Coming on the back of poor NAPLAN results, there is a group called The Heads Up Alliance, with a petition demanding of education ministers that schools stop being stupid. Specifically, the petition is hammering five principles for the use of screens and technology in Australian schools:
1. Primary schools must be device-free.
2. Foundational literacy and handwriting must be restored as core educational priorities.
3. The default mode of high school learning must be books, handwriting, paper and human relationships.
4. School-endorsed EdTech must be proven safe and effective.
5. Generative AI has no place in school learning.
6. Teachers gotta stop using PowerPoint.
7: Universities must stop telling pre-service teachers to use PowerPoint.
OK, yeah, 6 is mine (and 7 is Red Five‘s). But you can’t have everything. And, yes, NAPLAN may be the silliest of reasons to spur the current hammering. Nonetheless, it is a petition hammering a number of things that desperately need to be hammered.
Add your hammer blows. God knows if it will do any good, but, at least for a moment, it will make you feel good.
Can I add a point 7…?
7: Universities must stop telling pre-service teachers to use PowerPoint.
Done.
There is an Anti-Power Point Party in Switzerland.
A couple of weeks ago, I gave a public lecture to about 180 people and I did not use PowerPoint. I did have a whiteboard and marker; but mostly I read my talk. One teacher said to me later that he had never been to a presentation that did not use PowerPoint.
One of my objections to PowerPoint is that people often just cut and paste material from the Internet without permission, and without much thought.
Since I am talking about technology, a student asked me last week “How did you contact lecturers at university before email?” I replied “We would just knock on their door.” “What? You knew where they lived?” “No, their office door.” Then I was asked “How did you find things out before the internet?” “I went to the library.” “You mean, you had to look through all those books?”
On the other hand, online learning without PowerPoint would be challenging. I suppose that we could just rely on zoom and a textbook that the students and teacher had, or mail stuff back and forth. The University of London used to offer external courses where students were given a syllabus and a list of readings. C’est tout!
Thanks, Terry. I love the internet for preparing these blog posts and public talks, but basically zero for teaching. But I also love libraries, and the death of libraries, and the death of the appreciation of libraries, has been a techo-disaster.
Of course you are right about online learning, but I think there is a problem with the argument. I have a post planned, in which I will confess to using Keynote (Mac’s infinitely superior version of PowerPoint), and might include some discussion there.
That’s pretty funny. They are here.
The difficulty with this is that there is a set of numbered rules, which hide the real purpose of what you want in a classroom — an environment that moves at a pace where pupils can reflect on and understand what is going on. Using PowerPoint for example for regular teachers presents a package and isolates the students as spectators rather than participants. There is a similar argument for writing stuff out rather than typing, since apparently it improves the engagement of the pupil in the material.
There have been many examples (some aired on this blog) where some document comes up with a bulleted set of principles that function as scriptural texts — do the letter, not the spirit. I have been asked to review text books where the authors have taken pains to explicitly point out (sometimes fraudulently) where it abides by particular points in a curriculum document.
Modern technology does has its place, and teachers need to appreciate where it can be effective. Although, I think, when it is used, there has to be some kind of debriefing afterwards.
I don’t think number rules hide the purpose, but perhaps the core message can get lost in the details. (On the other hand, sometimes without the details the message is vague and ambiguous.)
Like, perhaps “3. The default mode of high school learning must be books, handwriting, paper and human relationships.” almost covers the points about PowerPoint, in the sense that if the teacher is also defaulting to handwriting and human relationships, then they aren’t using PowerPoint (by default). But 3. does kind of sound like it only referring to what students do rather than what teachers do…
Ed is right – always good to point out underlying rationale and put things in the positive. As Tony Gardiner might have put it – make haste slowly (which of course schools never do with the latest IT fad). We know what works – let’s tweak it slowly.
How about: I’m positive laptops suck.
Thanks, Ed. I’m not particularly enamoured with the list above, except for Point 1. And I agree that a list of discrete points can distract from the central purpose. But I think the reality is that a manifesto has to be pretty pointy.
I also don’t think it matters much. There are either sufficiently many pissed-off parents and teachers or there are not. If there are, then the clowns in charge will pay attention to that or they won’t. The fine detail of the “demands” is probably neither here nor there.