Digital and technology

Teaching tweens & teens: Ewan McIntosh

Ewan-2 Teachers are doing too much planning and could be making lessons more exciting and effective by using free technology, Ewan McIntosh tells Emma Blee.

“Authenticity in learning, whether or not it uses technology, is probably the biggest challenge we have,” says Ewan McIntosh.

Speaking at agendaNi’s seminar on ICT and education, he claimed that what is authentic for a teacher is all too often totally unauthentic for a teenager, a ‘tween’ (children aged 9-12) or a child in primary school.

McIntosh’s lament is that many schools around the world continue to block access to social media sites like facebook and YouTube, but these are the places that most children tune into for information.

“By and large we turn off the web. I don’t know one school system in the world that has got it right yet. YouTube, incidentally, is the second biggest search engine in the world and around 80 per cent of teenagers in Britain use YouTube as a search engine.”

He adds: “When you block YouTube in schools, not only are you preventing your educators from being able to use archive footage, wonderful explanations of events going on in the world here and now. You are also stopping them from being able to simply search what they are looking for.”

Wrong attitude

A former French and German teacher, from Edinburgh, McIntosh’s company NoTosh now advises governments, public service corporations and private companies on how new technologies can be used to help improve learning and knowledge management.

When it comes to IT and technology in schools, most education policies strive for the bare minimum and this is the wrong attitude, he says. He argues that policy-makers should be looking at how they can harness the digital equipment most children already have rather than spending money on expensive and ineffective IT equipment and programmes.

“We should be using mobile devices that kids have in their pockets, using video games and consoles that they have at home. Bringing a Nintendo Wii into a classroom, for example, and using an African safari game allows you a wonderful stimulus to get going on an Africa project at primary school.

“Instead we spend money we don’t have on buying laptops for students, whilst neglecting the millions of pounds worth of equipment they have in their schoolbags.”

Educational software purchased by schools isn’t as appealing to children as it doesn’t have the same amount of money spent on it that commercial games do, he contends. “Far too many companies are making Safe Tube or Teacher Tube. You don’t want that. You want YouTube so that kids can learn the skills they need for when they leave school.”

Missing out

Many schools are missing out on opportunities to engage with parents, grandparents and pupils, says McIntosh. He believes teachers should not be afraid to use free social networking sites such as facebook to their advantage: “At the moment, facebook is the virtual web environment everyone is on. Most parents are on facebook and if a post pops up from school they are much more likely to see it and engage with it.”

One of the biggest downfalls in education, he says, is that teachers spend too much time planning and don’t invest enough time in creating genuinely new resources.

“A lot of the teachers I work with actually do the learning for the youngsters. They are up at night in their own homes, instead of being with their families. Students are there to discover and research problems and create ideas around them and then stereotype or produce the resource that they want to make.”

He says he is “fed up with seeing teachers tiring themselves out” and doing all the work, when students should be doing it.

Ewan-McIntosh Game Boy generation

Taking part in projects, playing games and processing information should be as important as research, says McIntosh. “It helps you keep track and gather more of the research that you are doing. It helps you make sense of an increasingly complex wealth of information, quicker and in more visual terms. But importantly, it allows you to try more ideas out quicker.”

While most parents are of the ‘Game Boy generation’, he recognises that some may have concerns about the use of technology and social networking at school. But he thinks that the only way to get around this is by having a conversation.

“I don’t see enough parents going into enough schools to talk about learning, let alone talk about technology. Those conversations have to happen and out of those conversations you would find common sense. Where you don’t have common sense because people don’t have the information, you might have to go and provide it.”

A former digital commissioner for Northern Ireland, it was McIntosh’s job to re-invent how public service media was delivered. In practice, that meant he had to sift through a host of online ideas that people pitched to him, and support a select few.

Improvements

He says major improvements could be made in the IT sector here: “In digital, you’ve not got enough great programmers compare to, say Edinburgh. You will never have enough people, as far as I’m concerned, in those industries.”

In his opinion, many young programmers in the province have a “distinct lack of ambition”. He says that in his experience, “what they wanted to produce was made in Northern Ireland, for Northern Ireland”.

“My reaction was that you could make it in Northern Ireland but it’s got to work globally. That’s an attitudinal thing that you can change overnight by getting the right schooling,” he comments.

Mobile-minded children

81% of pupils have a mobile phone

64% have an Nintendo DS

57% have a laptop

42% have an iPod nano

32% have a portable DVD player

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