What do teachers need in their backpack?

[Dean Groom]

What is in the EdTech backpack? Is it a mobile phone, laptop, 3G dongle or a bag of virtual dirty tricks, magical potions and comforters – part operations, part strategy, part performance art.

With hind-sight, I’d have created a persona online from the outset. I’d be Victor Gloucester. He’d feel confident to throw dynamite-ideas into rooms where people sit with arms folded staring into the vortex of techno-denial. He’d tell you “technology, when given to adults, presents a distinct chance that it will be used to reinforce more of the same – or it will blow their hand off and they won’t touch it again”. Vic would be far more self-confident and inordinately cooler. He’d have figured out how to have made a million from consulting by now. Vic wouldn’t create an ePorfolio … he’d serve ‘cease and desist’ notices to the Emporer Ruperts of old-lore-mediocraty – in between watching Geek Brief TV and riding his Triumph.

The great thing about ‘toons’ … we can characterise them any way we like, they are imagined. The great thing about us is we are real an can imagine adopting project based learning, games, blogs, film making or writing a book. The characteristics of learning really are determined by our engagement with it. As simple as that. If the teacher isn’t engaged AND management doesn’t support or believe in it, then to them – your name is Vic. The tenants of eLearning have not changed in over a decade – but the opportunity has.

If you give people shovelware, all they will learn to do is shovel. God Bless Queen Victoria, and welcome the to the jugganaught of public education policy. We need stokers.