Teachers and tech: 'they're worlds apart - we can bring them together'

In the US, a crowdfunding website, DonorsChoose, has helped raise millions of dollars for classroom resources, by asking the public to contribute. Could a similar setup work in the UK? Nesta, an innovation foundation and registered charity, is running a pilot project for the idea, with the aim of bridging the gap between schools and the world of tech. Product manager Ben Gill spoke to us about the non-profit project, and how teachers can stay connected to tech.

Classrooms out of sync with tech

Over the years, we’ve seen shedloads of money going into edtech. There’s loads of exciting innovations coming up, but when you look at how tech is used in schools, you find huge variation. I’ve seen that from both sides: lots of startups are struggling to get market traction, and lots of schools aren’t using it.

To understand what’s going on I went to as many schools as I could, talking to teachers and headteachers. I found that the two worlds – schools and edtech – are almost like diverging universes. Everyone is trying to achieve the same thing, with the best intentions in mind: either trying to save teachers’ time, or improve learning outcomes. But unfortunately in many cases they’re not working together.

Tech-savvy headteachers tend to lead tech-savvy schools. But there can be lots of barriers – whether it’s a lack of budget, poor infrastructure, lack of support and training, or a lack of confidence. The final thing is teachers’ lack of time, which is a big problem. It takes time to learn what technology is available and choose what you want. Then it takes time to prepare to use it in your lesson.

From the edtech perspective, it’s difficult because teachers are extremely busy and extremely hard to talk to. And even if you do get to talk to them, they haven’t got any budget anyway. Also, if teachers want to use technology, often there’s not adequate Wi-Fi or there are not devices in the classroom to use new apps.

Beating the budget cuts

In times of austerity or budget cuts, the first thing to go are luxury items. Sometimes, headteachers have to choose between staff or technology, and obviously they prioritise staff. However, that means budgets for technology have been decreasing, according to Besa reports for the last few years. There’s a lack of overall budget provided by the government. But there’s also a lack of individual teacher budgets – they usually only have a few hundred pounds a year to spend on stuff, and most of it goes on photocopying, or things like that. So we decided there’s no point building a normal online marketplace for teachers if teachers haven’t got any money.

We decided to take a different angle and pilot an online fundraising platform for schools, called Rocket Fund. The aim is to allow teachers the freedom to buy things they think will have an impact in the classroom, which they might not be able to get otherwise.

People always ask me if this is supposed to be a replacement for government funding. That’s not the objective. The two safeguards we’ve put in to stop that is we’ve capped funding at £1,500 per project and it’s supposed to be for non-core items. So it’s not for desks and chairs and teachers; it’s for luxury items which you might not expect to be part of the core budget anyway. The way I see it is it’s an innovation fund, not a replacement fund – it’s not letting the government off the hook. It’s a way teachers can experiment with new things without risking their core budget.

Empowering teachers

Teachers want to be empowered to do their own thing. They want to be given the respect to teach how they want to teach – they know what will work best in their class. The exciting thing about this is that it empowers teachers to experiment with new things. If teachers find a piece of tech that’s absolutely amazing, then maybe it’ll become part of the standard package in the future. But this allows them to give it a try first, before we have a situation where technology is just dumped on every school in the country without thinking about how it’s going to work in practice.

Each school is unique. So it’s about how you use technology in your own particular situation. You can’t just dump iPads or Smartboards on schools and say: “Hey, this will solve everything”. Because, of course, if you give someone a car and they don’t have any driving lessons, they’re going to crash it pretty quickly. And within your particular class, one app might have might have more impact than another. So it’s important to get away from the one-size-fits-all approach.

In a dream world, in a few years time we’ll have a network of teachers who we know have bought iPads, or 3D printers or Lego Mindstorms. Then we can connect them as a network and find out how it’s going for them. It’s a great way to build a community from the ground up, sharing experiences and best practice.

Ben Gill is a product manager at Nesta, heading up the Rocket Fund project.

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