Digitalized school - First we have to talk about poor IT in the classroom

You are a teacher. In two minutes your Swedish lesson starts. The students come in happily from break where they played football, talked about the latest series on Netflix and about what they did over the weekend. You have a couple of minutes to calm the students down and get them in the right frame of mind for teaching. 40 minutes of guaranteed teaching time. A couple of minutes into the lesson all attention is on you. You have prepared a 5–6 minute introduction to a new unit. The working material and a short test to check that the students have picked up what the lesson was intended to cover are placed in the class’s learning platform. The introduction went perfectly and now you ask the students to fetch the material they will work with. 25 minutes where the students practice what we have gone through, finishing with a 5-minute summary.

“I can’t log in to the platform,” says the first. Two more join in the same chorus.

“My email doesn’t work,” says a fourth.

“I have no wi‑fi, I have no wiiii‑fiiii,” exclaims the fifth.

How long do you think it will take the teacher to solve these problems? How many of the 25 minutes will be used for what they were supposed to be doing? Where do you think the students’ focus is now? How many times a week do you think this happens to the same teacher? How do you think the teacher solves this so they can continue the lesson? Do you think the teacher will set up the lesson the same way next time?

By “Bad IT” in this post, I mean IT that is not adapted to the operations. For others, this kind of problem may be completely irrelevant.

IT in the classroom (a part of the school’s digitalization — in my case compulsory school) cannot play by the same rulebook as office IT. For me as an IT support guy it’s no big deal if my account is locked. I call support and go get a cup of coffee. I can also use other tools (mobile, tablet) and I have access to three different internet connections.

If my word processor crashes it’s probably not a big deal. I rarely write long documents and in the worst case I can rewrite it. But if I’m a student, sweating blood to get half an A4 out and have a deadline for, for example, national tests, then it cannot happen. If I also cannot log in to the digital exam system we use, then things go downhill fast. IT in the classroom (a part of the school’s digitalization) must work 99.99% of the time. At least. Until that happens we will really never achieve an equivalent (if that’s even possible) digitalization in schools.

All changes, such as new tools or ways of working, must always be worth more than they cost.

If they are not, most people will opt out and stick with what actually works. And then we end up in some sort of checkbox-IT usage. People do the absolute minimum that, for example, a school management or authority requires. Those who are more passionate about using digital tools get their own services for the class. The kinds of services and tools they know will keep that 99.99% — for example a WordPress blog instead of the municipality’s learning platform — so that parents don’t have to log in with BankID just to find out if there is swimming for PE tomorrow. In many cases we need to go back and look at our “digital hygiene,” infrastructure and resources. What works in a classroom, with children from (in my case) 6–15 years old. It’s not about choosing to ditch IT, but about choosing smart, operation-adapted IT. It’s rarely about teachers, educators and other school staff being unwilling to learn. It’s about ensuring they have the tools they need, tools that support them in their work to give students a good education.

Here are three suggestions that would go a long way toward greater use and usable IT. In my opinion.

1. Password management — keep it simple

No pupil in compulsory school should ever have to change their password after X number of days. That should apply forever. Passwords are only changed if a pupil thinks someone else has learned it. Pupils should preferably also not have the option to change their password themselves. From experience we have run several systems this way and there are very few password changes. That also means the systems work and teachers can have lists with account details. Passwords are an enormously large source of problems, since a change also generates that the pupil must change the password in various apps and services. And no, a six-year-old should not have a password that contains at least 8 characters including upper and lower case letters, a digit and a special character. Single sign-on Make sure pupils (and staff) need to use as few credentials as possible. Implement Skolfederation or something similar. But what about security? IT in the classroom should be used for pedagogical work. If you are worried about security, then pupils have access to overly sensitive information. Pupils in compulsory school do not need access to their assessments, grades, national test results, extra adaptations and individual development plans.

2. Internet — make sure you have at least two

Don’t skimp on access points in the classrooms. Plan for at least 60 connected devices per classroom, depending on whether you allow private devices to connect. 30 students streaming video or audio can put some strain on resources. Also don’t skimp on a backup internet connection. With digitized national tests the network will go down somewhere on test day. And somewhere can be with you. Make sure there are, for example, a few portable routers with mobile broadband for emergencies. Also try to keep internet access as simple and accessible as possible. The more certificates and filters of various kinds there are, the greater the chance that things will go wrong.

3. Too advanced and poorly designed systems and services — more is not more

This doesn’t quite belong entirely under “infrastructure and resources”, but it is the third big obstacle as I see it. Far too advanced and convoluted systems and services. Sure, we can all be tempted by everything that a given product can do. But do we need it? In schools — and especially in classrooms — we sometimes are forced to use software and services that have all the features, but poor functionality. Quantity over quality. Poor design and usability. It’s not sustainable to send staff on 3-day courses in one of the many software programs that are supposed to be used. We waste far too much time learning a program instead of learning how best to use it for the student’s development. If we need a word processor, it’s so the pupil can practice writing, not to learn Word. And then a stripped-down simple word processor can be much more effective than Word, because the pupil gets started writing much faster.

I wrote a bit more about this in the post “The 5-minute rule | Choosing usable technology and services in schools” if you want to read more.

This also leads to those who do not feel it’s worth the cost to abstain — and those who are passionate go their own way. And then we stand there paying for something few use or see any benefit in. And the digital gaps continue to widen. Here I would like the school authority to be responsible for the legal systems, that is the digital safe that contains, for example, student records and that type of personal data. Then I would like schools themselves to completely choose the pedagogical tools and operate them themselves. Let those who want to run GAFE, O365 or whatever they choose do so. The authority assists with legal expertise to draft data processing agreements and to GDPR-secure the services that schools want to use. A mix of centralized and decentralized IT.

Honorable mentions

These are, of course, part of more problem areas regarding “infrastructure and resources.” We could also discuss; account management where new staff and pupils wait weeks for an account, digital devices that are not adapted to the operation with poor durability, battery life and screens, lack of well-functioning AV equipment, printers (needs no explanation) and more.

What do you think would improve the conditions for IT to have a positive effect in the classroom?