Creating original work?

What Does It Mean to Present Original Work?

In an age of abundant information and powerful tools, the idea of “original work” is increasingly complex.   I often find it difficult philosophically when exam boards state, in schools and colleges, that work should be the “students own”.   What does that actually mean in todays world?     If you write or create something based on a lesson, a book, or with the help of AI, is it still your own?   

Learning vs. Creating: Where Does Originality Begin?

Originality doesn’t mean creating something in a vacuum. In fact, most original work is built on what we’ve learned from others. If a teacher explains a concept and you write about it in your own words, that is your work. You’ve processed the information, interpreted it, and expressed it through your own understanding. The same applies when you read a book and then write about it.   You add your voice, your synthesis, and your framing make it original.  

The Role of AI and Other Tools

Using AI to help structure your thoughts, refine your language, or even co-write parts of your work doesn’t automatically make it unoriginal. Tools have always been part of the creative process and we don’t want to remove them.  Think of spellcheckers, grammar guides, or tools to make writing easier such as the word processor or PowerPoint for creating a slide deck, or even just brainstorming with a friend.  Even consider the humble pen and paper.   Without the tool the output would be different, so the tool shapes the output, but yet we still consider the output to be our own.   The key question is: Are you using the tool to express your own understanding, or are you outsourcing the thinking entirely? 

If AI helps you articulate or present what you’ve learned, it’s still your work. But if you rely on it to generate output which you haven’t engaged with or understood, then I think it is fair to say the final product isn’t your own.  So, engagement and intent are key here.   If AI tools are being used for the right reason, to learn, and you engage with the AI in the production, co-production if you will, then it’s your own work.

Originality Is About Ownership of Thought

At its core, originality is about intellectual ownership. It’s not just about where the information came from, but how you’ve made it your own. Did you wrestle with the ideas? Did you connect them to other things you know? Did you form a perspective? If the answer is yes, then your work is original even if it’s inspired by others or supported by tools.

The Product vs. the Process

One of the most important insights is that the final product doesn’t always show the depth of learning behind it. A polished essay might look effortless, but it could be the result of hours of reflection, revision, and growth. Equally it could have been easy for an individual.  Conversely, a well-written piece generated mostly by AI might lack the personal journey that makes learning meaningful.  That said it could also represent the output to hours of effort, iteration, exploration and revision with the support of AI tools.

In considering the classroom and art for example, who achieves more, the student with strong artistic skills who produces a good graphic with little effort or the student with poorer skills who also produces a good graphic, but with the support of AI where they engaged with the process, contributing their ideas and identity but relying on AI tools for the realisation of the work?   Is it the product we value, in which case does it matter?   Or is it the process in which case one of the students clearly was more engaged in effortful learning.   I suppose it depends on what you are actually assessing.   And maybe that’s part of the issue.   Have we become to focussed on the product, the good graphic, rather than looking at the process, or more importantly effortful learning.

So perhaps in looking at if work is the students own, a better question is: Does this work reflect what they’ve learned? If it does, then it’s a valuable and original contribution.

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Note: this piece was written with the help of AI.  It comes from my ideas and initial prompting, was refined through further prompting with final edits of the text.   In posting it I do so as it reflects my views on originality however benefits from AI’s broader vocabulary and structure.    Is it still my work?   I think it is.

Technology in Schools: Innovating While Staying Safe

The technology in education landscape is evolving at a pace that often feels dizzying.   One look at the last few years and Artificial Intelligence (AI) development alone and this is pretty evident, never mind the pair of smart glasses I am currently experimenting with and what they might mean for students with English as a second language or with special educations needs, not to mention the challenges around academic integrity.   New tools, both hardware and software, emerge almost daily.   For schools these new tools offer such potential but adopting is complex and takes time, and relies on teachers having space to trial, experiment, and build confidence before these tools become part of everyday practice.  

The Challenge of Adoption

Introducing new tools often means rethinking lesson plans, learning new interfaces, and managing technical hiccups, all while maintaining the core responsibility of delivering quality education.  This all takes time.   With time and workload being such an issue, as has been identified by successive teacher workload surveys, it is often a case of comparing possible benefit versus the cost of exploring and testing new tools, where such exploring and testing may identify tools that aren’t fit for purpose.  When this happens the time appears wasted, leading to some being reluctant to invest the time in the first place.   For those who do invest the time, it is either at the expense of other things or at the expense of themselves in exploring in their own time.  And I note I have seen many a teacher present at webinars and conferences as to how they have used one amazing tool after another, which is great at an individual level and based on their personal investment in exploring and experimenting, but the question is how we scale this up to become the norm across all teachers.

Some years ago I presented at a conference in Dubai in relation to the need for teachers to build confidence where they wish to fully embed technology tools in their practice, however building such confidence is difficult when there isn’t the time and where platforms and solutions move on so quickly.  So, what is the solution?

Democratising Creativity: Let Students Lead

Perhaps the solution lies in shifting the focus. Instead of expecting teachers to master every new tool, why not empower students to experiment?  In the words of David Weinberger, “the smartest person in the room is the room” so what if we count the students in our classrooms?   There is only so much experimenting a single teacher can do, but a class full of students can do much more experimenting and sharing, with this facilitated and directed by the teacher.   The teacher doesn’t need to know every app or tool as long as they understand possible risks and pitfalls.

Coursework and project-based learning offer ideal opportunities for pupils to explore emerging technologies, whether that’s creating multimedia presentations, using AI to generate ideas, or leveraging coding platforms to build prototypes.  AI tools in particular mean that really impressive products, be these images, presentations, videos, or more, can be put together by any student able to type prompts into an AI, and then able to review and refine their prompts and resulting output.    We can truly allow students to be expressive and exploratory in their learning and in how they evidence their learning.   It is very much the “democratising creativity” which I have heard Dan Fitzpatrick refer to on many occasions.   

Safety First: Privacy and Data Protection

Of course, this freedom must come with guardrails. Schools have a duty to protect students’ welfare, their data and their privacy, so need to ensure that experimentation happens within safe, ethical frameworks. This means clear policies on what tools can be used, vetting and risk-based consideration of platforms, and ongoing education about digital responsibility.

Data protection isn’t just a legal requirement; it’s a trust issue. Parents, staff, and students need confidence that personal information is secure and that applications and tools which teachers introduce or recommend have this security at their heart.   I note that nothing is without risk but that doesn’t absolve us of responsibility to do what is reasonably possible, to do due diligence, put mitigation measures in place and protect our students where possible. 

Cybersecurity incidents, such as phishing attempts or data breaches, underscore the importance of vigilance. Even seemingly minor lapses can erode trust and expose vulnerabilities. I myself have seen how data incidents can have an impact years after the initial incident and where the initial incident was deemed to have been low risk.   We therefore need to ensure we have processes in place to manage and minimise such risk.

But, things going wrong, error and failure are part of the learning experience, and allowing students to experience such things, along with supporting them on the road beyond, and in building their resilience, are important parts of preparing for the world beyond education.  Supporting students to develop the skills so they can evaluate what they have done, refine and improve is likely to become more and more important in a world where information and knowledge is so widely available.

Balancing Innovation and Responsibility

The path forward requires balance. Schools must embrace innovation to remain relevant and prepare students for a digital future, but they cannot do so at the expense of privacy, security, safety or equity.  In considering new tools and technologies this therefore gets me thinking about the below:

  • Data Protection: Does the technology introduce data protection risks in terms of data sharing, including with AI tools for training, or with advertisers or other third parties?    How long is data held for?  Is the use of data limited to a clearly stated purpose?  Where is the data geographically stored?
  • Cyber Security: Does the technology vendor put in place basic measures for security such as MFA and requirements for breach and vulnerability notification?
  • Ethics and transparency:  Is the tool ethical and “right” in its planned use?  
  • Age limitations and T&Cs: Does the planned use align with the terms and conditions, including any terms which limit the age of users?  Also is the tool designed for and appropriate to the age of planned student users?
  • Intellectual Property: Who owns the product of the given technology?   Is it the user, be they student or staff, or is it the technology vendor?
  • Sustainability: Is the solution financially viable into the future, if there is a cost, as well as environmentally sustainable?

I note the above aren’t all the possible considerations but they are a good starting point.  I also note that, for older students, it may be appropriate to get the students themselves thinking and investigating the above before seeking to use or explore a given tool.

Looking Ahead

Technology will continue to reshape education, but its success depends on thoughtful integration. By empowering students to lead experimentation, schools can harness creativity while giving teachers the time and support they need. Teachers could be the tech guide on the side although there may be work required to help them build the confidence to act as such.   Coupled with strong privacy safeguards, this approach ensures that innovation enhances learning without compromising safety.

He was efficient!

We live in a world obsessed with outcomes. Achievements, milestones, KPIs, medals, checkboxes; the language of success is often framed around what gets done, how fast, and how well. Life, it seems, is about doing stuff. And doing it efficiently, with Artificial Intelligence being the latest shiny tool to help us be more efficient, as if efficiency was the ultimate outcome.    Am not sure I want “Here lies Gary, he was efficient” on my tombstone.

As someone who works in IT, I’m no stranger to the allure of systems, processes, and measurable results. There’s a certain satisfaction in ticking off tasks, optimizing workflows, and seeing progress in neat little graphs. I love a spreadsheet for keeping records of tasks complete with conditional formatting and an abundance of complex formula.   Or maybe a little PowerAutomate to gather approvals and ping emails to the relevant people while also updating a master SharePoint list.  And lets not even discuss having SMART KPIs and a PowerBI Dashboard or two. But lately, I’ve been thinking: maybe we’ve got it backwards. Maybe the real value isn’t in the doing itself or what we get done or achieve, but in how we feel while we’re doing it and in the experience.

Take my recent attempt to restart morning running. It’s been… messy. I used to be consistent(ish). Up early, shoes on, out the door, often before I realised what I was doing. Now? I snooze the alarm. I negotiate with myself. It looks a bit dark or a bit too cold or I don’t quite feel 100%, and then I climb back into bed.  Some (read: none recently)  mornings I make it out, some I don’t. And when I do, it’s not elegant. It’s slow, it’s uncomfortable, and it’s definitely not social media worthy and I do sometime feel for the poor souls who have the pleasure of encountering me on my morning run.

But here’s the thing: those runs, the imperfect, reluctant, sweaty ones, are teaching me more than the polished ones ever did, although am not sure any of my runs can ever have been described as polished. They remind me that the journey matters. That showing up, even when it’s hard, is a kind of quiet victory. That the struggle itself is part of the story.  Things are messy and sometimes, rather than getting annoyed or angry with myself, I need to accept I am human and that it is par for the course.  I need to step back and take a broader view on my progress over the longer time period.

We often treat mistakes, detours, and off-days as things to be minimized or hidden. But what if they’re actually the most important parts? What if the real richness of life is found not in the clean lines of achievement, but in the jagged edges of experience?

Think about it. The best stories aren’t about flawless execution. They’re about perseverance, vulnerability, growth. They’re about the days we didn’t want to, but did anyway. Or didn’t, and learned something in the process.

Efficiency has its place, of course. We need structure. We need goals. We even need the odd spreadsheet to help organise our finances or our todo list and there isn’t anything wrong with the occasional PowerBi dashboard.  But if we focus only on the measurable, we risk missing the immeasurable: the joy of a sunrise on a run, the frustration of a setback, the quiet pride of trying again. These moments don’t fit neatly into a spreadsheet, but they shape us in ways that matter.

So maybe life isn’t just about doing stuff. Maybe it’s about being in the stuff. Feeling it. Living it. Letting it be messy and real.

As I try to get back into running, I’m trying to learn to be gentler with myself. I need to spend less time beating myself up when I don’t manage to get out the door focusing more on how I might do better next time. I also need to remember improvement isn’t linear so setbacks, hurdles and struggles are to be expected. I need to celebrate the effort, not just the outcome, even where the effort was hard and the outcome sub-optimal. To notice how the air feels, how my body responds, how my mind resists and then relents. It’s not about pace or distance anymore. It’s about presence.

And maybe that’s the lesson we all need. That the journey, with its stumbles and surprises, is not a distraction from the goal. It is the goal.

So, here’s to the messy mornings. The half-finished plans. The imperfect efforts. They’re not signs of failure, they’re signs of life. And that, in the end, might be the most important achievement of all.

TEISS 2025 Cyber conference

Cyber resilience is an issue impacting all organisations, be they schools, charity groups or enterprise organisations.   It is with that in mind I attended the TEISS London 2025 event, an event focusing on cyber resilience and specifically, as per the conferences title, on resilience, response and recovery.   It is always interesting listening to industry speakers talking of cyber security, plus hearing the thoughts from the NCSC among others.   So, what were my take aways

Third party risk

    Third party risk has been something I have been concerned with for a while.  This includes companies which a school might use to provide online services such as learning platforms or even MIS services however, also includes companies which provide software which we may use, such as software or hardware to provide network monitoring or Wi-Fi or other functionality.   The reality is that we use far more third parties then we tend to be immediately aware of, with each vendor representing some form of risk in terms of the effect if their service wasn’t available or if their service was breached, resulting on the loss of school data to the dark web.   The TEISS event however widened my view to include the overall supply chain.   Consider a cloud hosted MIS system for example.   The vendor might use an external identity provider, a third party backup solution, an MDR solution and a separate bulk email solution, and we, as the user of the MIS may not be aware of which solutions they are using, and maybe the contract with the MIS provider requires they inform us of a breach, but do they need to notify us of a breach of a third party they use?   And never mind just breach situations, do they need to notify us of vulnerabilities identified in the third parties they use?   Remember, the school as the data controller is responsible for data even when being processed by a third party;  How can we discharge our duties when we don’t actually know the risks?  I feel we sometimes treat the use of cloud services as a way to shift the risk to them rather than the school, however all we can shift is the responsibility, the accountability and liability generally remains with the school.

    Recovering identity services

    In discussion of the recovery phase of an incident, the issue of identity services was raised.   We might have all our data and our systems nice and backed up, and we may have tested these backups to make sure we can recover them but what happens when our identity services are compromised?    How can we recover from backups when the identity services needed to authenticate are compromised and unavailable?   I must admit I myself have spent a fair amount of time in considering backups and disaster recovery but this raised a new angle.    Having break glass accounts is all well and good, but if our identity services have been compromised and even destroyed then these accounts are unavailable meaning we can’t get to our backups.   Are we sufficiently prepared for rebuilding our identity environment, including rebuilding all the trust connections across different systems and services as required to mount a recovery and get things back working, even if only to a minimum viable environment situation.

    Not if, but when?

    We do tend to spend a lot of time talking about our protective and defensive measures, our AV, EDR, XDR, MDR, SOC and other two or three letter acronyms but these defences only give us a less than 100% probability of a successful defence.    Looking at the probability of a breach or incident, if we look far enough into the future we approach a 100% chance that it will happen.   So maybe this means we need to spend more than 50% of our time talking about how we manage the “when” it happens.    And maybe the key here is not to treat a cyber incident as an IT or cyber issue, but as an organisational or school issue.   It’s a school operations incident albeit one of the cyber variety.   So, the question then becomes how do we manage the different critical aspects of a school if there is no IT available.   Thinking on this, I think teaching and learning can easily continue in the short term without IT;  Teaching worked for many years before we started adding tech to classrooms.   The issues therefore are other areas of a school such as do the door locks work so staff and students can get in and out?   Will payroll operate to pay suppliers and also pay teachers and other staff?   How will we manage safeguarding without our safeguarding platform or the ability to easily ping emails back and forth?    What about contacting parents if there are issues or even in general, if we don’t have access to our MIS?   It’s about the key business or school processes and how they might work in a minimum viable environment without our usual IT systems.

    Conclusion

    So, it was a very enjoyable conference once again, although I will note it wasn’t without my usual train related issues which saw me arriving home two hours later than original planned due to delays;  Why do I expect anything different?

    Thinking back one of the key discussions in a group session focussed on culture and I think this is key.   Cyber resilience, a term which has never fully sat well with me, is an ongoing battle against changing technology, evolving threats and evolving threat actors, as well as increasing internal risks as technology becomes more integrated and critical and as people are asked to become more efficient and do more, something which has a tendency to result in occasional errors.    As such it is all about building the culture such that the risk is addressed by all and not just by IT or cyber teams.   This is the ideal.  The question therefore becomes, how can we engage our school communities in cyber resilience, in the same way we engage them in safeguarding?    Is it time we stopped talking about cyber resilience in schools and started referring to it as digital safeguarding maybe?

    Minimal viable edtech product?

    In the IT world the phrase “minimum viable product” is often used to indicate the point at which a new product or service is good enough to go to market, but by no means the finished and polished product.  The issue in enterprise environments is the need to be first to market, complete with the competitive advantage this results in.   But would we use the same phrase in education and in particular in relation to teaching with technology?  Wouldn’t we want the best for all of our students?

    This question came to me following a number of webinar events focussed on AI in education where I saw some really great stuff being demonstrated.   I saw ways for teachers and students to bring their work to life, animating, creating video or imagining what a given piece of textual content might look or sound like.   And that’s the tip of the iceberg and it was inspiring stuff.    My initial reaction was one of, how do I achieve that or where can I use that.

    But then the day to day tasks and activities got in the way.  I didn’t have the time to visit and sign up to the various apps, and to learn how to use them to do all of these amazing things.   I didn’t have time to consider the pedagogical and content side of things in terms of how someone might teach through and using these tools.  The demos where amazing, but the people doing the demonstrations didn’t really share about how long they spent finding and learning the tools, how long it took them to build up the confidence that was so apparent in their presentations.      And I think building confidence in tools is a key issue and one which is often not fully considered.   As is experimentation, but this takes time. I would also suggest that where people do present great examples of tech tools, they are often eager motivated individuals with an interest in technology and exploring ideas and solutions.

    When we seek to scale all of this up we therefore hit challenges.   Not all people have the interest and motivation to explore technology tools, including AI tools for example, and therefore either they are unaware of what is possible or they simply don’t have the time to experiment and gain confidence.    And with quite so many different tools being demonstrated I also think staff can find it difficult knowing where to start.   Which tool is going to represent the best value, giving me the greatest impact but with the least effort.   So, selecting a lesser subset of tools and training all staff tends to be what happens, the minimal viable product, but it therefore misses out on some of the jaw-dropping opportunities which AI advancements can now provide. There isn’t anything wrong with this, but is it the best we can achieve?

    Maybe the issue here is my point of reference which is that of the teacher.   What if, rather than the teacher seeking to learn all these apps and tools, we empower the students to explore.   This fits better as the students are exploring tools which relate to their work and are doing so for their own benefit.   A teacher would however need to be comfortable in supporting students with tools where they don’t necessarily fully understand their use.  This would be a bit of a shift for the traditional view of “sage on the stage” teaching, and more towards coaching and mentoring, asking the right questions rather than showing students the facts or what to do.   This feels right to me, albeit possibly uncomfortable, although it is through challenge and a bit of discomfort that we often achieve the most.

    AI tools are providing such great opportunities at the moment and it is great to see the art of what is possible but I cant help but feel we should be supporting the students in this exploration.   This therefore means that the role of the teacher needs to be different, focussing on asking questions as to age requirements, privacy, intellectual property, ethics and the like in relation to the tools, rather than being the one using the tools or teaching the students how to use specific tools.   We need to explore why students are seeking to use certain apps and what they hope to produce.  Maybe this is the new minimum viable product in education.   Maybe this is what we need if we are seeking to develop creativity in students as well as the critical thinking to help them stay safe and secure.  

    Phones, smart glasses and bionics in schools?

    One of the challenges in education, as it relates to technology, is that we often spend so much time focussing on the tech at the time, or on the tech issues at the time.   Take for example the Smartphone.  The last few years have seen such significant and ongoing discussions of banning phone in schools.    Smart phone technology, if you disregard the Blackberry (showing my age there!), could be considered to have been introduced with the original iPhone 18 years ago.   Now it took time to get to the point that smart phones were in the hands of most children, and it took time for the potential issues and risks to become apparent, however it didn’t take 18 years;  This isn’t an emerging or sudden issue yet we are still looking at it rather than towards the future and the new technologies which are already upon us.

    And this is where some of the discussion with my amazing colleagues in The Digital Futures Group kicks in.  They have recently been discussing the issues of wearables such as smart watches and smart glasses, demonstrating the technology and some of the resulting issues, but more importantly looking to the future.   What are we to do if a student arrives at an exam sporting smart glasses with Wi-Fi capability?   How would we even identify they were even smart glasses?   And even if we do identify them as smart glasses, can we take prescription glasses off a student with a sight impairment?

    Looking a bit further into the future, Ian Yorston, at the ISC Digital Conference, referred to bionic enhancements humans may receive, asking questions in response to discussion as to privacy.   He was pointing to privacy as a construct which simply doesn’t stand up to scrutinization and even more so in the future.   If a person with sight loss gets a bionic eye to allow them to see, which in turn records their interactions, or maybe a person with memory issues has the same functionality, can we have privacy?   And why is this different to me looking round the room and noting things down?    But circling back to schools, and exams in particular, are we going to get students to remove their bionic implants and put them in a jar beside the envelope with their phone and smart watch in?

    The issue here is the integration of technology.   As Mark Weiser said, “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”    In the past it was easy to spot technology and ask students to put their phone in an envelope as they enter the exam hall.   But as the technology becomes integrated with what they are wearing, in their rings, their watches, their glasses and their jewellery, it becomes more difficult to identify and also more difficult to remove;  Remove a students smart glasses and they may not be able to see the exam paper.   And as we look further into the future the technology will become even more integrated, becoming integrated with our physical being, providing those that can’t hear, the ability to hear, and those that can’t see, the ability to see, plus providing augmented abilities.   Will it be right or even possible to have students remove such tech?

    So for me there is no point looking at phone bans and even how we manage phones as soon enough we will need to consider smart glasses, then smart something else, then eventually technologies so integrated they cannot be removed.   So how will we manage exams, or classroom interactions where bionic enhancements allow for recording, transcription and the like?   Or allow for instant searching of the internet with recommendations then made to the user?    For me this brings us back to school values, and those foundational statements as to what we believe matters.   Be brilliant, be curious, be authentic, be disruptors and be kind are the values in my school. 

    In reflecting maybe we need to have less detailed policies, guidance and advice;  Every year we just seem to be adding to these documents and as technology marches on this is unlikely to change.   Maybe we need to spend more time connecting with our values.   After all, cheating in an exam using a paper cheat sheet, smart glasses or a bionic eye, is that being authentic?    Recording someone without their permission, is that being kind?   Also, if I am using the tech I have to reach the best outcomes, is this ok, curious, authentic and brilliant, versus using the tech to get to a solution or piece of coursework with the least effort?

    Maybe the answer, in our values, has been in front of us the whole time.

    New Academic Year: Here we go again…

    It’s the start of another academic year and for us in the tech side of EdTech, it is the busiest time of year.   We have new staff and new students to get signed up and able to access school systems to enable teaching, learning and administrative processes to proceed.   We have the usual uptake in cybercrime, partly due to cyber criminals targeting education at this busy time of year but party due to staff returning and looking at their email inboxes after a period away from them.   Then we have the usual issues associated with people being away from their school tech, or at least not using it as frequently, including forgotten passwords, “can’t connect to the Wi-Fi” or to the classroom Smartboard and the like.   Printers where toner cartridges may have dried up too, among many other issues that all suddenly appear at the end of August and beginning of September as teaching staff and students return.  And it is also worth noting that although teachers and students may have been away, for school IT staff the summer holiday period wasn’t a holiday period.  It was their chance to do all the maintenance, upgrade and general preparation work required ahead of the start of a new academic year.  

    So the start of a new academic year is definitely a challenge.   My approach to the above, and to the challenges of a new academic year,  for the last several years has been two key words:

    Reasonableness.    IT staff in schools are (mostly) human and it is a busy period of time so there is almost immediate need to prioritise.   We cannot do everything, for everyone, all at once.   Now laughingly my office does include a crystal ball and a wand as often it does appear that we are predicting the future and performing magic, however largely this is part luck and part good planning.   The reality is we will do everything we can to support but it will be what we “reasonably” can and therefore involves triaging and prioritisation of tasks.  It is important to get this “reasonableness” across to all engaging with school IT teams, plus to the teams themselves.

    Entropy. This simply for me is the acceptance that the world around us is always seeking chaos, no matter what we put in place.   It is therefore required that we are agile and responsive when things go wrong, or when things aren’t planned as well as they maybe could have been.   Schools are dynamic places, and we need to plan and prepare as best as we can, however no amount of planning and preparation can cope with the variables presented by thousands of students and hundreds of staff especially at the start of a new academic year after over a month away from school.  This means we, and those engaging with IT teams, need to be accepting of where things go wrong or not quite as we would have liked.

    As the new academic year begins my wishes go out to IT staff in schools across the UK and beyond.   Our job is to make the tech aspect of school life go smoothly and if all goes well, be almost transparent to the end users whether they be students or staff.   Where things do go as planned, we are supporting schools by putting appropriate technology tools in the hands of school leaders, teachers and students.   These tools enable, enhance and empower.  This transparency, however, means when it all goes well there is little praise or thanks, as the work and effort was all but invisible.  If it goes less well the concerns and complaints will be quick to arise.  

    As such if you see your IT team around your school do say hello, ask them about the work they have done over the summer in preparing for the new academic year and thank them for this, and in advance for the work they will do in this busy introductory period and beyond.   I know from experience, teaching isn’t easy, but also from experience, the educational IT world also comes with its challenges, especially at the start of a new academic year.   If we want to achieve all we can in schools, for our students, for staff and for our wider community, it takes everyone’s involvement and effort.

    Smart Tech: Do we need to ban it?

    Some schools operate in a bit of a tech paradox.   Use tech to help students with special needs or disability, EAL students, or simply to support collaboration, critical thinking, communication and creativity, while at the same time banning technology due to the risks related to online content, or the evils of screentime.   For example, many schools are banning mobile phones or at least smart phones.   But in a world of evolving technology and slow evolving school policy, are we always going to be behind the curve?

    Banning Phones, but what next?

    Am not going to discuss banning phones here as I have written enough on it in the past.    Needless to say my view is that we should seek to manage rather than banning phones, and in schools with limited technology available, why wouldn’t you seek to use such a valuable and flexible bit of kit which the kids just happen to have brought with them?

    The issue here though, is that we can ban phones all we want but the technology has already moved on, with more and more students bringing wearables such as smart watches into school.   Less conspicuous than a smart phone but increasingly becoming almost as powerful.   So are we going to start banning smart watches?

    And even if we do, we are already seeing signs of what the next issue might be in AI powered wearables that record and monitor what a person is doing to provide insights, summaries and advice.   Quick lets make sure they are mentioned in our school policies as yet another thing which is banned, and which staff should be on the lookout for.   And what of smart pens or earpieces? We don’t seem too far away from having to provide students with a technological pat down to make sure they aren’t packing any dangerous smart devices. Or maybe we need tech detecting metal detectors in the entrances to schools?

    Integrated tech

    More recently we have seen the issue of integrated tech where technology is integrated with other items, such as integrating camera, microphone and smart tech into a pair of glasses.   “Ban them” I hear you cry.   I can see it now, the student squinting at the board at the front of the class as their smart glasses have been confiscated.   Hold on, how would I even be able to tell they were smart glasses?   I also wonder what other items might have smart tech integrated with it.   Maybe smart earrings?   We already have smart rings…..hold on does that mean we have to ban rings too?

    Thinking to the future

    It all gets a bit worse if we look even further forward and start to consider cybernetics.   What if a students failing or failed eyesight in their left eye is addressed through a smart implant.   Do they need to take their eye out for exams?     Or a student with motor control has some sort of haptic device to help them, do they need to take it off for exams?   What if the student has some sort of brain implant to augment their capabilities; where would we stand with that?

    Conclusion

    Our thinking to date has, in my opinion, tended towards being focussed on the short term, as well as reactive.   We don’t know how to manage phones or smart watches, so lets ban them.  But this doesn’t deal with the problem, and in fact misses some of the potential benefits which might exist.   It also just kicks the can down the road a little until we need to ban the next thing, and the next thing, adding more and more to our policies and guidelines, and to the checking people need to do to ensure students are complying with the increasingly complex rules.  

    Instead, couldn’t we look forward, and consider the increasingly likelihood of wearables, or integrated tech and even of cybernetics.    Maybe there is another way other than banning, which would allow for the kit to be safely and responsibly used. With this as the context it seems inappropriate and even a bit silly to be looking to ban tech.  Instead maybe we need to step back and consider education and learning, and how it might need to evolve in a world of evolving technology.

    A-Level/BTec results day

    Tomorrow is results day for students all over the world getting their A-Level or BTec Level 3 results.  So firstly, good luck to everyone awaiting results and I hope you get all you hoped for.

    But…..

    Exams results aren’t everything!   Our current system definitely has them as important as they impact on the next stage in life and on career or university opportunities but if we take a wider angle lens they aren’t as important, and it is for this reason that I ask parents and their children to seek to take that wider angle lens.   Taking the wide angle lens isn’t easy though, I will admit, as it focusses on considering and accepting an unknown future where we have a bias for what we know, an availability bias.  But it is important.

    Exams results are an important step in our life journey, there is no doubt in this, although I would definitely like to see some change in our current education systems and in the industrial error approach to student learning.   But that’s for another blog, and also something I don’t see changing any time soon so for now we are stuck with this system.  So exams are important but not as important as I feel they are made out to be.    For some students, they will get the results they sought to get, either through natural aptitude, hard work or an element of luck.   And I note most will likely get there through a mixture of ability, hard work and luck, something which I see as a recurring theme in life.   Others may be a little disappointed but nonetheless proceed to the next stage of their lives or education.   While others still will be very disappointed and see their initial plans go up in smoke, possibly seeing their grades failing to meet the entry requirements for their chosen course and then having to look to clearing for alternatives.  This might be the result of failing to put in the needed effort, however it may also be the result of external circumstances, such as family matters, or health issues, or it could even be the result of bad luck and the questions which arose on that particular exam paper on that particular day.

    In my school days I saw the later, seeing my plans go up in smoke and requiring an additional year of school study rather than my planned jump to university study.  I feel now that this likely happened as I didn’t fully focus having previously found the previous standard grade exams easy, so I attributed the issue mainly down to myself.   At the time I was gutted and got quite depressed and down about the whole thing.   I went to a pretty dark place at times, and suspect these days may have sought or been made to seek medical help, where back then this wasn’t as normal or common.  But taking a wider angle lens and looking back now I suspect this “failure” made me work a bit harder than I had done and shaped the career which was yet to come.  A year later I joined the university, having also taken a summer course as a backup plan, proceeding four years later to a 2.1 hons, albeit even then I was disappointed in not getting a first class.  But again, this possibly a good thing as again it lit a fire in me that saw me focus and quickly progress from a lecturer to a course leader and eventual Head of School in an FE college in only a few years.

    My message to students is therefore to avoid focussing too much on your results, be they good, bad or indifferent.  This isn’t the end, but is but a point in a long life journey which has many twists and turns.  With that in mind either take the opportunity to celebrate, or to reflect and learn, but that’s all it is, a point and in a day or so this point in time will have passed and it will be time to move on and focus on next steps.   You are not defined by the results you achieve, but by what you do next, and the thing you do after that, and after that.

    Good luck, well done no matter what the results, and may the future hold many exciting opportunities and experiences ahead, even if your plans now have to change.

    Anyone for chaos?

    I have recently read Chaos by J. Gleik and it has got me thinking about how chaos theory might be applicable to education.  Now this does remind me of a professional development session some years back delivered by Roy Leighton where he referred to chaos and the butterfly effect, although I cant quite remember the context in which Roy  raised the topic.

    Now before I go any further let me just point out I am no expert of chaos theory, the maths behind it or how it might apply to living world, physics, etc so what I present here are my thoughts based on the limited amount I have read and how I have came to understand it.

    Chaos theory and entropy

    One of key words I use with my technology services team is that of entropy, or the 2nd law of thermodynamics.   For me this is the need for us to constantly expend energy and effort in order to create a stable state and maintain order, where the world around us seeks chaos and disorder.   I make this point to highlight that things can go wrong and inevitably will go wrong, plus that things will change, often at short notice.    We therefore need to be constantly exerting energy, changing our approach and adjusting to try and maintain the stable state we wish.   This stable state might be a great service provided to teachers, a reliable IT infrastructure or excellent teaching and learning.   Either way we are going to have to be constantly putting in effort to achieve the state we wish to achieve and keep things there.

    For me this links a little to chaos, and maybe is extended by the concept of chaos, in that even a stable system can show some unpredictability and variation leading to a constant need to exert effort to address these variations and try and keep the system, education, teaching and learning and technology services, stable.    It also highlights for me that no matter how stable the system is, for example this years autumn term when compared to last years autumn term, there will also be a degree of variability and chaos having an impact.

    Education and data

    It is the use of data in education which is where I think chaos is particularly appropriate.   We seek to us very simplistic models to allow us to compare students, to compare schools and even to compare whole national education systems.    Is their pass rate higher than ours, and is this years pass rate higher than last years rate?     Is the value added calculation for this years set of students greater or lesser than last years, or greater or lesser than other local or competing schools?     The issue with this is that it implies that education is so very simple that it can be so easily measured and compared.    It doesn’t take much thinking to realise the almost infinite number of variables which might have an impact on results, including results for a given school.    Socio-economic factors, local events, school leadership focus, the culture of the school and of the surrounding community, and much, much more all go to impact on results.   Now if we ignore chaos theory we might simply say that the impact of these things might be minor when factored across a whole cohort of students, however the reality is that these factors can grossly change the outcomes.   Chaos theory, or my interpretation of it, shows that small variations can have overall impact rather than being negligible and able to be disregarded.    It may even be that a single event can nudge results significantly positive or negative, with the event itself barely remembered when the results come out.    Basically, our approach to data and to measuring educational outcomes is simple, which is great in terms of people understanding the facts and figures, but is wholly lacking in any real appreciation of the complexity of education, and therefore quite significantly flawed.

    What matters is what we measure?

    And then to make things worse, we have the issue that we often focus on what is easy to measure, so on these simplistic measures, with that then becoming central to our efforts.    So is student exam grades provide a simplistic but easily measurable indicator of learning, we focus on achieving better exam grades when maybe we should be focussing on better ways to measure learning.     Technology for me is having a key impact here as surely we need to ask why it is so important to memorise facts, as students are required to do for exams, when in the real world you can simple Google the information.   As for coursework, the recent growth in generative AI must surely force us to question our approach to coursework.    So, do we need to reconsider what we measure and also how we measure it?

    For me this may be a large part of the issue in that education has changed little in over a century, being still largely built on classroom of students sat in front of a teacher, tests, coursework and homework, while the world has changed significantly over the same period and even over shorter periods.   Just consider technology and the impact social media has had over 20 years, or the impact of generative AI which has happened in the last 3 years, post ChatGPTs public release.   The world is moving fast, the world is inherently chaotic, and if we look specifically at education, it involves groups of human beings in the students and teachers, which add yet many more variables to the mix.

    Concluison

    As humans we like simple narratives such as “GCSE grades have fallen again”.    But this fails to capture the complexities and variables which feed into education, into teaching and learning, and eventually into the simple measure, exam results, which are often used to measure the success, or failure, or education systems, schools and even individual students.   The world however isn’t simple and is subject to entropy and a bit of chaos.   I remember reading something on statistics which suggested as we add further variables our ability to measure and predict goes exponentially downwards.    So, if we consider education and the variables as they relate to individual students, teachers, school contexts, parents, and much more, our ability to accurately measure must be very small indeed. 

    So, the question is, how do we better deal with chaos and the pace of change within the world when looking at education?      I suspect the answer lies in decentralising to allow for local needs to be addressed, on trust and on transparency to reduce the importance of centralised measures, and on a move to a more individualised rather than industrialised education system.   Easy said, although am not so sure its as easy to implement and achieve.