teaching.mrstacey.org.uk

For a while now I’ve been interested in ways to get the message about the use of educational technology as a tool to transform learning out there to other teachers. Or more precisely, I’ve been interested in the puzzle of why more of them aren’t leaping in and doing it. Sure, there are those with the ‘it’s not for me’ / ‘I don’t know how to use it’ speech, but there are also lots who do use technology in their lives outside the classroom that haven’t adopted it in the classroom.

Back in my my ‘ten commandments for evangelising Ed Tech‘ at Teachmeet I said:

‘2. Ask, don’t tell. ‘What would you like to do’ is much more powerful than ‘have you seen this new cool thing’ is much more effectively with 95% of our colleagues’

But today I had another lightbulb moment while reading Hugh’s ‘Think Geek‘ post (and bear in mind part of my job next year is going to be about getting staff on board with this). Even though I thought I’d gone as far away from the ‘no, really, try a wiki. They’re cool’ as I could, I hadn’t. 

Because ‘what would you like to do’ is only a valid question if the person you’re asking knows the options. And then we’re back to wikis and blogs and podcasts and people have started to glaze over. Again. 

What I (we) need to do is find a valid social object around which to hang the discussion. I (we) need to find a teachers passion. (You remember? We used to have them before the National Curriculum. They’re going to be big again in the next few years.) And providing that passion is linked to what they’re teaching (which for many it is) then we have a conversation (see? Not asking a question, but having a conversation) about what they’d like to do with that passion and then we can see how we can link that in to the school site, to using images from Flickr, or whatever.

So that takes care of the early adopters, the slightly-later-once-someone-else-has-tried-it-first adopters and a whole swath of the rest who will start to do more once they see the relevance. 

Which just leaves those who are happy chalking and talking. And I’ll need to get back to you about them.