A 2019 study by Education Weekshows that elementary and secondary school teachers are skeptical that technology can transform public schools or dramatically transform teaching and learning.*
In Geneva, Switzerland, Ecole Moser, a pioneer in deploying iPads in classrooms, has just announced that it has decided to pause this project. **
Conclusion: technology does not move schools.
It seems fairer to say that no move in schools has yet called for the creative use of technology.
Investing in interactive whiteboards is hardly meaningful if the goal is to use them as blackboards.
The plateau on which technology seems to be bogging down in schools does not speak of the possibilities of technology, but of the stagnation of the schools which continue to do as they have always done, even though the world is experiencing the greatest changes in history.
We call this phenomenon of stagnation “Education Cliff” and we present how schools are locked in a dead end, because of fixed institutional cultures and inadequate ways to defend values such as prudence, justice, intellectual rigor or equality in the 21stcentury.
Technology alone cannot get the school out of this dead end.
Conversely, when teachers or principals realize that the normal way of school does not work anymore, and start looking for solutions to get out this dead end, technology becomes a vital ally.
On the one end, we’ve reached a plateau at the systemic level. On the other end, punctual and entrepreneurial initiatives integrate technology easily, initiatives that we call edupreneurial, the term we use to speak of entrepreneurial mindset at school.
The Education Weeklysurvey highlights one-off initiatives that fail to establish innovation over time, which explains the slow advancement of technology in the school.
It seems to us that we have to worry about the figures of the weak progress of technology in school, not per se, but because they are the symptom and the reflection of the stagnation of the fact-school as institution unable to respond to the challenges of the 21st century.
Therefore, it is not the presence or absence of technology at school, but the ability of the school-fact to change and evolve and the most effective ways to do so that must be discussed.
We show in Edupreneurial Pivotthat punctual edupreneurial initiatives constitute the one and only fragmented form of disruption that can prevent the Education Cliff.
The success of the edupreneurial initiatives do not lay in their impact in terms of the general acceptance of technology for the system, but in their value as a model for all those who, in schools, want to be agents of change, that is, to immediately solve the problems they face by relying on the resources at their disposal, by being creative and able to take measured risks.
Edupreneurial Pivothelps to understand precisely what is blocking the implementation of technology in schools and how the implementation of the technology leads to the change that is expected.
That is why we want to put the notion of “Edupreneurial Pivot” at the disposal of all those who contribute by their actions to the transformation of the fact-school.
*Education Weekly
**Le Temps
https://www.letemps.ch/economie/numerique-lecole-remis-question