In 2012 I wrote an article called The Stimulating Classroom, updated in 2016. Much of it still relevant, so I've republished it here, with a few minor amendments and an updated link.

It seems paradoxical, but the most boring classrooms tend to be the ones that are full of technology – and little else. The worst ones I’ve been into are those in which 30 or more computers are crammed into rows, allowing no room for note-taking, let alone collaboration -- despite plenty of evidence indicating that kids learn better by working with others, at least some of the time anyway.

But even the ones with wall-to-wall interactive display screens, visualisers, graphic tablets etc etc are often, to be frank, Tedium City. How come?

I think the reason, in a nutshell, is that in the sorts of classrooms I’ve just described, the emphasis is on technology rather than learning. What a shame. What a missed opportunity. Technology can enable great and transformative things to happen in the classroom and beyond, but I think it's easy to lose sight of that if we're not careful.

Primary (elementary) classrooms tend to have this more right, or right more often, than secondary (high) schools in my experience. Secondary schools are serious, with a timetable to stick to come what may, whereas primary schools have still not entirely lost that ethos of exploration they are so good at, despite numerous “initiatives” over the years to ensure that anything that moves, or even anything that doesn’t move, is measured. The best schools still have that despite the constant pressure by Governments to test the kids and micromanage the teachers.

So what sort of things should a classroom have? I’m basing this list partly on my own experience of having taught in secondary schools over many years, and my visits to what I considered to be the schools where the education technology classrooms were the most vibrant.

Different areas

Different sorts of activity require different kinds of spaces. Within the classroom there should be an area where students can use the school’s computers, and places they can sit and plug their own device in if they need to. There should be places where students can collaborate, using pencil and paper if necessary, at tables. There should also be, if space allows, some comfy chairs too. If the school wireless network, layout and rules allow, the classroom can be extended beyond its walls by allowing students to work outside.

In my experience, even if the room you have is incredibly small, you can still arrange furniture and equipment in such a way that you can accommodate different sorts of spaces. And if you can’t then I would suggest, at the risk of being designated a pariah, that you might consider getting rid of some of the equipment. Nobody needs one-to-one computing all the time, and for learning purposes it’s not usually the most effective strategy anyway unless you build in opportunities for collaborating with others.

Books

Not e-books, but books. Not because I’m a Luddite (I’m not), but for four reasons:

First, the very practical one that if you have a few manuals and other books around, it is easy to pick them up and look things up while your partner is working at the screen.

Second, the nature of the books don’t have to be restricted to manuals. There are science fiction novels and short stories related to technology, books about the development of cyber warfare, books about the rise of Google and the fall of Boo. All sorts of technology-related books to stimulate thinking and broaden the mind. I dare you to start a class library.

Third, there’s a hidden message that old technology is still important and useful. Ebooks are great, no doubt about it, but there’s no reason to ditch paper ones, especially as you can’t display ebooks on a bookshelf as far as I know.

Fourth, I think it designates the classroom as a place of learning, not a hub of technology. I think that’s important.

Magazines and other periodicals

I always had newspapers, magazines and even comics in my classroom. I used to buy a lot of computer mags, and I’d bring them in when I was finished with them. If you want a student to write a software review, show them a variety of types of review in different magazines; they’ll soon get the idea. Even the Sunday newspaper supplements sometimes have interesting articles, such as on cyberbullying.

And the comics? Well, comics like 2000 AD or the Marvel comics, though somewhat outlandish in many respects, have interesting ideas and a great appearance from a design point of view. One of the requirements Computing curriculum worthy of the name should be the ability to present information in a variety of formats according to its purpose and intended audience. Comics or, if you prefer the grown-up term, graphic novels, can be pretty effective. There are plenty of comic-creation resources available: see the article referenced in A cornucopia of comic-making applications (updated).

Tablets on demand

I like the idea of students and teachers being able to use technology where and when they need it. So that means there should be good enough connectivity to make that feasible, and that banks of laptops or tablets are available quickly and easily. Having to book the laptop trolley a day in advance doesn't cut it.

A stand-alone computer

I always liked to have a computer that wasn’t connected to the rest of the network. Yes, I know it’s a bit retro, but it meant that students could check out DVDs without having to go through a whole rigmarole to gain access to the DVD drive. It also meant that they could use programs that were not available on the network, or in the cloud but not available from the network. This sounds all very old-fashioned, but if you have some useful DVDs or CDs from days of old, why abandon them just because technology has moved on?

I also used a stand-alone computer to play music while we worked – Vivaldi, which tended to keep the kids both calm and productive at the same time!

These are just a few ideas, and I don’t even think I’ve scratched the surface. In my opinion, the classroom should be a powerhouse of learning and exploration. If that’s the starting point, then in my experience learning will follow much more than if the starting point is technology.

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This article contains two versioons of my review. The first is the one that was published in Teach Secondary magazine. The second is the one I actually submitted.

The Shortest History of Al

(Toby Walsh, Old Street £9.99)

How is it that ChatGPT, Claude and other Al models appear to perform so well at certain complex tasks that some people become convinced that they're sentient — only for them to then promptly fail at simple tasks that even a child could handle?

And what's with their tendency to fabricate 'facts' if they don't 'know' the answer to a query? This very readable account of Al's recent history covers these questions and more, taking us on a journey from the first stirrings of Al technology over 70 years ago to the powerful models of the present day, filling in readers with information about the major players involved along the way, including Turing, Boole and others.

For teachers of computing, it's a valuable guide to how Al-derived approaches to problem solving have evolved over time.

This review first appeared in Teach Secondary magazine.

In case you’re interested, here is my original review, before the editor amended it.

How do ChatGPT, Claude and other AI programs perform so well on complex tasks that some people have even come to believe they are sentient? And yet why do they tend to fail to cope with simple tasks that even a child could handle? And why do they tend to make stuff up if they don’t “know” the answer?

These questions and more are covered in this very readable account which takes us from the first inklings of artificial intelligence over seventy years ago to the powerful programs of the present day. As well as providing information about the people involved, such as Turing, Boole and others, Walsh explains how the approach to thinking about AI and problem-solving changed over time.

Teachers of Computing will find this to be a valuable source of information about how framing the problem to be solved is bound to affect the success of the program concerned.

Every so often I like to take a look, or another look, at a book published a while ago, and today I’ve been looking at Teacher Geek, by Rachel Jones. It is aimed at primary teachers, but it’s full of great ideas that could be adapted for secondary — or even, in some cases, transferred wholesale.

When I flicked open the book to start with I came across this:

“Passion is a hallmark of being a geek teacher, and part of that passion is about seeing those you teach do well and achieve.”

That very much chimed with me. These days I teach writing-related courses for the most part, and I get a huge thrill every time one of my students obtains a book deal, has a play perfromed, or had an article published in a magazine or newsletter. I do my best to encourage them to “go for it”.

The author goes on to write:

“It is now one of my core beliefs that the work of every child should seen and shared. Not just with parents but with a wider audience. A geek teacher should relish the opportunities that sharing student work can bring.
”

The book contains lots of great (analogue) ideas, one of my favourites being the assembly in which the kids had organised a singing flash mob!

I have a couple of quibbles. First, the subtitle: life’s too short for worksheets. Well, some of my worksheets are almost collectible items! I take great pride in my worksheets.

More seriously, while some of the websites cited as resources still work, several no longer do. Hrdly surprising, given that the book was published in 2015. It pains me to say this, because I’ve met Rachel and she was a lovely person who was as passionate about educating the young in real life as she is in the book, but I’m not sure the price of the book is value for money any more. Crown Publishing, in my opinion, should do the decent thing and ask Rachel if she would like to update it (unless she has and I’ve missed that, in which case my apologies) or reduce the price.

I don’t often get annoyed when I read the newspaper these days –- well, not more than once per page anyway – but an article a few years ago with a headline aloing the lines of “Half of university students also prepared to submit essays bought off internet, according to research” (I’ve seen many similar articles in the context of AI), really wound me up. This for several reasons.

Firstly, the research was carried out by a researcher with the results to be presented at a conference called The Plagiarism Conference sponsored by, amongst others, a company which supplies plagiarism-detecting software. Now come on: how likely is it that they would sponsor a conference in which someone comes along and say “Hey! Our research shows that you really don’t need to be buying plagiarism-busting aplications!”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that the research was fabricated or misreported, or that anyone has said or done anything which is underhand. The fact is that there is a tendency for research results to reflect the views or principles of the researcher or organisation involved. It happens in every field. In economics, for example, research by Keynesian organisations always discover that unemplyment is caused by a lack of demand, while monetarists always find that unemployment is caused by wages being too high as a result of too much money being printed, in effect, by the government. As I put it some years ago:

“The same sort of thing was discovered many years ago in the field of Economics, in which it was found that the (to all intents and purposes objective) research of left-wing think tanks tended to reveal things like, for example, the official rate of unemployment was an understatement of the true figure, whilst their right-wing counterparts’ research demonstrated errors in the opposite direction. There was no suggestion that anyone was being economical with the truth.”

I first heard about this phenomenon when I was studying Psychology at uni. It was an option I took in my first year, and in one of our experiments we looked at something called the Experimenter Effect. It was fascinating really. Paired off, we students were given the role of either experimenter or subject, and then each experimenter was given an instruction sheet to read to our subject, explaining the nature of the task he or she would be doing. The sheet included the directive to read out the instructions exactly as they were set out, apart from the last paragraph. That final paragraph told me that the task was impossible. What I didn’t know at the time was that other experimenters’ final paragraph said the precise opposite, that the task was as easy as falling off a log.

Despite, as we all thought, carrying out our instructions to the letter, and reading the sheet out exactly as it was written, ie with no diversion from the text or even giving our words a particular nuance, those of us who were told the task was impossible witnessed our subjects flailing and failing abysmally, whilst our more optimistic colleagues saw their subjects succeed with glee.

It seems to me, therefore, that the results of research are coloured by hidden influences such as expectations, underlying methodology, the type of questions asked, and so on. I don’t think truly objective research is possible, and I would even apply that “law” to my own humble efforts. For example, it is hardly surprising that when I set out to find out how teachers were using Web 2.0 applications in their classrooms, and what the outcomes were for students, I discovered that teachers who use blogging and so on in their lessons universally report that it had a profoundly positive effect on their students’ learning.

Bottom line: I tend to take all research results, especially the ones I read about in newspapers, with a pinch of salt. And I say "especially" because I find it very depressing that stories like the one alluded to here seem always to be reported without any critical faculty whatsoever being exercised. Like those stories that pop up every so often in which someone starts ranting that kids don't know how to use apostrophes these days, a clear indication if ever there was one of the wholesale failure of teachers, schools and society in general -- and it is mentioned, almost in passing, that the ranter has just published "Apostrophes for Dummies" or some such title. I know journalists are busy people, with deadlines and stuff, but surely they could at least raise an eyebrow?

Secondly, I refuse to believe that 50% of university students are cheats or potential cheats.

Thirdly, what exactly has changed over the last however many years apart from, perhaps, the ease with which one can buy essays? I recall a “student” I was put in contact with through a private tuition agency offering to pay me three times the hourly rate to write an essay he could copy and pass off as his own. I refused, and he was so upset and angry that he complained to the agency about me, telling them that I had made the offer to him! That was 40 years ago (and I still feel bloody annoyed and outraged about it!). As far as I can see, the difference is that now he would go to a website and anonymously purchase an essay written anonymously by someone who has basically abandoned all pretence of being professional or ethical. Or, better still (from his point of view) because costless in terms of both time and money, just prompt ChatGPT with the essay title and it will not only “write” the esay for yoiu it will also provide a whole load of false references.

Fourthly, how come their tutors need software to tell them if their students are cheating? If you read your students’ essays over the year, and listen to them debating in seminars, how could you fail to notice if their writing suddenly used different language, different sentence structures or just seemed different?

Well, maybe university tutors deal with hundreds of (to them) faceless students these days. But schools?  I mean, why should any school need a computer to tell that their kids are “cheating”?

And are they even cheating? There’s an old maxim that if you steal from one writer it’s called plagiarism, but if you steal from lots of writers it’s called research. Do youngsters actually know the difference between plagiarism and research unless they’re taught?

This is nothing new either. In my very first teaching job, when I taught Economics, I set an essay to answer the question, “What are the causes of unemployment?”. When I had marked the essays I gave the class feedback as follows:

“That essay you did for me was tackled really well. The only thing I would say, though, to save us all a lot of a bother next time, is that instead of copying several pages straight out of a textbook, just hand me in a sheet of paper with your name on, together with the title of the textbook you’d like to copy from, and the relevant page numbers, and I’ll mark the book instead.”

So how did I know thay’d copied large swathes of textbooks? First of all, I possessed all the main textbooks and knew them quite well. I knew the way their authors expressed things. But more importantly, I knew my students, so when the lad who would usually come out with such gems as “My granddad wouldn’t of got any work if he hadn’t gone out looking for it” handed in an essay which was full of sentences like “Indeed, we can surmise from observation of the effects of tax incentives on industry in regional development areas …”, something told me that he may not have written it all by himself.

You don’t need technology to detect plagiarism, cheating, copying or whatever you wish to call it. What you need is teachers who know their students, and common sense – and time by the powers-that-be for teachers to get to know their students, and freedom to trust and rely on their own professional judgement (because that, when it becomes subconscious, is actually “common sense”).

Moreover, if students really are cheating, we need to ask ourselves some questions, such as:

• Are they really cheating, or have they simply not understood that that isn’t real research, or don’t have the literary skills to summarise or reword passages they read in articles and books?

• If it turns out that they are cheating, is that because we seem to be living in a society in which it increasingly appears to be the case that the end is regarded as justifying the means?

If there is any truth in that latter suggestion, perhaps we would agree with Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

I wrote the artticle below twelve years ago. As the UK government is planning to ban social media for under-sixteen year-olds I thought this might be relevant in an oblique sort of way. I’ve made a couple of corrections to website links, that’s all. I could have updfated the technology references too, but I wanted to preserve the original as far as possible.

Whatever you think of the current debate over news that the US Government may have been monitoring the online activity of not only its own citizens but those of other countries too, you have to admit one thing. It provides a great opportunity for ICT teachers everywhere to bring some real-world issues into their lessons, in a very newsy (ie current) way.

Privacy keyboard by g4ll4is Here are a few suggestions for class activities you might wish to pick and choose from -- and add to.

• Find out: what are the plain facts. Or at least, as far as we know them. The thing is, we don't actually know all the facts, and that is a major part of the problem. So, perhaps a better question to research might be...

• What are the issues being discussed?

• How did the news/information become known?

Think about how the results of this research might be presented:

• A timeline depicting the events unfolding. Students could do this in a spreadsheet, in the form of a graph.

• Or how about a more visually appealing approach, using an application like Prezi, which has the merit of showing all the slides on the page (albeit in miniature)?

• You can bring some programming into this, using PowerPoint. In a low-level way, students can automate the presentation so that each slide appears after a set interval. At a slightly higher level, they could use hyperlinks. For example, the first or second slide could have a series of labesl, like "Prism", "Whistleblower" and so on. Clicking on each of them would take the viewer to another slide, a video, or a website where more information is presented. They could make their presentation even more sophisticated by using Visual Basic for Applications.

• They could create a website, and code it so that it's not just a static page or series of pages.

• They could summarise the events in a series of tweets.

• They could write a blog post about it.

• They could make a (one minute) video.

Think about how the issue(s) could be made easy for young pupils to understand. Why not have some older pupils create a video or simple animation (or even an interactive game) to explain the issues to younger pupils?

There is scope also for how the research findings are used, and some of this could bring in colleagues from other subjects. For example:

• Have some students make a video for a left-leaning organisation, while others make a video for a right-leaning organisation -- using the same basic information.

• We have known for a long time that GCHQ in the UK, and other Government agencies in other countries, monitor web and email traffic for keywords. How about getting students to write a simple computer program to simulate the process? You will probably need to provide them with a set of acceptable keywords, or some (especially boys!) will try out every swear word they know. Discuss: is the program useful? Why/why not?

Finally, there are the legal and ethical issues.

• If the USA is trawling through our data, where does that leave our assumed guarantees under EU Data Protection law?

• Does it matter anyway? Is there merit in the view that if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about?

• How come this is news anyway? Boris Johnson has argued that ever since the web was invented you should have assumed that as soon as you do anything like send an email to someone, which goes to a server, or request information from a website (which resides on another server), anyone can read it. On the other hand, not everyone takes the same pragmatic view.

That last point raises another interesting issue: do your students know what happens when they send and email or do a Google search? There's another good lesson there too.