Should schools gorge on gadgets?

Want to see how equipping every child with a tablet can
transform the way they learn? Want to meet leading tech
firms which promise that their products are the key to your
school's future? Then come to BETT, the educational
technology fair in the vast Excel complex in East London.
But here's another thought - what if all of this is a huge
waste of money which would be better spent on employing
more teachers?
That was the provocative question posed in a blog on the eve
of BETT by the General Secretary of the National Association
of Head Teachers. According to one newspaper headline
Russell Hobby said "money spent by schools on fad iPads
could have funded 8,000 teachers". Another translated it as
"Schools should stop wasting money buying iPads and 'shiny
gadgets' for pupils."
When I caught up with Mr Hobby - on the phone rather than
at BETT - he said his message had been somewhat
exaggerated by those headlines. But he had wished to start a
debate about the priorities for schools. "We're facing some
very difficult spending decisions," he said, "we've got to ask
ourselves, if we lost all the technology we have now would we
actually go backwards?"
He insisted that he was no Luddite - "it's the uncritical
purchase of gadgets that worries me," he said. I pressed him
for an example and and he came up with interactive
whiteboards, rather than tablets. These expensive pieces of kit
are now in just about every classroom in the country, and Mr
Hobby is far from alone in his criticism.
Plenty of teachers question their usefulness, and I have seen
them employed in one school recently as surfaces on which to
stick paper notices. Not exactly hi-tech…
I took these criticisms to the man who has probably done
more than anyone to promote the use of technology in British
education. Dominic Savage is the founder of BETT and the
director general of the British Educational Suppliers
Association, which represents the companies selling
technology into schools.
"What an unfortunate message to be putting out," he said of
Russell Hobby's attack on his life's work. We're asking
teachers to do more and more every day. It's not a question
of throwing teachers at the problem - it's asking how do we
provide the technology that enables them to do what we are
asking of them?"
I challenged him to defend the investment in those
whiteboards and he admitted that these had not really
worked. He said early users who'd had extensive training had
produced good results, But then a cost-cutting exercise by
BECTA, the now-disbanded school technology quango. "It
does not surprise me in the slightest that it did not have the
impact it should have, but it's not the problem with the
technology in that case."
Where both men agree is that simply throwing money at
technology without investing in teacher training does not
work. And there's an issue of scale - bigger often isn't better.
What often seem clever initiatives in a few well-funded
schools then prove to be pretty useless when implemented
wholesale by local councils or academy chains.
Still, with little money to fund the big technology schemes
we've seen over the past two decades, the problem may be
solving itself. While the major tech companies still turn up in
strength at events like BETT, their stands seemed sparsely
populated.
Creative teachers are turning to free software, cheap devices
like the Raspberry Pi or even their pupils' mobile phones as
they work out how to use technology to enhance their
lessons. The digital transformation of education continues -
but it's a much more decentralised and low-budget revolution