Mobile eLearning and Teaching

“We need technology in every classroom and in every student and every teacher’s hand, because it is the pen and paper of our time, and it is the lens through which we experience much of our world” – David Warlick.

At the beginning of 2015 each Grade 8 student brought their own device to school. This was as we launched Mobile eLearning and Teaching MeLT into the colleges. MeLT launched in Grade 6 in Boys and Girls Prep in March 2014. In the second year of the programme it has become the new norm to see devices used in classes. From 2016 the MeLT programme will officially run from Grades 5 to 9 but that certainly does not mean that other grades will not be using technology. The school is working to develop an ICT skills list that will cover all Grades at the College so that by the time a student leaves they will have been exposed to various different ICT skills across a variety of devices and operating systems. The key, however, is a move from teaching ICT skills for the sake of learning the skills to integrating these ICT skills into the curriculum.

To truly innovate using ICT we have to move away from simply using technology as a substitute to what we are already doing. The key is to move from substitution to augmentation to modification to redefinition the SAMR model. The redefinition of learning is where we are using technology in ways that enhance the learning to such an extent that learning would not be possible if we did not have the technology. That is the space in which we are able to truly innovate.

In each of the schools an “Ed Tech Coach” has been identified or appointed with the specific mandate to coach the staff into using ICT and devices creatively in their classes to enhance learning and redefine the way we learn and teach. If we are truly going to innovate we constantly need to evaluate the ways we learn and teach: changing not for the sake of change, but because we truly believe that what we are doing is better than what we have done in the past.

“If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow” – John Dewey

“New technology is common, new thinking is rare” – Sir Peter Blake