Creating a Vibrant Digital Learning Environment

In our personal moments, we have all probably binged watched more than we admit on Netflix… which mostly ends with us staring into a black mirror as Netflix patiently asks, “Are you still watching?”.

Globally, our desire to feel a sense of real belonging and human interaction has pushed our communities online. Schools, being the bedrock of childhood social and academic development, have required to provide online learning this year. We are unanimously in agreement no child should ever feel alone, staring into their own black mirror, passively listening in on teaching that is happening elsewhere. Bricks and mortar schools are full of laughter, chatter and joint experiences of learning, growth and development- for teachers and students! Each school’s digital environment should reflect those values.

Attitudes towards the role of educational technology to achieve these ends has seen a paradigmatic shift over the past 12 months and many teachers in many schools have found themselves peering through the looking glass into a bright future of elevated teaching and learning, bolstered by their developing digital environments. Here are three key drivers that our school used to ensure we built a vibrant, collaborative community as we transformed what education looked and felt like in our school.

It is never about the platform

Gone (hopefully) are the days now where we use Kahoot merely as a “fun game”, and where students think they are getting the same learning experience out of watching a video recording of a lesson. When choosing schoolwide platforms, it is essential to make explicit pedagogical links to how it will directly promote questioning, intervention, collaboration and student voice. By making these links obvious to the teachers and students, you build a legacy of learning that is bolstered by technology in every department.

A great example of this was the implementation of an AI based learning platform in our school. We explicitly linked the platform as a tool to promote timely and tailored intervention for every child, which inspired authentic schoolwide use and bought extraordinary value to our teachers and student’s lives. Pedagogy first is the non-negotiable angle and the difference between a disconnected array of “bolt-ons”, which will be shattered as soon as schools fully open; or implementing platforms that play an integral part of creating a sustainable future of education.

Growth as a community

The fear of becoming robotic and deskilling as educators as we swapped our classrooms for online meetings rippled through the worldwide teaching community during March 2020 as we gazed in confusion into our screens…. And our screen selves stared blankly back. Fast forward one year and the best thing we did as a school was to let teachers set up their own routines that celebrate their style of teaching, which authentically connected their children to the content they are delivering. Being part of a school with experienced and confident teachers made transformation of our digital environment into a vibrant and dynamic ecosystem possible because we are all able to offer different methods of applying technology to our lessons to boost questioning, intervention and authentic student voice. Celebrating our teachers’ abilities to deliver their lessons in the various changing environments created more ownership of continued personal training for all our staff members, dispelling the notion of having “techy teachers” at school. We are all teachers that use technology. This growth mindset flowed down to our Student Leaders, who now relish at the opportunity to hold student workshops on digital skills, highlighting their own online fluency and raising the standards of digital literacy for teachers and students across our school.

Thinking big means that this format can be repeated in other schools, tailored to anyone’s digital ecosystem! Our activities are developed to be fully inclusive for online learners, so it becomes a lot easier to create unique opportunities for teachers and students to be collaborating with nearby schools… or schools on the other side of the world!