Education Technology
Article | July 20, 2022
After almost two years of disruption due to the pandemic, our ongoing recovery has highlighted the value of embracing change and working much more flexibly than before, refusing to give up at the first hurdle and a willingness to work together to achieve a common goal. These transferable skills are becoming ever more important for us to thrive in our increasingly automated world, and they are skills that can be developed and embedded through the medium of mathematics.
Fluency, reasoning, and problem-solving are the three foundations of our mathematics curriculum. By valuing them all, we will ensure that our future workforce has the confidence and skills to work together much more effectively to solve problems, overcome hurdles, and sustain our recovery. Let’s begin with fluency. Although AI is becoming increasingly prevalent, benefiting both our social and working lives, we still need number skills, perhaps now more than ever. Too many high-profile technology projects have failed due to basic mathematical errors. We need our education system to nurture the types of number skills needed in industry, especially a much greater focus on using and applying number skills. We must encourage students to develop their confidence in estimating quantities and a willingness to check calculations, even when they’ve used a spreadsheet or calculator.
From NASA’s disintegrating space probes to trains that don’t fit their platforms and submarines that are just too big, the tech world is littered with avoidable, costly mistakes. Acquiring number fluency means developing a ‘feel’ for numbers so that we can easily spot when something is not quite right; the NASA probe disintegrated due to a simple error converting units, the trains would not fit because no-one checked the platform sizes, and the submarines needed refitting due to an error entering spreadsheet error. Each of those three were incredibly costly, totalling millions, if not billions of pounds, but they were all avoidable too. We must nurture a willingness to estimate and develop a ‘feel’ for numbers, known as ‘number sense,’ alongside the more traditional approach of performing more formal calculations when needed. After all, few people head to the shops armed with a pencil, squared paper, and a ruler in readiness to calculate their change at the cash register.
We need to value number sense and rethink our expectations of the primary curriculum.
Encouraging a different approach towards the teaching and learning of mathematics may also help to address the gender imbalance in the subject. If you filled a room with a hundred math professors, the chances are that less than ten would be female. However, female mathematicians have played key roles in the fight against COVID. Mathematical modellers such as Professor Julia Gog, based at the University of Cambridge, drew on her research as an adviser to the government’s SAGE committee.
Nevertheless, even though more students study A-Level mathematics than any other subject, few female students choose to apply to study mathematics at university. My own research with female A-Level candidates reveals their preference for careers which help others and contribute towards a better society.
However, they often do not appreciate how studying mathematics might help them to realise their dreams by helping thousands, if not millions, of others through research on climate change, medicine, and networks.
We know that the gender gap in mathematical performance starts at a young age, and researchers have suggested that the changing expectations in the curriculum as students progress through their schooling might dissuade girls from continuing to study mathematics at a higher level. At primary school, pupils are expected to master written calculations such as long division and long multiplication to achieve ‘age-related expectations.’ However, to progress further, they also need to be able to solve problems, and this seems to be the point where female students lose out.
It has been argued that the switch from being rewarded for learning procedures to solving problems favours boys over girls, and the persistent gender gap in results for higher-achieving primary pupils appears to add weight to that argument. Effort are being made to encourage more females to consider studying mathematics, including the Maths 4 Girls project which organises school visits from female role models and the careers arm of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications which organises poster competitions to encourage more school students to think carefully about studying mathematics, both projects which I support. Yet more needs to be done.
Our curriculum and assessment system are designed to value number sense, estimating and problem-solving skills and perhaps rethink the time schools devote to rehearsing written calculations. Otherwise, we risk overlooking the huge potential of our current female students to contribute and build on the work of their predecessors, including Florence Nightingale, Mary Boole, Ada Lovelace, and Julia Gog, among many others.
To continue our recovery from COVID and rebuild our economy, we must embrace the potential of mathematics for developing and embedding the skills and attitudes that our students will need to thrive in their increasingly automated world: a willingness to "play" with numbers, estimate and check their answers; an enthusiasm for solving problems and working together; and an understanding that it’s OK to get stuck sometimes. We can overcome the hurdles that we face by working together as a team.
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Education Technology
Article | October 7, 2022
2020-21 proved pivotal for online learning technologies. The sudden shift to remote classrooms pressed educators and parents to emphasize environments conducive to anywhere learning, creating anywhere classrooms everywhere. Classroom management has become integral to these new settings where learning has to be an extension of the physical classroom. Virtual classrooms may still be in their nascent stage, but this is the time to test better ways and establish smart classrooms that are flexible, advanced, and encourage knowledge retention.
What Makes a Classroom Smart?
A smart classroom will make extensive use of technology to engage and immerse learners. The tools will be designed to generate interactions between educators, learners, and parents through multiple media. For instance, laptops and tablets will complement or even replace books, and a significant portion of the curriculum will require online tools to implement the study plan. According to TeachThought experts, there are eight components to a smart classroom technology stack:
Integration of the digital and physical space in learning
Live feedback from teachers
Diverse technology usage, like smartphone apps and Wi-Fi
Workflows that are not linear
Customized learning paths and environments
Transitioning lessons with no beginning or end
A new approach to delivering learning
Availability of an immense amount of data
Managing a Smart Classroom
Traditional classroom management thrives on the ability of educators and students to create a robust learning environment that promotes an exchange of ideas and the creation of a learning ecosystem that is conducive to creativity and productivity. Managing a smart classroom with or without technology is about keeping learners engaged and focused on the learning outcomes.
A technologically-driven smart classroom only aids learners to develop self-initiative and act independently when it comes to presenting ideas and projects. Smart classroom management will focus on three things, namely: lesson and group organization; instructional approach, and optimization of technology and time. Passive learning isn’t something every student will prefer, so digital smart classrooms offer them the avenue to initiate learning, actively learning and get involved in class forums.
Smart classroom management also comprises addressing technology-based hurdles for accessibility and technicalities. For instance, issues like cyberbullying, data security, ransomware, and a breakdown in internet access can hamper lessons and cause interruptions.
What Are the Best Practices to Follow?
In traditional classroom management, the emphasis on student-teacher association is paramount. The point is to establish relationships, define boundaries and help identify the students’ strong and weak points in order to help them thrive. Educators and school administrators can follow a range of best practices to get the most out of smart classroom technologies. Here are some best practices to follow:
Do a thorough check of whether all technology is working as it should
Set a contingency plan for when something goes wrong
Determine protocols for providing students with the help and point of contact they need when something isn’t working
Set collaboration guidelines to avoid unnecessary back and forth
Provide teachers and students with an avenue to engage offline as well
Take regular screen breaks
What’s Next?
Today, technology is a playground of the youth and even the youngest school students are well versed with the use of technology. It is only a matter of leveraging this familiarity and affinity and ensuring that learners are making the most of these skills. Embracing a smart classroom fully will take tome but the possibility to create a springboard for richer learning experience using it is immense.
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Continuing Education
Article | November 15, 2022
Imagine a virtual world where people socialize and work, and are represented by their virtual avatars. The concept may date back 50 years as part of sci-fi stories. Thanks to advancements in digital technology, it is seeing the light of the day in the form of Metaverse. The concept has been contemplated by many scientists, writers, and artists alike. However, the release of Metaverse proved to be the pinnacle of the many possibilities that digital transformation holds in store.
The most exciting part is innovating powerful applications of Metaverse across industries, and Facebook is already on it. Not just employees, but any institution that no longer requires its stakeholders to be present physically, from banking to socialization to education, will discover the biggest opportunity for transformation.
Learning in 2-Dimension
Online education has received a shot in the arm in the past couple of years, more out of necessity than anything else. From K-12 to higher education, children are affected and protected by online learning in educational institutions. Inclusive online education is the biggest challenge faced by educators. Next, engaging students in an environment that does not employ their full sensory capabilities hampers learning. Despite these challenges, virtual classrooms remained the bastion of academics and learning at a time when many industries came to a standstill.
The phase allowed software providers and institutes to identify challenges, assess their needs, and contribute to driving innovation in the edtech space. Thanks to the exponential increase in the demand for better solutions, edtech can now consider moving from a virtual classroom that shoots up screen time to a classroom simulation that is much more immersive, engaging, and effective. Virtual spaces have been around in some form for some time now, especially in the gaming world. With games like Second Life, Minecraft, and The Sims, many children and young adults are already familiar with the use of technology to live and play virtually. Metaverse will only make it easier to transform education completely.
Anywhere Classrooms
Although both online learning and virtual spaces have been around for a while, the conflux of both will engineer a new dimension and disruption for education. The blurring of physical boundaries and geographies is one of the most significant advantages of the Metaverse.While access to virtual classrooms still remains a big hurdle, the value addition from VR-based classrooms could solidify the case for virtual only classrooms.
Compared to reading and lectures, which have a knowledge retention rate of 5% and 10%, respectively, VR has a retention rate of 75%. The high retention rate can encourage educational institutes to redirect their teaching equipment budget to educate more children, say, at the NASA space station or in the Amazon rainforest, all without them having to leave their homes. Anywhere classrooms may just be the detour that education needs to leverage the current landscape and create a powerful transformation for the industry.
To Wrap Up
Education is heading for a rebranded future with classrooms being replaced by virtual reality in the pursuit of remote learning. Anywhere classrooms will help eliminate virtual walls that are currently nowhere near providing the experience that a real classroom can. With children being well-versed with virtual reality ecosystems, Metaverse will further simplify the seamless adoption of a two-dimensional learning space that offers better education, near hands-on experience, and actionable knowledge.
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Article | August 25, 2020
This entry is the 13th in a blog series called Pandemic Response and Educational Practices (PREP), which aims to highlight and further the important work educators are doing amid the worldwide COVID-19 crisis. Based on Creating the Anywhere, Anytime Classroom. Gloria’s situation is not unfamiliar. In fact, over the last six months, millions of teachers everywhere have been asked to suddenly transition from traditional face-to-face instruction to working either fully online or in some type of blended-learning configuration.
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