Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Speaker A: Many teachers believe or are led to believe that every technology is good technology, which is simply not true.
It's about knowing why you use the tool, what is the problem that I want to solve in my classroom and then think about what tool can I use and what with what criteria am I going to use in order to evaluate this tool.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: If we're going to make the best use of these digital tools, teachers will have to be building more confidence in the various different tools and what works and what doesn't and which ones are good ones to use and which ones are maybe oversold and they don't want to touch them. Some are particularly good for the learning and some are good for connecting with the students.
[00:00:50] Speaker A: The tool does not lead to learning. It is the task that is created, structured around the tool.
[00:01:01] Speaker B: And so you meet a group of very enthusiastic people who've been given some funding and they've set up a business and they're convinced they're going to crack education and solve language learning and when you get down to it, and very intelligent, very well meaning, but just no pedagogy or no real understanding of how learning works.
[00:01:31] Speaker C: Welcome back to the second episode. Thank you so much. What we're going to look at now is much more about a pedagogy led approach to technology.
We often talk about that, that it's that the pedagogy should lead, not the technology, but want to dig into really what we mean by that when we talk about that.
I mean, where should we. We could start with positive examples or think of negative examples. Perhaps, you know, things where it hasn't been led by the pedagogy but been led by something else.
Do you want to throw in any examples to get us kind of feeling this area?
[00:02:13] Speaker A: Where do I begin?
[00:02:16] Speaker C: Have you seen times when technology has not been used in a particular.
[00:02:20] Speaker A: Well, yeah, yeah, unfortunately, many times. Many times.
I mean, just thinking about it, in all the enthusiasm around what technology can do in education, there is something that we tend to overlook. Many teachers believe or are led to believe that every technology is good technology, which is simply not true.
Technology can be used in very innovative ways and transform what we do and enable new things, but it has an equal potential to be used in very traditional behavioristic ways that simply replicate the same things that we used to do, only with technology.
And yeah, there are many examples. The teacher stands in front of the classroom teaching from an interactive whiteboard, a teacher centered lesson.
Students doing exercise after exercise of multiple choice and gap fill activities or kahoot style tools on their computers.
[00:03:33] Speaker C: Right.
[00:03:34] Speaker A: Students writing a blog post that nobody reads. But if you are to get your students to write a blog, then you want to share it, you know, to extend the audience and get other people or the classmates to comment.
[00:03:51] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:03:52] Speaker A: Or I mean we in online education, recording our lectures.
[00:03:58] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:03:59] Speaker A: Putting them online and call this the flipped classroom. I mean none of this is innovative. It is technology that is used to replicate what we have always been doing, only digital. And then we need to ask, does it add value really?
[00:04:19] Speaker C: So those are kind of missed opportunities for people.
[00:04:23] Speaker B: One part of my role is I often get involved in mentoring, guiding smaller startups, startups in the education learning area sector.
And so you meet a group of very enthusiastic people who've been given some funding and they've set up a business and they're convinced they're going to crack education and solve language learning. And when you get down to it, and very intelligent, very well meaning, but just no pedagogy or no real understanding of how learning works. And so it sort of has a very mechanical, maybe you were behavioristic idea about learning that there's a, it's a sort of tap full of facts that you need to pour in and then test until you get it and then you get the next facts and maybe slightly personalized branching. So I send you both down the paths that you're more likely to help you succeed. But it's a sort of the idea that there's a production line of information that I'm trying to cram into your head and that's the problem, is to optimize the right bit of information at the right time. And that's such a, such a missed opportunity for all the amazing ways you can help people engage with new information and use it and sort of take it from learning to using and producing.
And so yeah, I have a recurring pattern of meeting well meaning people who just haven't understood how the learning part works and have sort of got a much more simplistic view about it.
[00:05:44] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:05:44] Speaker B: And that still continues to this day. I'm afraid it's not.
[00:05:48] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I fully agree. Well, meaning people, I mean the intention is good, but it is the pedagogy perhaps.
[00:05:58] Speaker B: But you mentioned Kahoot for example, and I love Kahoot. I think it's great, I think it's. But it's great because you can very quickly pull a whole group of people together for a sort of quick snapshot of what you know, it doesn't have to be a test, it can just be a jokey, playful way of Aligning everybody and understanding what this. What this group of people think at the moment and then what we should do next based on that group. And so it's a really powerful tool. But if that's the entire way you teach, it's super shallow and superficial because you can only teach in things that are single clicks or single words. You can't do anything deeper. And so that's a great example of. It's one tool, but it can be used in totally different. It's unfair to blame the tool because actually it's how it's used. It can be really powerful or quite shallow.
[00:06:45] Speaker A: Absolutely. It's about knowing why you use the tool because it does have its place in the classroom. I'm not a very big fan of these kind of tools, but I understand that there is a place in the classroom.
But using it to. I've heard, for example, I use it to wow the students to make teaching less boring.
And yeah, I understand it. I mean, if this is your reason, perhaps at the end of the lesson for this wow factor. But we cannot assume that all students want to learn this way.
For some students, this is stressful. I know that this is, this gamification. I mean, young students, teenagers, they are used to, you know, playing games, etc. But we cannot assume that all students like that. And also, it is a matter of time, you know, getting the answer, the correct answer quickly. Yeah, does this.
What does this say about learning? How do we measure learning there? So it does have a place, but I would say in moderation.
So if you use kahoot every time, it's like assuming that all students want to learn this way. And for some students, it is stressful.
[00:08:11] Speaker B: When I think about the language learning classrooms I've been in as a student that were the most interesting, every session was kind of different. Sometimes it was from a clear textbook that we were working through. Sometimes it was a word game. Sometimes we were looking at current politics and we would watch a video in German and trying to make sense of what's going on.
And that's part of the sort of the art of being a great teacher is mixing things up like that. Sometimes you do it because it's the most efficient way to learn, and sometimes you do it because you realize you learners just need to change gear a bit. And I think some of the digital pedagogies fall into that category, that some are particularly good for the learning and some are good for connecting with the students, even though the learning might be a bit shallower. So you might choose to use TikTok, not that you think it's actually better, but because there's Some really interesting TikTok people doing language stuff and you can do a session on it.
[00:09:08] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:09:09] Speaker B: So I like that. That sort of hybrid mix that teachers would do quite naturally. Yeah. But sometimes sort of systems, tech systems lose sight of entirely. They get over focused on. On just one narrower.
[00:09:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:09:19] Speaker C: They want to scale things, you know, from one particular model. And, and I think that's when we talk about, when you talk about startups and people who come from a tech background. Not really understanding the pedagogy kind of digging into that a bit more. I was reflecting when you're speaking there that about knowledge that for a lot of people they think of education as acquiring knowledge and language particularly has a very strong balance with skills development. So there is knowledge, you have to learn things and. But you also have to develop the skill, the fluency, the ability to draw on it when you need to. And then also there's that social part which is making it meaningful.
So you're not just kind of doing things, you're actually trying to create meaning and interact with other people. So there's so many dimensions there. And I think that's what means, that's what makes a single solution not work.
That art of the teacher is saying, okay, now we're focusing more on meaning. Now we're focusing more on fluency. Now we're focusing on accuracy.
[00:10:26] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:10:27] Speaker C: And that's what's quite difficult to replicate with a single digital tool.
[00:10:33] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
[00:10:36] Speaker B: Which I guess is why. Why part of the sort of this is a pedagogy led approach.
Why we thinking about a pedagogically led and if we're going to make the best use of these digital tools as teachers will have to be building more confidence in the various different tools and what works and what doesn't and which ones are good ones to use and which ones are maybe oversold and they don' Want to touch them and having their own position evolving position that I think that's probably a skill set we need. Everybody needs to be working on.
[00:11:08] Speaker C: Yeah, maybe that, maybe that's really what we're thinking about now is how. How do you think of the different activities that you need to make happen for. For the language learning to work and what are the tools that you might draw on for those.
So for example, you might think one of my tasks is for students to that input stage to see the language being used in a meaningful way.
And then you're thinking well what's A tool that would be good for that.
And again, apologies, my memory, I've forgotten the name of the tool, but there's a really nice tool out there which you put in a word or a phrase and it picks out clips from YouTube and other things.
[00:11:53] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Of that in use. Yes, yes, yeah, yeah.
[00:11:55] Speaker C: And in real life. And, and it's. It's fantastic. The only problem is the free version of it has no child filter on it.
[00:12:04] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:12:04] Speaker C: So you get really adult type.
[00:12:09] Speaker B: Innocent words can take you down dark paths.
[00:12:11] Speaker C: That's right. So you have to be careful. You have to pay for the. For the version which has the children's, you know, filter on it.
But it is brilliant in terms of giving you meaningful input, which is one of your tasks as a teacher.
[00:12:25] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I liked what you said, Ben, about starting from the aim, from your pedagogical aim.
Starting from where you want to go or starting from the problem. Because sometimes with technology we have an aim in our mind, but because technology enables and may enable things that we can't even imagine.
[00:12:51] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:12:52] Speaker A: Start from the problem. What is the problem that I want to solve in my classroom? And then think about what tool can I use and what criteria am I going to use in order to evaluate this tool?
These are the decisions that teachers need to make. They don't need to know 100 tools because tools change all the time.
So you know, 100 tools now, but, you know, in six months there will be more and more. And then students get in this vicious circle trying to catch up and they feel exhausted.
They say we can't catch up with so many technologies.
[00:13:36] Speaker B: Maybe it's the teachers that are feeling more exhausted. The students might well be several iterations ahead of the teachers.
[00:13:41] Speaker A: As I say students, I meant teachers. Sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I meant teachers, definitely.
[00:13:47] Speaker B: I like the reality check of looking and at resource constraint environments too. So you look at. There's been lots of great examples of SMS and WhatsApp being used to scaffold teaching in Brazil, in South Africa.
And that's a very simplistic tool, but then thinking, okay, how can I use the capabilities in this tool to scaffold my learning? And so there's sort of students taking voice notes or recordings or some very short writing pieces and doing homework. That involves submitting something via WhatsApp and just using, using it to there. The tool itself has got fairly simplistic capabilities, but it's required the teacher to think more expansively about how to make use of that. And some great examples.
[00:14:34] Speaker A: Hi there, Sophia. Here we'll get back to the conversation shortly, but if you're finding this discussion useful, you might want to explore these ideas further in Optimization. Oxford University Press's new position paper on digital pedagogy. It looks at what it really means to use digital tools in a reflective, intentional way, where pedagogy leads, the choices we make, and the technology follows. The paper goes into detail on how digital tools can enhance learning, but also how they reshape the relationship between teachers and learners.
And it encourages us to pause, ask key pedagogical questions, and evaluate tools based on how they support meaningful learning rather than how new or exciting they are. You'll also find practical guidance on the opportunities and risks involved, along with ideas for implementing digital pedagogy in ways that are purposeful, inclusive, and adaptable. You can download the full paper using the link in the description. Thank you.
[00:15:45] Speaker C: I'm thinking of situations where you have seen technology address a pedagogical need.
So we were talking about kind of meaningful input.
We might have something around fluency, wanting to develop fluency. So that's our goal.
A student need. They could. They can do something with accuracy, but they can't do it in real time. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, are there tools that we might use in order to address that particular need?
I don't know. In your experience, have you.
[00:16:22] Speaker A: I mean, the latest tools that we can use is AI, and it can be a great tool to help students to develop fluency.
But there is a misconception here, and this takes us back with, to what you said previously, that when we start with a tool and what this tool can do, and we don't think about the pedagogy and how to set up the activity, because it is the activity, it is the pedagogy that will take the student to fluency.
To fluency development. So when we start with a tool and we say that the. This tool with the students can use this tool to develop their fluency and they can use it to practice.
[00:17:11] Speaker C: Are you thinking like a chatbot?
[00:17:13] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Yes, like a chatbot. But this is like assuming that students will be using it in a way that they will learn and that they will keep on using it and not setting up the activity, but using this tool outside the classroom, not necessarily in the classroom, but structuring it. So giving students some options.
So this is the task that I would like you to do. Make sure you speak. This is just an example. And of course, it depends on the context, but speak for five or ten minutes about this topic. And then some training before that. How are you going to use the chatbot to have this kind of conversation and then how are you going to follow up? What are you going to do?
Are you going to frame it a little bit? For example, what I would do is I would ask the student to record a 30 second recording and send it to me, not because I want to control the activity, but as a sense of accountability.
So this is what I did today.
This is one thing I learned and this is one thing that I would like to improve on. This is just an example. And of course, you know, there are so many other ways. But what I'm saying is that the tool does not lead to learning. It is the task that is created and structured around the tool.
[00:18:49] Speaker B: So I agree with your, your summary there. I guess I've got a much more tech positive view of that though. So fluent helping students build fluency is a critical skill.
[00:19:01] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:19:01] Speaker B: And it's one that's hard to deliver on because ideally you're giving continual feedback and they are confident enough to practice in a sort of pseudo real world environment.
And the teacher's got enough time to give everybody the time they need. And the reality is that you don't get enough time, you don't get enough feedback. And that sort of practicing speaking AI is fantastic at that. It's really, really, really good. You can have really authentic seeming audio conversations with the right scaffolding around it, you can get meaningful feedback. So I would agree with your summary point, which is that it needs the task to make sense of it. But some of those tasks are bundled with it. So there's lots of talking chatbot conversational things, some geared around learning.
Babel Duolingo has one kind of Italki Speak.
Quite a few products have them. Some are quite scaffolded, so you're given a conversation to follow. That's very base level. Some are much more open ended where you're literally trying to navigate a conversation and find an answer by talking to some pseudo characters.
Some are sort of very fluently spoken, some less so. But then there's, I've also seen some great tools which are about public speaking and you can, it's just listening to how fluent you are and how many ums and ahs and pauses and how much repetition. So it's not even a language tool, it's just a, it's not a language learning tool, it's just a speaking rehearsal tool. Yeah, and they're great. And it's not, it doesn't give you everything but It's a fantastic way of spending half an hour practicing between lessons.
[00:20:39] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:20:39] Speaker B: Even if the teacher doesn't see it, they'll see the result at the end when you've improved. So, yeah, I'm, I'm very positive about the ability of tech and the AI conversational structure tools to help exactly that sort of fluency and language production.
[00:20:56] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.
[00:20:58] Speaker A: I think that just. What? Totally agree. But for the mainstream learner, how possible is it to do it independently without some kind of structure in the classroom?
Genuine question.
[00:21:16] Speaker B: Honestly, I don't know. Because this is the challenge. Right.
If the classroom is very, very structured at which level you're at and what's appropriate for you to do next, almost certainly you're not serving everybody in the class because some people will be further ahead and some are behind. And if you're only trying to do an activity that's very packaged up at that level, somehow you need to tell the technical tools that that's the level you're at. So either you need to have bought into a system that automatically knows or you need to give the student the help to say I'm B1 or to give it some sort of scaffold.
So it's totally a solvable problem. But that's what we're talking about is how to combine what's happening inside a classroom with these tools, some of which are not designed for class classroom based usage, they're designed for kind of direct consumer individual usage. And part of the pedagogy that we're teasing out here is how you help students transition between those, because you're not going to stop them using those things. So how do you help them to use them in a way that sort of enhances the classroom experience?
[00:22:21] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:22:21] Speaker C: One of the things that came to mind was not so much the advanced AI conversational kind of tool, but in fact just the use of timing, which you can control in a digital world, which you can't. It's more difficult to control in a, in a print world.
[00:22:39] Speaker B: So for example, if you're trying writing.
[00:22:41] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. Or like, I mean, a couple of examples I've seen teachers use. One is reading fluency.
So we often teach students scanning and skimming skills. Yeah, but actually those, those only really make sense if there's a time limit. Because otherwise, you know, you look at all these reading comprehension activities, they're actually about reading for detail in the end because there is unlimited time or almost unlimited time. But if you have a reading text which is going to appear for 10 seconds, then you're then you really have to use your skimming or your scanning skills for that. So that ability to control the timing is really nice or to have it scrolling at a particular SPE and you can increase the speed of scrolling or decrease it.
Nice little things.
[00:23:32] Speaker B: And as far as I understand that can also be a very effective way of assessing language ability is being quite thoughtful about timed activities, timed writing activities, timed reading activities. It's quite a good indicator of language level.
[00:23:45] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:45] Speaker C: And even the we talk about kind of fairly simplistic focus on form, you know, creating maybe a transformation of a sentence or something like that, but doing that at repeating that activity with a time limit. So you've done it once with a focus on accuracy, then you're doing it again, but this time you've only got 30 seconds. You know, those kind of things you can do much more easily in a digital environment.
[00:24:13] Speaker B: That's great.
[00:24:14] Speaker C: Yeah, great.
[00:24:15] Speaker B: Connecting that idea back to an AI related one. I heard some great examples in the British Council were in some, some of the lessons were doing a chained writing activity. You know, the kind of thing you used to do where you write a bit and paper and you hand it over and you write next bit. But they were using AI to help with that. So you would use AI to write a paragraph and then you would give the final sentence of the paragraphs to the next person and they would have to figure out the prompt they would like to use to build another paragraph from that sentence and they'd build their own paragraph and take their final sentence and give it to the next person. And so the art was thinking about the prompt you wanted to use to get a paragraph that would meaningfully connect. And so it was a sort of funny hybrid of the fold up paper activity and using AI and prompting and this chained narrative. And I really like that example.
[00:25:04] Speaker A: Brilliant.
[00:25:06] Speaker C: I love that.
So we're kind of coming to the end of this episode. I think the question that I wanted to ask was.
So if we were looking at a digital tool and the teacher wanted or a school wanted to say, is this pedagogically sound or not?
I kind of got a sense. I think I know what your answer is going to be, but tell me, what would your answer be? How would they go about evaluating whether a particular tool is pedagogically sound or not?
[00:25:37] Speaker A: It is not the tool. Let's begin from that. It is not the tool. It is how you use it.
How you use it and the reason you use it. I mean we can be, you know, teachers teaching classes and we can use the same tool differently and achieve different things for different classes. So it depends why you use it, what is the problem that you want to solve?
Is it fluency? Is it accuracy? Do you want your students to develop their motivation, their writing skills, what is it? And then compare the tools. I mean, if you know two tools, there's never just one tool. There's usually quite a few. So compare them. What does this tool to do? What does this tool can do? And then compare them and decide in terms of your students needs. And also look at the trade offs, because they're always trade offs. I mean, there's always something that you add value, but perhaps there is something that you need to remove or perhaps there's something that you need to train your students to use the tool. We mentioned digital distractions and bringing devices in the classroom, for example. But you cannot start from bringing in devices in the classroom if you haven't trained students to manage their digital distractions. This is just an example of the trade off and how this is part of an ecosystem, if you like. It is not just the technology, it is the whole thing.
[00:27:29] Speaker B: So I definitely agree with you that it's about how you use it and thinking about what's the learning problem you're actively trying to solve and evaluate it against that.
The extra I would add to that is that some of these new tools create new ways of, of creating things of constructivist sort of approach or production. And so I would also be looking at, is it helping teach some of these new ways? Am I learning how to prompt? Yeah, yeah. Am I learning how to do a podcast at the same time, Am I learning how to write a blog?
[00:28:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:28:00] Speaker B: And so I would both what is the learning game you're getting? And be open to it being a thing that you hadn't done last year. But actually as a new emerging skill
[00:28:09] Speaker C: that the students need to build.
[00:28:11] Speaker A: Absolutely. And sometimes they create new ways, more powerful ways that we cannot imagine.
So it is. Yeah, that's a very useful perspective.
[00:28:21] Speaker C: Lovely. Thank you so much. Thank you.
