![]() ![]() Since then, some 2.4 million new user accounts have been created for the two platforms. More than 6,500 primary and secondary schools in England – over a quarter of the total – signed up. In late April, it announced a scheme to provide free technical support and training in Google and Microsoft education digital tools. The government has helped facilitate Big Tech’s expansion in education. Most children have the tech in some form, but it might be using Dad’s mobile phone, or a flatscreen TV Karen Giles, school head In the first month of the pandemic, the number of active users of Google Classroom doubled to 100 million. Pre-Covid, Google had already gained a dominant position in many schools by providing its edtech tools free or at low cost. In the summer the school began transitioning to Google Classroom, as a more interactive remote learning tool, and set up face-to-face lessons via Google Meet for those unable to return or self-isolating. “We were putting work on ClassDojo but the children couldn’t send me back the work, so they weren’t getting the feedback they need,” says Alexander, who was teaching year four pupils at Barham last spring. It didn’t take long for problems to emerge. For some this meant simply uploading links to worksheets to school websites, while others gave live lessons via video conferencing. Others say schools are ill-equipped to protect their pupils’ data, and that the growing role of commercial interests both within state education and through a booming direct-to-consumer edtech market amounts to privatisation by stealth.Īt the end of March, with such short notice of the shutdown, most UK schools turned to their existing digital tools to help their pupils continue learning. Sceptics, however, warn that a “digital divide” further widens existing attainment gaps and inequalities faced by disadvantaged children. The app was founded by a game developer and a teacher and is used in 95% of elementary and middle schools in the United States and in another 180 countries. ![]() In May, New York governor Andrew Cuomo publicly questioned why physical classrooms still exist at all, as he announced that former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Bill Gates would help rethink education in the state.Ī screenshot from a ClassDojo mindfulness module. Andreas Schleicher, head of education at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), has described the pandemic as creating “a great moment” for learning. And now, with UK schools having closed to the majority of pupils again on 5 January, teachers are back to providing mostly remote lessons.įor some, the resulting global edtech boom is long overdue. ![]() By April, the pandemic had forced almost 1.6 billion children and students out of their schools and universities worldwide, putting many of their teachers on a steep edtech learning curve. “Every single parent had to be on there so we could communicate with them and get work to the children.”Įnsuring they could distribute work remotely was just the first of many challenges staff at Barham faced as they turned towards greater reliance on education technology, or edtech, in response to Covid-19. “We decided ClassDojo was a non-negotiable,” says Laura Alexander, a senior leader at the school and nursery attended by 930 children aged three to 11 in Wembley, London. ![]()
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