Leading, teaching and learning
From Pandemic to Progress in IT Integration By Robert Harrison, Lyndsey Stuttard and Matt Buck
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round the world, access to educational technology has been one of the most impor tant factors in the quality of learning available to students throughout the extended school closures related to the coronavirus pandemic. It’s no surprise that venture capital is flowing fast into EdTech. An already-crowded collection of hardware, software and cloud-based applications is expanding by the day. Here, two exper t practitioners share their experience and ideas about how to bring what we’ve learned about educational technology during distance learning back into the classroom (and on to the playing field) with integrity. They were interviewed by Dr Rober t Harrison, Education Strategy Director for ACS International Schools (London and Doha).
34 | International School | Summer 2021
What opportunities has teaching remotely opened up for you and your students? Describe some of the work you’ve been doing with Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence while teachers and students were working from home. Lyndsey: During distance learning I have explored more ways of ensuring that we are maintaining connections to our students to offer experiences that support their learning at home. A good example is the Augmented Reality Escape Room, which is a way of providing an immersive experience through which students can ‘step into’ a virtual world and explore the curriculum in an engaging manner. I’ve been helping teachers learn how to capitalise on this new approach that empowers them to become creators rather than consumers of educational technologies. They’re taking an active role as advocates and designers of student learning. We started on this path before the distance learning became such a big part of our educational reality,
