Using EdTech to shape your curriculum roadmap

When I was set the challenge around six months ago to ‘create a curriculum where the use of educational technology is part of the culture of the school’, it seemed like a daunting task. Where to begin? What needs to be included? What are we doing well and what needs to be ditched? Six months later and, whilst the new curriculum is not cracked, it is well underway and the journey ahead is a really exciting one.

At a leadership level, we started by looking at the current provision for the use of technology across the school. Under this umbrella, we reviewed our understanding of what our vision and values were in addition to our capacity to improve. It was clear that we were in the fortunate position that EdTech was evident in the majority of classrooms, but that this was possibly inconsistent along with an unclear vision or digital strategy. 

After exploring what our values are as a school, we pinned these down to create a vision that summarised all of these points. We came up with “Using technology to remove barriers to learning and open additional doors of opportunity”. As leaders, we felt that this encompassed our belief that through the use of technology, we can break down many barriers to learning in addition to how our learners could creatively work towards innovative uses of technology. 

Once we were all clear about our EdTech vision, we set about creating some SMART goals for what change would look like in six months, 12 months, and two years’ time. In order to create a cultural shift, we knew that it would not be a quick task! Along with a working party made of volunteer teachers from across the school, I mapped out a professional development plan which put a curriculum review at the heart of kickstarting this vision.

Creating a curriculum map was as much about entitlement as it was about what we wanted the children to cover. For me, this was really important. It was not just about curriculum objective coverage; instead, I wanted children to leave a year group thinking “Wow, I covered xxxx this year” or “I can not wait to use xxxx next year”. 

Through the use of the teachcomputing.org and commonsense.org, we already had a foundation of expertise – it ensured full coverage of the curriculum, whilst supporting less-confident teachers. These websites are just two examples of many websites that I placed onto our skeleton curriculum map. Ultimately, I wanted to provide teachers with a framework and to scaffold them through the Computing curriculum, but also to give them some flexibility to include what interests them.

Personally, I found the generation of the curriculum roadmap really exciting, although it was also the most challenging task too. Whilst looking for progression, I needed to balance up the resources that we had access to and to explore future investment requirements. Early on, we had identified that we had the willingness of staff and a good capacity to improve, yet we also knew that the knowledge and skills of staff were inconsistent. In addition to the working party, which is made up of other like-minded staff who already have an interest in technology, we celebrated staff who had gone the extra mile with their own CPD. This included, but not limited to: Apple Teachers, Seesaw Ambassadors, Microsoft Innovators, and Google Educators. It actually became quite competitive to get whole year groups to achieve certain accolades!

I felt that whilst this helped us to ensure the Computing curriculum was being covered, it did not necessarily help us to embed technology and the culture of technology in purposeful day to day practice. For this, I looked to the ‘Everyone Can Create’ series of Apple Education ebooks. As a 1:1 iPad school, we had the tools in place but potentially not always the skillset that we wanted. I found that these free ebooks were easily accessible by even the most tech-phobic teachers. It allows them to plan purposeful links across their curriculum, using many free apps that the children already had access to. 

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It might be worth sharing why we use iPads:

iPad Quality – iPads are built to last. In addition to the design and use of Apple Pencil, the iPad is a more user-friendly experience. Very young children can soon grasp concepts that are transferable between apps. For example, using the ‘+’ command in Pages offers the user the same functionality as ‘+’ in Numbers or Keynote, making the user experience easy and efficient. In addition to this usability, through the use of iCloud this is a more stable and secure platform for students to save their work. The lifespan of an iPad is typically 5-6 years, whilst the lifespan of an Android device can be around 3 years. In addition, Apple’s software updates will run for a number of years before they freeze updates on older devices.

Apple Classroom / Schoolwork Apps – Teachers have benefited from deploying Apple Classroom in their own classrooms as this monitors the students’ use of the device. Teachers can easily AirDrop resources to the children, screen share and remotely lock iPads. This has supported parents too in ensuring that children are on task and working efficiently. If needed, teachers can lock students on to a certain website or app and the children can only come off of that site with the teacher’s permission.

App Store – Apple has a far greater range of educational apps, all of which have to be approved in the App Store. The Apple App Store is also more attractive to software developers, meaning that the number will continue to grow with major apps that are not always available on the Google Play Store.

Powerful native (free) apps – Teachers have benefited from powerful, free apps like Numbers, Pages and Keynote. Skills of using these are easily transferable. In addition to these apps, powerful apps like GrarageBand, Clips and iMovie are exclusively on the iPad. At Kings’, the use of these apps is commonplace across all subjects. For the computing curriculum, ‘Swift Playgrounds’ helps students in Year 5 and above to learn to code. All of these apps are supported with Apple Education eBooks like ‘Everyone Can Create’ and ‘Everyone Can Code’ to ensure teachers are able to make these links between apps and subjects creatively.

Apple Teacher – free CPD for teachers using either iPads or Macbooks. The site is continually updated so teachers can benefit from resource sharing ideas as well as continued professional development.

Privacy and Security – whilst Chromebooks and Android devices release regular security updates, Apple will always have the advantage when it comes to security and privacy settings. The Chrome browser is open to attacks. By using an iPad, this is overcome in many ways by using the App Store and Apple’s reliance in using quality approved apps. Additional security settings allow you to maintain files and folders without the need for additional settings.

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Whilst we are only at the beginning of this journey, I know we have a long way to go before we have a ‘culture’ that is consistent and sustained. As we continue to explore AR/VR in the classroom, we continually find ourselves falling back on the many free resources, websites and ebooks that support our teachers to achieve our vision statement. We even found ourselves using EdTech to remove our own barriers to the computing curriculum, whilst the ‘doors of opportunity’ not only benefited the children’s learning, but the skillsets of the teachers too. The road is long, but we have our roadmap, enthusiastic teachers and the world of technology to explore.

Got a curriculum tool you’d like to add? List it here!

Russell Smart
Russell is the Senior Leader for Educational Technology Integration for Kings’ Education and Assistant Headteacher at Kings’ School Al Barsha. He has been teaching in Dubai for nine years. Russell has always had an interest in technology, right from a young age and this has been a key feature of his practice over the past sixteen years.
@rustysmart