I’ve been worried that people might think that by publishing old copies of my newsletter I’m showing that I have nothing new to say. After all, news that is twenty years old isn’t exactly news.

Except when it is.

In issue #2, which you can read here: The State Of Information And Communications Technology In The Year 2000, I wrote about teacher training in ICT. I quoted from teachers in the UK and the USA, and also from an Ofsted subject report published in that year.

Here are a few quotes from that newsletter:

A nice historical curiosity one might think. If only! This morning, thanks to a comment by Professor Bob Harrison in Linkedin, I got wind of an article in TES quoting a research paper from the NFER.

That paper cites a number of interesting international statistics linking the degree of teacher familiarity with technology, and the availability of technology, with schools’ preparedness for remote learning (for want of a better term). One of the most damning of those statistics in my opinion is this one:

It would be easy to get quite depressed about this, and decide that I may as well hang up my boots and spend the rest of my life reading, writing and doing crosswords. However, I think there are still reasons to be optimistic:

As I said in an article for Bee Digital, Reflections on Technology in Schools in the time of Covid: Part 1:

What I glean from this is that when it became absolutely necessary, schools, teachers and students responded as well as they were able to. It also makes me think even more strongly that I was absolutely correct when I wrote, many years ago, that proficiency on technology use should be a prerequisite for become or remaining a teacher, and that a key question in Ofsted inspections should be “Has the headteacher devoted enough money and time to investment in technology and the training of teachers in its use?”

However, for these ideas to be viable, government has to show leadership. Until March 2019, governments had shown no interest in technology in schools since 2010. As Bill Gibbon said on Twitter,

Unless, of course, you think that scrapping a subject (ICT) which might have needed a bit of polishing it up, and replacing it with a subject (Computing) that even fewer teachers could teach, even fewer students wanted, and that was completely off the mark as far as most companies were concerned could be termed “showing an interest”.

It will be interesting to see what the research shows next year in terms of schools’ embracing of technology (the NFER report was based on research carried out in 2019, ie before the pandemic). In the meantime, it would be great if the DfE could organise laptop schemes that work properly, and identify the schools and teachers who have managed to achieve great things in online learning and disseminate information about how they did it.