If technology is so clever, why are teachers so busy?

I'm going to ask each of you, Ashley and Richie, what piece of school technology, past or present, do you remember most fondly? And if you can't remember anything fondly, which do you remember least fondly? And I am going to pick on you first,

Ashley.

Well, when I think back to when I first started teaching almost 20 years ago...

I remember that the school I taught in, we only had one interactive whiteboard for the whole school.

And this huge piece of kit was transported around the school, wheeled around the school on a timetable.

So you had it in your class for maybe, you know, the morning section of the day or for 45 minutes out of the day.

And it was huge.

I mean, we were so lucky to have it at the time.

It became...

It was transformative in the way that all of a sudden we've gone from using overhead projectors where you wrote on, you know, the acetate sheets to be able to bring video and the interactiveness that came with this whiteboard into the class.

So it was fantastic piece of kit to have.

But moving it from class to class was unreal.

It was a job in itself.

We had to push it along the corridor.

It took about three people to move it.

And if you were due to get it after, say, interval time, after your 15-minute break, it took you 15 minutes to get it from one class to the next.

Quite often, you took half a display along with you or things that were hanging from the ceiling got tangled up in it and stuff like that.

So... now when you look in classrooms almost every classroom has an interactive whiteboard but yeah so even when i was speaking to my last class that i had kids just don't understand that now that we they're so lucky that we had we have one in every class now we used to share it across the

school absolutely and richie what about you what's what's taking you down memory lane

well i'm a few years uh longer in the tooth shall we say so Yeah, having a chalkboard and having a TV on trolleys was a big highlight in terms of technology.

Acetate was the high-tech element of it at that point.

So I'm going very, very far back when to find the chalkboard eraser, that fantastic sort of fabric-covered things that people push along to move the last person's chalk off the board.

And then every other year they had to be repainted because they were just so stained with chalk marks from the previous lessons.

I'm in that era.

So for those that are slightly more, how can we put it, tenured, then you'll relate to that fact that, yeah, I'm in my early 50s.