22
PRINT.IT
01732 759725
CLASSROOM TECHNOLOGY
dramatically. The teacher is no longer
the ‘sage on the stage’ presenting
content to students; instead,
they spend their time talking with
students, answering questions,
working with small groups and
guiding the learning of each learner
individually.
More than one in five children in
the US (22%) don’t speak English at
home, so their parents are unable to
support them educationally. Send a
child home with a computer and get
them to consume content in video
and they can return to school and
solve problems by doing homework in
the classroom.
6. Invest in educational
technology or plummet down
the PISA
[3]
rankings
Why is the UK plummeting down
the PISA rankings? Because we are
living in the dark ages – as a country
we lack the ‘big picture’ thinking
about technology formerly provided
by government agencies, such as
BECTA, so that our next generation of
learners are entering the knowledge
economy ill equipped to compete
with students from emerging
countries such as South Korea.
Nowhere is this more evident than
in the recent PISA rankings where
emerging countries, such as South
Korea and Singapore, are rocketing
up the league tables as a result of
major investment in new technology
and infrastructure that has enabled
school children nationwide to access
cloud-based educational resources
from low cost hardware devices such
as Chromebooks.
What do we need to do in the UK?
To maintain and improve our position
in the PISA rankings it’s imperative
that major investment be made in
WiFi and connectivity in schools,
similar to JANET in the higher
education sector. This will enable all
learners to access the wealth of first
class educational content that exists
on the cloud, anytime, anywhere.
Lack of investment in technology
is inhibiting our progress as a nation.
In the Victorian era, Britain led the
world in science and engineering – in
technology we are lagging behind.
We need to get our next generation
of workers curious about IT,
programming and robotics and instil
consumption of trees and carbon
savings. There is software for that,
but to a large degree, it’s about the
management of output, including
from mobile devices – we have seen
a huge increase in mobile device
output across the education sector.”
PrintIT:
What’s driving that? Is it
changes in classroom technology
or just the fact that students
use mobile devices rather than
computers now?
Bob Taswell:
“Schools are early
adopters of technology and when
they have the budget they will always
invest heavily in technology. They
invest in laptops, which become
out of date fairly quickly; and they
invest in notebooks, which become
out of date fairly quickly. Support for
those devices is difficult because
students don’t treat them with the
respect they deserve, and school
IT departments have to bear the
cost of repairing and storing them.
The tablet is an easier solution: it’s
a much more compact solution;
it’s more easily transportable; it
connects to a wireless LAN more
easily; it has a range of tools and
applications that can be used; and
cloud-based storage and cloud-
based functionality and virtual
learning environments (VLEs) within
schools all point to centralised use
and centralised deployment and
centralised control of tablet-based
devices, and perhaps terminal-based
devices as well.”
PrintIT:
While technology has
helped drive increases in print
volumes up to now, do you think
as more people are given tablets
and make use of cloud storage and
virtual learning environments that
volumes will come down?
Bob Taswell:
“There are many
initiatives afoot to push paper-based
volumes downwards. The classic
and main focus is around virtual
learning environments where you
can publish tests and complete tests
online. Tests can be marked very,
very quickly and much more easily
on a VLE than with conventional
mechanical-based output. We offer
scanning solutions so a document,
rather than being output, can be
scanned to a repository in a VLE and
accessed electronically by a desktop
or tablet device. So paper-based
material becomes electronic rather
than being output, which does reduce
volume. This is a big focus in many
establishments that we look after.”
PrintIT:
So print volumes could
begin to come down quite
significantly?
Bob Taswell:
“Absolutely. But it’s
a difficult one. We all look to the
paperless office, but there are
conflicting desires and conflicting
requests. Colour output has increased
because there has been increasing
demand at the head level. Heads want
the curriculum-based output to be
more colour-rich and to be of a higher
quality and they are prepared to
sacrifice cost for that, in some cases.
I don’t think many heads like waste,
so to suggest a control solution and to
provide a simplistic but feature-rich,
relatively modestly costed control
solution in an education environment
is a good option.”
David Harrison:
“An interesting
perspective on this is how work is
being submitted and used. Today,
with homework, many teachers will
pull down a document from the
school system, print it out and then
mark it up. The next generation
of teachers, who are probably at
school themselves or maybe at
university, are probably more familiar
operating in a completely electronic
environment and will happily read
a proof online. As screen and tablet
technologies continue to improve,
teachers won’t need to print bundles
of paper. That is a behavioural and
generational change that is gradually
happening and similar to what we
see happening in the corporate
environment.”
PrintIT:
There must be research
showing that reading something
on paper improves retention and
Continued...
Continued...
