How can schools think strategically to cope better with the rapidly changing digital landscape?

Written by Rudi Eliott Lockhart

What can Heads learn about ICT from Music?  Not so much I thought, or at least that was my opinion before last Wednesday’s ISC ICT Strategy Conference at Radley College.  One of the presentations at the conference was a high-energy presentation from Radley’s own Head of Digital Strategy, Ian Yorston, who suggested that Heads of Music already knew the answers to many ICT questions.  Just as two pupils of the same age can arrive at school, one able to play a concerto, the other unable to play a note, so it is with ICT: pupils arrive with wildly different ICT skills and needs.  If Music departments can prepare pupils for Grade exams that are not tied to specific ages, and teach in a range of settings from one-to-one tuition to a whole orchestra coming together, then perhaps the effectiveness of this flexibility shows the way for ICT.  It also highlights how, just as the challenges a Music department faces are not all about the technicalities of music, many ICT challenges have more to do with the curriculum and pedagogy than ICT itself. 

The comparison with music tackles ICT as a subject being taught in schools, but of course, ICT strategy goes much further than that.  Heads need to think about issues such as how to handle cyber bullying, how they should respond to pupils bringing smart ‘phones into the classroom, whether and when they should move the storage of their data and the operation of their computing to ‘the cloud’ and how best to avoid wasting money by making poor ICT investments.  But if parallels with teaching music showed that issues in teaching ICT often weren’t technical matters, so it was that at the conference speakers emphasised that these strategic concerns were also not really ICT issues: cyber bullying should be recognised as simply a form of bullying and handled accordingly, and smart ‘phones with internet access aren’t a technological challenge to the sanctity of the classroom but, less threateningly, they’re another teaching tool to be embraced, just as the calculator was in the ‘70s and ‘80s.  This emphasises the underlying theme of the conference: ICT strategy is not something that should be left to network managers and IT specialists; rather, it is something that should be at the heart of every school’s strategic thinking.  Heads, Bursars and Governors need to be aware of the changing ICT world in order to make the correct strategic decisions, and I hope that this conference will have helped some of them gain more of that sort of awareness.

The conference brought together high quality and respected speakers such as the dynamic Steve Molyneux, and the former Secretary of State for Education and Employment David Blunkett.  A demonstration from two former Radley pupils showed the audience how adept school pupils are as ‘digital natives’ able to use social networking to myriad ends.

It being an ICT conference, naturally there’s plenty of material relating to the day on the web: the presentations are available here, and there’s a twitter feed that picked up on any tweets using the hashtag #ISC09, meaning that delegates could make real-time comments on presentations as the day unfolded.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 at 11:34 am by Rudi Eliott Lockhart and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.