“Please Sir, May I Have Some Digital Skills”?
“A one-man war against decay, I enjoy life the hard way” Is anybody familiar with Salford's John Cooper Clarke’s poem “Heath Fanatic? Well, I feel like it’s been a one-man war that I have been fighting for around 7 years now. Stuck right on the front line, hoping somebody would join me, hoping that the digital army of Greater Manchester would at least show some interest. But alas no....
The Forgotten Digital Generation
Who is the forgotten digital generation? Older people perhaps, young adults maybe, or possibly the unemployed? All of these fit the bill and all would benefit by having better digital skills. Skills that would enable them to be better suited to employer's requirements, or help them engage in online activity such as shopping, keeping in touch with friends or family and access to online services.
So, back to the forgotten digital generation, who are they? - well it may come as some surprise that it's actually children; namely primary school children. WHAT!!, I hear you cry, what a pile of old rubbish. The generation that is glued to mobile phones and tablets and has more or less grown up with the internet - how can this be possible?
After working in business IT for over 25 years, including supporting education, I decided it was time for a change. Working in schools gave me a great opportunity to study, first-hand, how primary school children were taught ICT, what was covered and what, if anything, would benefit them in the future.
I had been using Google Cloud for a number of years, having moved most of my IT support documents up to the cloud more or less when Google Docs was introduced in 2006. For me it was a real game changer, I didn't have to worry about backups, it was virus free and always up to date. Hassle free computing that I could access anytime, anywhere on almost any internet connected device. It was a complete revelation!
I have a presentation that I use when I’m doing training or introducing cloud computing into a new school. One slide is called “School IT always moving up, always moving forward?”. It shows how schools have upgraded all sorts of IT equipment over the years, but in fact, schools have not really changed the way they access and use IT since the first networks were first rolled out in around 1995. Wouldn't it be great if we could introduce a completely new way of working, a system that was free, a system that didn't need backing up and was always up to date and a system that could be accessed anytime anyplace on almost any device - exactly the thing I have been doing since 2006.
So, that is what I did and I rolled out my first Google G-Suite school. Not easy to do and lots of mistakes to learn from, but one thing soon became very clear. This system allowed children to work in a way that was totally impossible a few years ago, and it allowed them the freedom to access a lot of online apps and other cloud based resources via their Google accounts.
I developed lessons that allowed children to become quickly engaged and made sure it was bolted into the current curriculum and topic work. I used a cross platform curriculum such as coding and collecting and analysing data, but in a very fun way and in a way that children really enjoyed.
It’s Just A Dream
Wow!!, wouldn’t be fantastic if it was possible to roll this cloud based system to primary schools throughout Greater Manchester. Just think what that would do for the digital divide and the North / South skills gap. Giving children access to a 21st-century learning platform and skills they could use all their lives. Unfortunately, that's where this story goes from bad to worse.
I have established two Digital Skills centres, these are schools where cloud computing has really taken off and has made a massive difference to the way children work and more importantly, the skills children leave with. One is at Aldwyn Primary School in Tameside, the other is at Tithe Barn Primary in Stockport.
The plan, long before the current Covid-19 lockdown, was to provide free training to other primary schools and establish cluster schools that were also keen to get children working on a 21st century learning platform and give them much needed digital skills. Link to the website below.
“Like Tumbleweed Blowing Across the Digital Desert of Greater Manchester”
At Tithe Barn Primary we thought it would be a great idea to get the digital community of Manchester interested so they could support and promote our plans, aims and ideas. So, the children produced handwritten letters and posted them to the people or companies who should have really taken an interest. Disappointingly, there was zero response to all our letters, not even one reply or acknowledgement.
Covid-19 Changes Everything, The DfE And Free IT Kit.
Covid-19 was a real game changer in so many ways. With the forced closure of schools, children were suddenly expected to continue their education at home. Early on it became clear that many schools, in the year 2020, were just not equipped to allow children to continue working at home. The best they could do is provide a few links on the school website. Not the case for schools using G-Suite, they had access to the fantastic Google Classroom, so could set and mark work as normal. They could even hold video classes if they wanted to.
Panic from the Department of Education (DfE), who have had their feet firmly parked in 1985, so comes the directive that all schools will have to move to a free cloud based learning platform - either Google (G-Suite) or Office 365. They also offered free IT equipment and even a 4 or 5G internet connection for the most deprived children. This ties in with The Greater Manchester Tech Fund, which will reach and support the most vulnerable young people and their families across the region.
After spending 7 years trying to get schools interested in using cloud based learning whilst seeing what the benefits are at schools that had already adopted it I can't help but feel the current incentive is 5 years too late. What really astonished me was Greater Manchester digital hierarchy which appeared not to be interested in making sure primary school children start to develop and build their digital skills from an early age along with reading, writing and arithmetic.
Missed Chances And The North / Skills Gap
I worked on a project a couple of years ago with children at Aldwyn Primary School to set up a virtual small startup company with the aim of producing an e-safety website. We ran it like a small business and the end result was not only a website but a group of primary school children who had 6 to 8 of the top ten skills employers are looking for in 2020/21. That’s what working from the cloud can do. The link to this website is below...also take a look at the “Our Team” page and read how we managed to pull this off.
John Goodier
