Credit: jamesteohart via Adobe Stock.

17 December 2024

By Rachael Levy and Jennifer Chung

‘Technology is bad for kids!’ This statement has become something of a slogan in recent years with parents, teachers, educationalists and health workers, among others, raising the alarm about the ways in which technology is deemed to be damaging children. You may have seen the recent Channel 4 programme ‘Swiped’, which removed smartphones from children in an attempt to improve child well-being. Recurring themes include concerns about harmful online content, cyberbullying and screen addiction, often resulting in the call for all children, especially young children, to be protected from the digital world as much as possible.

However, the world we live in is digital. To take the example of literacy, we know that learning to read now includes developing skills to make sense of screen texts, and learning to write now includes learning to code using programming languages. This raises challenging questions for the field of early childhood education, particularly in relation to potential tensions between the desire to offer children opportunities to develop the digital literacy skills needed to succeed in the future and the desire for them to avoid the harmful effects of technology. (more…)

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12 December 2024

By Guy Roberts-Holmes

Commercial early childhood education (ECE) digital platforms have expanded rapidly since the Covid-19 pandemic. Thus far, there has been a lack of critical research on their growth and consequences. The aims of this blog are, firstly, to open a critical space to think about the political economy of commercial education platforms and, secondly, to ask questions about their impacts upon the experiences of educators, families and children. (more…)

UCL speaker presenting with a microphone. Credit: Mary Hinkley for UCL.

29 October 2024

By Leda Kamenopoulou

Synchronous accessibility can be challenging

In a previous IOE blog, I wrote about accessibility as a right and not an option, and I summarised key actions for creating accessible digital content, such as Word and PowerPoint documents. These resources, however, are almost always created asynchronously. In this post, I consider how to make sure live teaching delivery is accessible, focusing in this instance on the needs of students with hearing impairment. I list best practices that I recommend as an expert on inclusive education and sensory accessibility, and as a programme leader for UCL’s Special and Inclusive Education MA, experienced in putting reasonable adjustments in place for our students. (more…)

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3 October 2024

By Andrea Gauthier, Mina Vasalou, Yang Yang and Team FoodWiser: Sanya Bajaj, Enying Chen, Xinyue Dong, Thi Huyen Mi Nguyen

As the new academic year begins, we reflect on our ‘Digital Design Thinking and Making’ (DDTM) module, which is part of IOE’s Education and Technology MA. The aim of DDTM is to support the critical understanding and application of design to educational technologies, with a focus on environmental sustainability. Taking a research-based design approach rooted in creative design practice, during Spring 2024 the student team ‘FoodWiser’ worked with UCL’s caterer, Gather and Gather, to develop a new digital tool for tackling food waste in the UCL halls of residence cafeteria. Food waste isn’t just an annoying problem of dealing with leftovers: each discarded plate of food means wasted resources and unnecessarily inflated greenhouse gases. (more…)

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17 September 2024

By Wayne Holmes

This commentary is adapted from Wayne’s contribution to the ESRC Education Research Programme event, More or less technology in the classroom – the value and purposes of technology use in schools. Watch the event recording on UCL Mediacentral.

Technologies have long been designed for use in education. However, the ‘potential’ of this EdTech, especially AI-enabled EdTech, has been frequently overstated and its limitations underexplored. In any case, while EdTech offers ‘solutions’ to a variety of educational problems, not only do they rarely actually ‘solve’ the problems that they target, it isn’t even clear whether they are the ‘right’ problems in the first place. (more…)