Creating a digital strategy for learning and teaching
A Digital Strategy should be designed to provide a document which an organisation can use to plan the ways in which it can achieve a vision for how digital technologies can support improved learning outcomes for all those within its community.
The strategy should detail specific, measurable actions and outcomes that the organisation aims to achieve. If it is to be truly effective, these actions and outcomes must be aligned to the overall organisation development plan and should take into account the various resource constraints and opportunities that are available during different times in the strategy life-cycle.
Key to the success of a digital strategy is the full involvement of all members of the organisations community. In particular:
The Senior Leadership Team must support, and review, the strategy development and build important elements of the strategy into the overall organisation development planning process.
Overall the process is pretty simple in structure and becomes very simple over time, although getting it right at the beginning can often take a little time. You certainly produce a better version in Year 3 of the strategy than you did in Year 1 but that’s true for most things.
Developing the strategy requires, as a minimum, the following:
A vision You really need a vision for the future that sets out where the strategy will take you. I will write more about vision development as a create this resource but your vision should be simple, challenging and focused on learning. Visions with too much (arguably any) technology in them may be too restrictive and narrow.
A starting point It may seem strange to suggest this but it is so important that you know where you are starting from. A strategy is designed to take you on a journey towards your vision and you need to understand your progress on that journey if you are to measure success.
Milestones Lets put it this way, even if you have LOTS of money any strategy will be a multi-year programme that will involve several steps along the way. Set yourself some milestones by which you can measure progress.
Outcomes By which I mean REAL OUTCOMES. Outcomes that can be identified and measured, in some way, and that have some impact on the learning journey of those who you are trying to support. I’ve seen too many outcomes in my time that are IMPOSSIBLE to verify. By all means have things like “improves engagement in learning” as a goal but make your outcome more measurable.
Resources The strategy needs to be resourced in order for it to be effective so you need to think about the FULL RANGE of resources needed. This includes things like teacher time for planning and CPD and SLT time to monitor and evaluate. We know no one has any time!! However your strategy should recognise that developments need to have things like this built in.
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Developing the vision is the most important part of creating the overall strategy. Your vision needs to express how you think digital tools will enhance the learning outcomes for everyone across your organisation and is the target that your strategy aims to deliver.
When developing your vision try to do the following:
Long term Think long term. Ideally you should be thinking 10 years ahead. Thinking long term is important since we know that any change within a learning organisation can take a long time to both initiate and embed.
Think learning Think learning not technology. I see too many visions that talk about specific technologies or types of technologies. Big mistake. Technologies come and go but learning needs are independent of technology solutions and focusing on learning needs means that you can always judge the potential usefulness of a digital tools against outcomes that are learning focused (which is what you do best anyway).
Ask Work with all your community to discuss the current barriers to improved learning outcomes. Staff, learners, governors, parents and the wider, local community. Again, try to steer these conversations away from technologies and more to the practicalities around encouraging different types of learning.
Find out Explore what others are thinking using sources on the Internet, other organisations locally and organisations with a similar profile to yours from further afield. Try to focus on ideas from sources that have some relevance to your needs. As much as a high-tech secondary school in China may be doing some cool stuff using mobile devices, how relevant is it to your rural primary school?
Describe Try to describe a day-in-the-life of different members of your community and how learning will be different when your vision is achieved. This can be extended to describing, in a little less detail, how a week, a term and a learning year may be different.
Create Create your initial vision by thinking about all these points of reference and applying your overall understanding of the context of your organisation. Keep it short. It’s a vision, it’s about learning and it is a goal to aim at. It’s not a detailed list of everything you want to do. That comes later.
Remember that this is a long term strategy and it probably will take you many years to even get close to your vision for the use of digital tools within your organisation. So it is important that you find out, record and refer to your starting point on this journey so that you can measure progress and give yourself a pat on the back sometimes.
This is particularly important because the rate of progress will inevitably be different in different years. Changes in staff (you always seem to loose the best ones to other schools!!), changes in funding and changes in organisational priorities will all impact on progress towards your vision. So some years may see very little progress and more ‘consolidation’ and in thise years it is important to be able to look back and reflect on how far you have actually come since you started. (By the way this also works for learning in general and I always found it good to make my learners look back at the progress that they have made).
So what should your baseline data include?
Learning Obviously you need to start with some learning data. Data about high stakes assessments, data about where your learners come from, data about those with specific educational requirements, data about progress being made by learners throughout their enrollment within your organisation and data about where they ended up after they left you. All this you already do and rather than writing it out again just refer to where the data is and highlight specific metrics that you hope will improve over time. It’s important to understand and be able to reflect on this data because sometimes the use of digital tools will have un-looked for impact on aspects of your organisation. For instance, I once introduced a 1:1 project within an inner-CIty primary school which found the school identifying increased literacy standards across the whole cohort involved and very much reduced costs for IT support and repairs. Two areas that they were not focusing on.
Teaching You need to find out how your teachers are ACTUALLY using digital technologies in their teaching. This is key data and staff need to be encouraged to be honest. It can be brutal but it is important. I once went into a school that prided itself on having a fantastic Virtual Learning Environment. I spent the day taking lessons with groups of students in each of the year groups that the school supported. I was observed by the Deputy Head, who was also the lead on the VLE development. Embarrassingly none of the students I taught knew what a VLE was and only a few, once reminded, had ever logged in to the system. At the end of the day the Deputy Head admitted that he had a lot of work to do with his staff. In another school, with Interactive Whiteboards in every class, a survey of teaching methods identified that the boards were only being used to project materials from the teacher laptop for the majority of the timetable, with less than 20% of the staff actually using the ‘interactive’ features and even less involving the learners in using the boards.
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Infrastructure It’s really important that you take a deep dive into your infrastructure because one of the BIG barriers to adoption of new technologies is reliability. Staff and pupils just will not adopt digital tools as effectively as you may wish if they cannot rely on them being available as and when they are needed. So accurately identifying the age and expected working life of everything from a tablet pc to the cables in your network is going to be important right from the start. Often, a first step in an effective strategy is to reduce the number of tools your use and make sure that the infrastructure is rock-solid.
Knowledge, skills,
interests and
understanding Let’s be clear here, this is about identifying members of your community that have knowledge of, skills and an interest in some form of digital technology that may be useful to the successful development of your strategy. This could include staff in the school, learners, governors, parents, staff in local schools and companies that are in your area. You would be surprised how willing many people are to help you out on your journey and let’s face it you can’t do it on your own. I focused on local connections here because it is often these local connections that have a better understanding of the way a technology can be used within your specific context. They will probably already be using the vast array of online information resources and sources of help, which relieves you from having to find these things out in the first place.
Organisation Development
Plan I see so many digital strategies that have little or no links to the current organisation development plan which is a HUGE mistake. Like it or not staff have only so much time to devote to new things, that may be outside their comfort zone, so unless it is directly relevant to their everyday, professional life it will be hard for them to assimilate. So review your current development plan, identify some key drivers to which digital tools may be applied and think about these when you are developing your strategy.
Finance Finance should play no part in the development of your long term vision. However, it MUST be considered when developing the strategy that will move you forward towards that vision. However, too many leaders have a narrow view of finance when it comes to digital tools and fail to look at the broader financial landscape and how creative approaches to the use of digital tools can help move the financial goalposts for the organisation as a whole.
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One of the big mistakes in some strategies is not thinking about the milestones that you need to apply to achieving your vision. Milestones should not be set in stone. That is, you should not be breaking everyone and your budget just to meet a milestone. But they are useful to give you some ‘steaks in the ground’ to which you can aim some elements of your strategy.
Obviously, the further away in time that you make a milestone the more difficult it is to provide an accurate timeline for that milestone. However, with a little thought and some discussion with those around you it is possible to set some pretty good milestones for the strategy overall and certainly for elements of the strategy that are due to be delivered during the next 3-5 years.
Milestones should be closely aligned to specific outcomes, discussed in the next section, and should take into account some of the following:
Small steps Think about identifying smaller milestones during the journey towards a specific outcome. This gives those who are implementing your strategy the chance to fit changes into their current working practice and allows them to focus on delivering things in a smaller time frame, which is often easier for busy people (and learners!!). Smaller steps also helps you measure progress more effectively and gives you feedback on progress in a timely manner. This allows you to modify your milestones and timescales more effectively when issues knock the progress off course.
Workload The overall workload of the staff across your organisation will have a big impact on the milestones that you set. There are obvious times during the year when staff have a ‘little’ more time to address new ideas and these can be targeted for initial introductions.
Your year As with workload, think about the times in your organisations year that make it easier for change to be implemented and, importantly, supported. Particularly with digital innovation it is important to make sure that change can be supported by both the technical team and those who are supporting the pedagogical change.
Your priorities Align your milestones for your overall organisational priorities with the milestones for digital change. This really helps reinforce the importance of the use of digital technologies and makes your life easier when evaluating progress across the organisation as a whole.
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Clearly the effectiveness of any strategy will depend on apply the right kind, and degree, of resources, at an appropriate time in order to affect change in the most effective ways. As a leader within your organisation you are obviously used to doing this on a day-to-day basis but let’s take a step back and think about what this means for the digital development strategy you are creating.
The resources that you have at your disposal will obviously dictate both the pace of delivery and the scope of change that you can enable at any period of time. But that does not mean that throwing lots of money, or kit or software or even people at a strategy will allow you to do more. It is a lot more subtle than that and so resourcing needs to be constantly monitored against progress to see if other factors are affecting the change that you are trying to bring about.
Here’s an example from many years ago. I worked with a project that was providing portable devices, laptop that could also be used as a tablet, one a 1-2-1 basis to students in both Primary and Secondary schools as part of a pilot that was looking at the effectiveness of such programmes. In one of the secondary schools the students enthusiastically started using the devices in the Autumn term, spending many weeks ‘finding out’ what they could do with the device and the software supplied. Many became extremely competent in using both hardware and software and usage rates were high. However, as the term progressed there was a slight reduction in use by these students and at the start of the spring term many of them gave up bringing their devices to school at all, with most of the use being recorded outside of school for things like homework and leisure activities. Discussing this with the students highlighted the problem. Hardly any of the teachers were ACTIVELY using the presence of the devices in their lessons and the students just did not see the point of bringing them to school. No one was happy, not students, not teachers and not the organisation providing the devices.
In the example above, because we were monitoring use regularly we were able to address the issue, which n this case was both CPD and time to make changes to the learning activities being offered within lessons. Both of these required further resources applying to the project and lacking them at the start meant that valuable time was lost.
So what types of resources do we need to consider?
Your People Probably the most crucial resource. What expertise have you access to? How do the skills and professional practices of your current staff fit the direction that you want to take? Who is a change leader and who will provide some degree of inertia. What types of staff or skills do you need to bring in at some point in the future in order to ensure that your strategy can succeed? This latter point could be through hiring or professional development so be open-minded on that.
Infrastructure Hardware, software and connectivity will all be key to the development of your strategy and getting the balance right can be a big part of the success of your strategy. Inexpensive hardware and software may need more expensive connectivity of it is to provide real value. It is also important to ensure that you take into account things breaking down when you are resourcing your strategy. As stated above, you really need to make sure that digital tools are ALWAYS available as and when required if staff and students are going to adopt them and this may mean reducing some of the scope of what you are trying to deliver.
Money Money is always a crucial issue in learning organisations. Try to think about your whole budget when considering how to resource your digital strategy inside your organisation. As an example, consider the professional development budget required to introduce a new digital tool. Traditionally this may require staff going out to courses, or even a ‘trainer’ coming in to the organisation for one or more sessions. But there are some really effective, online training resources available organisations now that will not only support your staff but, depending on their age, your students too. Educational process for these resources mean that a whole year subscription may cost you less than the traditional methods open to you AND will introduce your staff to the opportunities that online, asynchronous learning brings to the learning environment as whole.
Other people Consider how to use people from outside your organisation. Local companies, national projects, people on the Internet are all resources that can be utilised, often for free. As an example, one teacher put out a tweet recently asking people to look at the writing exercises that some girls he was working with had put online and because I was not busy that morning I went and commented on every piece of writing. I’m no angel and I am certainly not alone in my desire to help others, so be part of a community of change, help out where you can I ask for help when you need it.
So this has been the initial phase of my look into developing a strategy for developing the use of digital tools within a learning organisation. This first draft is really a mind dump of thoughts and will probably be edited, added to and changed over time. But for now it is where it is and hopefully will provide you with some thoughts on how to move forward with your strategy.
In the next section I will look at each of the topics I have introduced here in a lot more depth and include some more detailed examples and thougts.
See you in the next document……...
HAVE I MISSED ANYTHING?? Probably….. so drop me a comment.
More next time …