Educator insight: Clay Johnson & Ross Cundy, University of the West of England

Many thanks to Clay and Ross for their thoughts on EdTech and its implementation and use.

This is the full text from an interview that appeared in our schools newsletter of 27 July 2023.

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Clay Johnson (on the left above) works within the University of the West of England’s Digital Learning Service as a Senior Learning Technologist. For almost 20 years, he has been involved in Computer Science and Digital Education at Primary, Secondary, Further and now Higher Education level.

Ross Cundy is a Senior Technical Instructor in Science Education at UWE, where he supports others in finding their own digital solutions. He is a strong advocate for the use of digital tools in enhancing learner engagement.

1. Delivering improvement

Follow the pedagogy. Start with a part of your practice that is not having the
intended impact on your learners. Reflect on the learning technique that might best unlock this deficit and try to identify why your practice isn’t gaining the traction you need. Only then should you investigate a tech solution.

Use data-driven decision making. Always follow the data and make the effort to collect it in-house to support or refute a broader claim. It is very tempting to follow market trends, but what might work elsewhere might not work for you in the same way, or at all.

Develop an adoption strategy. Everyone adopts, or rejects, new ideas or tools on their own terms and at their own pace. Planning for this will help increase the rate by which staff and students adopt the new technology, process, or protocol

2. Test and trial

Test your tech. Don’t spend any money before having a “play” with a low stakes version of your idea / solution. Spending money without a clear understanding of what you “need” creates costly, unused, white elephants.

Bigger is not always better. Don’t think you can’t achieve big outcomes without big tech – less can sometimes be more. Low tech solutions aren’t just a segue into bigger EdTech solutions, they can sometimes better meet a need.

Think about your staff. Always consider the impact of any changes on your staff. Remember we hire them to be expert teachers, not expert technologists.

3. Embedding AI

Developing provision around AI deployment, its use, and implications, is a primary focus for us and many other universities. However, regardless of the nature of the technology, all organisations should strive towards developing a framework that can allow for easy testing and seamless integration of any digital technology.

Of course, there remain key issues to consider – finance, adoption, training, support, etc. But, working towards positioning your organisation to respond to change must be a key objective of any road mapping exercise, especially if you want to excel at pivoting to new innovations.

4. Delivering digital transformation

Since March 2020, the way we live, work, and play has fundamentally changed. The pandemic threw any sense of normalcy out of almost every sphere of society. Considering
this, the case for digital transformation has never been more urgent. This urgency has set
growth, within the tech industry, ablaze with new technology outputs changing more in the
past twelve months than they have in the last twelve years. This global boost in
technological development presents an opportunity, particularly within education where traditionalist mindsets can be prone to follow trends set elsewhere.

Here at UWE, by harnessing the power of digital technology we have been better able to
connect with innovations in other sectors. By diversifying our circle of influence, we have
been better able to build organisational resilience. More especially, by capitalising on the
leap forward we made in the pivot to online during the pandemic, we have made
concerted efforts to further developing the creativity and adaptability of both our students
and staff.  

Rodgers’ Diffusion of Innovations speaks to the role innovators and early adopters can play
in enhancing collective buy-in from staff. A strategy that has worked for us has been the
formation of a centrally managed service which we use as a catalyst for encouraging and
showcasing teaching and learning best practices across the university. By using our
organisation’s values as a moral compass, what we have focused on is shining the
proverbial light on where these values are already being lived. Shared values ultimately
equate to a shared sense of belonging and ownership. Using this to stoke and steer the
manifestation of our organisational vision has been our primary focus, post-COVID. We
argue that ambition is innate in all individuals here at UWE, students and staff alike. Our
role then as leaders, is to actively encourage and support this as doing so invariably leads to a more collaborative environment. If we operate under the principles of true non-judgemental collaboration, then we create a more inclusive environment. The knock-on effect is such that inclusivity, in the presence of creativity and curiosity, inevitably breeds the type of innovation that underpins our values. And where there is innovation, there exists fertile grounds for rapid and sustained digital transformation.   

Our advice then, is to start small and build strong foundations of good practice. Remember,
part of our role as education technologists is to ensure we only ever advocate or integrate
the use of technology where there is a benefit to learning outcomes and, or the student
experience. But we must acknowledge, most of our teacher colleagues do not have the time and rightly cannot see the benefit in the use of technology for technology’s sake. We must not expect this of them.

🎒 Clay and Ross’ EdTech toolkit…

• Biteable: Fantastic, relatively low-cost, online platform for your staff or students to create high-value video assets for a wide range of use-cases. We use this to develop internal and external marketing videos. 
• Vivi: We are trialling this at the moment and it looks good. The Vivi box is a low-
  cost alternative to Promethean or Smart boards. It can serve as both a wireless
  screen mirroring and digital signage tool. It supports both hybrid and blended
  models too. The best bit is that it is designed for education by educators.  
• Microsoft 365: Apologies for including one of the giants here, but there are so
  many new tools released from MS over the last 18 months that they do deserve a
  shoutout. Worthy mentions include Designer, Viva Goals and Copilot. Using 365,
  we are currently looking to towards developing a VLX for our students – this so
  we can move away from conventional VLEs.  
• Flip: This is a free social learning app where educators create safe, online groups for students to express their ideas asynchronously in short video, text, and audio messages. The key element here is the issue of safeguarding – students can only ever download their own videos and live script checking ensures bullying and offensive text is addressed in real-time. 
• Pabbly Connect: As an alternative to MS Power Automate, Pabbly allows you to
  connect multiple applications and automate almost any task. Zapier is another
  option. 
• Da Vinci Resolve 18: Is probably the best free alternative to Adobe Rush and
  Premiere. With it you can edit and finish up to 60 fps in resolutions as high as
  Ultra HD 3840 x 2160. The learning curve is much smaller than other
  professional video editors.  
• Tiny Wow: Has an insane list of free productivity tools, including AI augmented
  ones, to tackle a wide array of education-related tasks. Whether its removing the
  background from an image, splitting a pdf into multiple pages, converting an
  image to text, and essay writing, there is a free tool for you in Tiny Wow. 
• Jasper AI: A relatively low-cost tool for generating, creating, and repurposing
  content for marketing content creation around your brand at both a micro and
  macro organisational level.  
• ZeroGPT: Kids as young as 8, are using ChatGPT to help with their schoolwork.
  In fact company directors, and other executive staff too, have also become
  regular users of generative AI. One of the best AI text detector tools
  available, ZeroGPT’s algorithm has a claimed accuracy rate of text detection up
  to 98%.  
• AI Text Converter: is a free online tool that easily converts ChatGPT content to
  human-like content without changing its meaning. Users can simply copy and
  paste their AI content in the box, click convert, sit back and watch your AI content
  convert into 100% human form. A word of caution: the use language is, in a non-
  AI generated word, poor.