable.
• Allowing children to be creative using iPads will enable them to demonstrate their understanding.
  Children often come up with interesting ways of approaching tasks and by allowing children to be creative and giving them the choice to use technology to complete tasks within school, it allows them to demonstrate a much wider skill set that will stand them in good stead for the rest of their lives.
• Using iPads for different purposes can improve learning outcomes.
  iPads are best used in primary schools for creative application of learning, however they can also be used to assign pre-teaching videos to watch or articles to read. They can also be used for assessment purposes although this is much more the case in secondary rather than primary. By using the flip-learning approach of pre-teaching reading/watching, the teacher becomes more of a facilitator in lessons. In terms of assessment, using apps such as Socrative or Answer Garden allows every child who has an iPad to feedback to a given question, which can then be shared with others in the class. This can be used to encourage even with the quieter/less confident children to respond.
• iPads aren’t the only tablet you can use to enhance learning.
  A lot of websites are now able to do the same thing as apps can do and so can be accessed from a range of different multimedia devices. Having said this, iPads can be more user-friendly, and they make it easier to collaborate and share work between each other.
• Rocket Fund can help to launch a fundraising project.
  iPads and other technologies are an expensive business and in the current educational financial climate, it is not always possible to afford them. Rocket Fund is a crowdfunding platform which supports school staff to create and manage a fundraising campaign for school equipment (link provided below). 

• Use technology to reduce teachers’ workloads.
  Technology can be used to mark work by using audio feedback. Teachers can scan a QR code and have the option to record. They can record their voice, pause it and start it again. An example would be to write the points 1, 2, 3 etc in the piece of work being marked and record a voice note for each. The student can hear personalised feedback to them and act upon it straight away by scanning the same QR code.
• Technology can be approached using small steps for those teachers who are less confident with it.
  Some teachers find using technology in a classroom setting an obstacle straight away. Even when teachers aren’t confident, it’s important for them to find one thing which they think is a good idea for use in their classroom. They should use this until they are confident and become a master in using that before moving onto the next thing.
• Use everybody’s skills and strengths.
  Getting to grips with using technology does take a longer time for some than it does for others. By working collaboratively with their colleagues and drawing on the skills and experience of the different members of the team, teachers can build their confidence levels and new skills can be learned in a supportive way.
  
  

BEST MOMENTS

"There’s no point in using it [technology] if it doesn’t actually improve what you’re doing.”
 
“Why not give the students that autonomy to choose to do that [use the iPad to create]?”

“Students are already making videos at home... if you go into a class full of year 6 students and say to them ‘What do you want to be?’, the most popular job will probably be a Youtuber.”

“It’s about giving the kids the opportunity to show their creativity. Having a multimedia device in front of them, which has got a camera, it’s got a voice recorder, you can take a photo, and you can combine all those elements as well in interactive books; why not use that? Why not harness that technology?”

“Not only is that making them think about a variety of skills in terms of the metacognition.... but also preparing them for life after work as well.”

“Our students don’t have paper planners: they organise all their work on their iPad.”

“We compliment traditional learning methods with technology.”

“There’s a difference... what you find in secondary schools is that the use of technology is geared around how the students can be independent in their academic studies... in terms of primary schools, it’s more to do with the creative application of their understanding.”

“Now yes there is an expense there (iPads). Our parents pay a certain price per month and then after 3 years, the device is theirs to take home.”

“Very, very true, that’s why we have like a 3-year scheme and then after that year, we then offer a buy back scheme where if the IPad is in really good condition, they can then trade that iPad in and then they can get the value of that against the cost of a new device because like you said, it (technology) does change very quickly.”

“...I’ve worked in 2 schools now over the sort of past 6 years running these iPad schemes and never had a device stolen.”

“[Using audio feedback,] I can explain theories, I can explain concepts, I can rephrase sentences for them…Not only does it save me time, but the feedback becomes much more useful.”

“It’s finding that one thing with each individual teacher that’s going to spark their interest, and make them think,’ Actually that’s a problem I had and that’s the solution for it’.”

“I do find it really useful to work with other teachers in all sorts of different contexts and also to learn from other teachers as well as them learning from me.”

“The staff around me do inspire me; I hope I inspire them…we do learn from each other on a regular basis.”

“...we have the technology, which is advancing at a very, very fast pace and I don’t think that our exam system is sort of responding to that very well at the moment.”

“I think there needs to be some other way of assessing students on more of a fluid basis, using the technology which they have in their hands.”

VALUABLE RESOURCES

Nathan Ashman:
https://uk.linkedin.com/in/nathanashman
https://twitter.com/Nathanashman
Firefly: https://www.fireflylearning.com/
Rocket Fund: https://rocket.fund/
Hudl Technique: https://www.hudl.com/products/technique
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/

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.