The chapters in this article were originally published as separate articles. For a pdf version, sign up to the free Digital Education newsletter and download it from the Digital Education Supplement area, where it goes under the title of My Worst IT Training Days.

In this article ...

My worst IT training days #1: Internet training day

If you are going to run an internet training day, then one of the prerequisites for a successful event is access to the internet. So imagine my dismay when, five minutes before my demonstration to over 100 teachers was about to begin, I was informed by the local authority. that the internet had gone down all over the borough.

It would have been more accurate to say that the internet was still very much intact, but that access to it was no longer possible because the borough's wi-fi set-up had decided to take a break. But I was in no mood to quibble.

I always try to plan for the worst case scenario, and that usually means having handouts and a PowerPoint in case the computers go AWOL, or another activity in case the planned one cannot take place. But in this case the headteacher was adamant that the staff would learn about using the internet, and she wasn't the sort of person you would wish to argue with.

I always believe in having a plan B, and in this case that comprised the following:

• A PowerPoint showing how to use search engines and useful tips and tricks.

• A handout listing websites housing useful resources for teachers.

• A Q & A session about do's and don't's, and internet safety in general.

I'm not sure if all that would have placated the headteacher, or indeed the staff whose training day was about to be, if not ruined, somewhat downgraded in quality. Fortunately, I never found out. Two minutes before I was due to go out on stage, I received another phone call saying that all connectivity had been restored. I floated out to my audience, none of whom was any the wiser, and the training day went very well.

Even though I didn't need the plan B in the end, I was glad I had one, because it provided a certain degree of confidence. Although I didn't relish the thought of doing an 'internet unplugged' session, I didn't fly into a blind panic either!

Moral of the story? Always have a plan B!

My worst IT training days #2: Another internet training day

In My Worst IT Training Days #1: Internet Training Day, I made the point that you always need a plan B. (My mantra as far as technology is concerned is that it’s not a matter of if it goes wrong, but when.) But in the story which follows, a plan B wouldn’t have been much use, because there wouldn’t have been anywhere to execute it.

Rather, the story illustrates the fact that when giving training, adopting an approach similar to that of advanced driving is not a bad policy. The difference between advanced driving and ordinary driving is that the advanced kind involves a great deal more anticipation of what might happen. Consequently, the word “suddenly” is rarely to be heard in the advanced driver’s conversation (as in, “He suddenly pulled out right in front of me!”). An interesting statistic I came across some years ago was that drivers who had taken and passed the advanced driving test had 80% fewer ‘accidents’ than motorists who hadn’t taken the course. And interestingly, even the ones who had failed the test tended to have 50% fewer accidents.

The incidents related in the story below were not of my making, and fortunately I was still able to conduct a fruitful training session. However, had I anticipated the ‘mishaps’ described, I probably could have prevented them altogether. These days, I always check in advance that these and other factors will not be an issue.

The scenario

I had been invited into a secondary school to teach very under-confident teachers how to use the web. They had few or no skills in this area, and frankly didn’t necessarily want them. However, the school had a remit to make all staff digitally literate and competent, so they were obliged to attend whether they wished to or not. It was an after-school session running from 4:30 to 5:30.

What happened

Four things happened. Well, five actually, for reasons I’ll explain.

The first was that I and the teachers all turned up to the computer lab where the training was to be held, and found it locked. I went off to find the Head of Computing, who fortunately was still working in his room (which was a five minute walk away from the computer lab). It turned out that he kept the door locked as a security measure. For some reason it didn’t occur to him to meet us there and let us in.

So, by the time we all traipsed into the computer lab, we were 15 minutes late, the teachers were in a foul mood, and even more time was wasted because I hadn’t been able to get into the room to log on to the network while the teachers were getting themselves settled down. Basically, by the time we got going, we’d lost a third of the time allotted to the session.

The second thing was that none of us could access the internet. I raced off to find the Head of Computing once again.

“I blocked access to the internet so that nobody could accidentally access porn”, he told me.

“But they can’t access anything, and it’s an internet training session!”

The next thing that happened was that when the teachers tried to print something, they discovered that the printer wouldn’t work. Even worse, (and this is the fourth thing) the error message that came up on the screens was something like:

‘Fatal Error #10978. Do not continue. Call Technical Support immediately.’

As you can imagine, being completely under-confident already, the teachers all thought they had somehow destroyed the school’s network.

I went off to find the Head of Computing, and he told me that there was nothing wrong with the printer. He’d disabled it in order to save paper. However, if the teachers chose another printer from the menu, they could print off their stuff in the room next door.

It was locked. That was mishap #5.

Somehow, we had a good training session in the sense that the teachers were able to achieve quite a lot by the end of it. However, as for whether or not they would do anything with education technology in the future was very much an open question.

“Tell me”, I said to the Head of Computing afterwards. “Was it your aim to deter those teachers from ever using the computing facilities again?”

“Of course not!

“Well, I’d be surprised if they do. If they were experiencing so much aggravation in a twilight training session, do you really think they’re going to take groups of kids in there?”

Lessons learnt

Since then, I’ve always asked for — insisted on if necessary — certain things to be in place if I’m to do training:

• The facilities have to be available. It hadn’t occurred to me that I would ever need to stipulate this, but the training room has to be unlocked before much else can happen!

• The things I want to be able to do can be done, such as being able to get online, print (in the same room), or whatever.

• Ideally, the tech support people should make error messages friendly and comprehensible, and never use the term ‘fatal error’ unless the system has just killed someone.

• The teacher who has asked me to do the training must be in the room, or very close by such as next door. Every time I went off to get the Head of Computing, I wasted ten minutes (five minutes each way).

• Failing that, tech support should be in the room, or very easily available by phone, and respond immediately.

Conclusion

As I said at the start, none of the things that happened were my fault. However, they’d have been less likely to have happened if I’d thought of giving the school a more comprehensive list of my requirements in advance, and that’s exactly what I do these days. By ‘more comprehensive’ I mean including really obvious things.

For example, if the teachers will be using school laptops for the training session, I’ll request that they are fully charged, available in the room and ready for use (such as actually being on the desks), with a list of guest log-in details in case anyone has forgotten their password, etc etc — and that someone is there 15 minutes beforehand to unlock the room.

This all points to a wider truth of course. We tend to avoid stating or requesting the obvious because, well, it’s so obvious. But in my experience it’s precisely those things that get overlooked if you don’t bring them to people’s attention. Far better to err on the side of caution than to try to avoid looking pernickety!

My worst IT training days #3: Large-scale training

The worst thing about using an external training provider, even if they are from a well-established company with a good reputation, is that, frankly, you don’t know what you’re going to get on the day.

On this particular occasion, the trainer turned up — but the materials didn’t.

That might have been manageable if we had been in a computer lab with 20 teachers. Instead, we were in a hall with around 200 teachers, most of whom were there to be convinced that they needed IT skills, and would have to be dragged kicking and screaming into using them.

Frankly, I don’t blame them. It’s tough to argue against “My results have always been excellent, and I’ve never used anything more technical than a chalkboard.” There are ways to persuade teachers of that school of thought to at least dip their toe in the digital water, but dragooning them into a school hall to be lectured at for an hour is not known to be the most efficacious approach.

Unfortunately, we were obliged to facilitate this farce, as a condition of getting truckloads of funding.

Well anyway, there we were, doing the best we could to show that this was going to be a really worthwhile training session, and that everyone was going to get the most fantastic resources pack they’d ever seen in their lives. Except that there were no resource packs to be seen anywhere.

After some frantic phone calls, they suddenly turned up.

It wasn’t the trainer’s fault -- they seem to have been let down by someone in the office. Unfortunately, not everyone understands that you can’t keep a couple of hundred busy people stuck in a hall and expect them to then be eager recipients of what you have to offer. Of course, being the consummate professionals that my colleagues and I were, we did manage to salvage the opportunity -- but there is no doubt that it was made much harder by that poor start.

There are a couple of psychological concepts which are useful: primacy and recency. People’s first experience of something (primacy), and their most recent experience (recency), tend to be highly influential. Therefore, when one’s first experience of IT training is being kept waiting with nothing to do for an hour, that is unlikely to predispose them to desire more. And it’s overcoming that which makes it so much more difficult than if the experience had gone without a hitch in the first place.

Well, you know the old saying: fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. Since then, whenever I’ve organised or been involved in the organisation of a training day I’ve insisted on the following. Indeed, I have it built into the contract so that if these conditions are not adhered to, we can have a discussion about the price:

• All physical materials must arrive at the training centre at least a week in advance.

• There must be more than enough to be distributed. I get quite annoyed when a presenter or trainer says, in the session itself, “I’ve only brought along 20 copies; could I use a photocopier?” That requirement should have been dealt with in advance.

• Ditto any digital presentations.

• Ditto any special requirements such as internet access (or photocopies -- see above).

• The trainer must arrive at least an hour early on the day, to make sure the set-up is as expected and required. Of course, most people do this anyway.

Using an external trainer is always a bit of a risk, because they’re an unknown quantity. For my part, when I am the external trainer I abide by all the above requirements, regardless of explicit contractual obligations. It’s not only because I want to preserve my good reputation: I couldn’t face the embarrassment of turning up and discovering that everything I needed had not!

My worst IT training days #4: Too much admin on a course

The title of this chapter is not quite accurate. First, it refers not so much to a single day as to a whole course. Secondly, the course was quite good. Nevertheless, I believe the cautionary tale I’m about to relate justifies its inclusion in this document.

During the time that I was an ICT advisor in a Local Authority, the government’s education department of the day announced that there was funding available for digital skills training for teachers. (A quick word of explanation: The role of an ICT advisor involved working with schools to provide training, resources and other forms of support to teachers of ICT and Computing.)

The funding was to come from something called the New Opportunities Fund, so the training scheme ended up being referred to as “NOF training”. Mention that phrase to anyone of a certain age, and watch them turn white. Governments have a remarkable talent for being unable to match good intentions with plans that will enable those intentions to be realised. (See The trouble with Government education technology initiatives, below.) NOF training was no exception.

The problem with it was simple: the money could not be used to train teachers in basic skills. Instead, it had to be used to train teachers in applying those skills in the classroom, that is, to use education technology at the “chalkface”.

Take a moment to reflect on this: what teacher is going to want to undergo training on how to use technology in the classroom if they can’t use the technology in the first place? In other words -- and this is purely my opinion of course -- the NOF training scheme was set up to not solve the problem it was intended to solve. Indeed, the only teachers I ever heard expressing satisfaction with the training were those who had signed up to one of the training providers which ignored the injunction against teaching basic skills and did so anyway. And that’s another thing: it’s my contention, born of experience, that the only approaches that meet official expectations are those devised by the mavericks who ignore the rules.

Given our lack of confidence in the NOF training scheme, the advisory team of which I was a member set up another training scheme to run alongside it. This took the form of an externally-certificated course which covered not only basic IT skills but also their practical application in the classroom. The course was broad, deep and therefore brilliant. The course participants loved it and, as far as the aims and coverage and types of challenge were concerned, so did we.

Nevertheless, we declined to run the scheme again the following year. Why so? The amount of admin was nothing short of astonishing. There was a weekly assignment in addition to end of term assignments. Each one was quite detailed, with a detailed marking scheme to match. There was also a complicated sort of way of adding up and averaging out the marks of the assignments over time.

To help us cope with this avalanche of “paperwork” I created a spreadsheet that dealt with all the averaging of marks and flagging up of un-handed-in work. But that was a massive undertaking in itself, involving named cells, advanced functions and a spot of programming in Visual Basic for Applications.

I think this experience provides a very good lesson for anyone creating a course or a scheme of work. It doesn’t matter how brilliant the materials are, or how wonderful the experiences enjoyed by the course participants. If the assessment scheme is so complicated and burdensome that it collapses under its own weight, there will come a point for some people where the cost (to them) outweighs the benefits. Yes, we all want robust assessment, assessment that is both valid and reliable. But out here in the real world, you sometimes have to make compromises.

Relying on the teacher’s or trainer’s professional judgement may sound too subjective, but falling back on apparently objective methods (like rubrics and complex marking schemes) usually end up being judged subjectively anyway.

This is because the longer, ie more detailed, the criteria are, the more easy they are to apply, but the less meaningful they become. The reason is that once you start breaking things down into their component parts, you end up with a tick list of competencies which, taken together, may not mean very much at all. The whole is nearly always greater than the sum of its parts, so even if someone has all of the individual skills required or has carried out all of the tasks required, the end result may still not be very good.

Conversely, someone may not be fully competent in every area but still do a brilliant job of using education technology. So you end up having to use your own judgement about how to grade something, which is exactly what a marking scheme like a rubric was meant to avoid in the first place. To put it another way, if the criteria are too "locked down", this could lead to assessors introducing their own interpretations to aid the process of coming to a "correct" conclusion.

I’m pretty certain that had the course we run placed more emphasis on our professional judgement than rigid adherence to the most detailed assessment scheme I’ve ever seen, we’d have run it more than just the once.

The trouble with government education technology initiatives

An awful shock, by Terry Freedman — Widget hour, by Terry Freedman

Having had experience, both direct and indirect, of high-profile Government education technology initiatives, I have my doubts as to their efficacy over the long term, or even in some cases the short term.

They all seem to follow the trajectory I’ve outlined in the cartoon above. First, a new initiative with a whizzo new name is created and tons of money thrown at it. It fits the current thinking (at least by government officials and their favourite experts), and schools are expected to adopt the policy, even though (perhaps because of workload issues), it will be non-mandatory. (That bit will be spoken sotto voce.) Inspectors will ask whether the policy has been adopted, with the unspoken suggestion of an “and if not, why not?” at the end of the sentence. Teachers will fall over themselves trying to make it work.

Eventually, the educational fashion changes, and the policy is seen for what it is: a gigantic hole into which money and time have been poured. It is quietly dropped from the conversation, or government ministers will declare it to have been a huge success, but which cannot, alas, be repeated or extended because of a lack of funding.

It is at that point the policy will join all the previous policies that were going to change the (educational) world.

Later still, all of the people who became experts in ‘delivering’ (a word I hate but which seems rather apposite in this context) the policy will get other jobs, and any collective expertise or memory will be lost, to all intents and purposes.

My worst IT Training Days #5: Whiteboard not working

Leading by example is a key tenet of teaching. If you want your students to behave, dress or generally conduct themselves in a particular way, you need to live by the adage beloved of writers: show don’t tell. Or perhaps, show and tell.

To be more specific, if you find yourself training the next generation of primary school teachers, and you think that encouraging them to make use of an interactive whiteboard is a good idea, then do so yourself.

With this in mind, a few years ago I was asked to teach the Computing curriculum to trainee teachers at a university. They were doing a post-graduate training course (the Post-Graduate Certificate in Education, or PGCE). It was therefore somewhat disconcerting to discover that the interactive whiteboard in the main teaching room was not working.

I may have understated the problem. It wasn’t as though a plug had come out or a marker pen was missing. If a whiteboard were a town, then this one had tumbleweed blowing through it, hadn’t seen a lick of paint in decades, and, to borrow from a song title, there was nothing going on but the rent. In short, it had not been used for ages, if indeed it had ever been used at all.

What’s better: a piece of kit that is present but not working, or a piece of kit which isn’t there at all? I think the former is demoralising, while the latter gives you something to aspire to. But I digress.

Calling up technical support resolved part of the issue, but at the expense of some of the time I wanted to demonstrate stuff. I resolved in future to ask in advance what equipment and other facilities would be available -- in the sense of being available to use. Ideally, you should check it out for yourself beforehand. This isn’t always possible of course. In my case, the journey took two hours each way. Even if I’d resolved to simply arrive very early on my first day, it would have been pointless because there would have been nobody around to let me in to the room.

I suppose that in the total scheme of things it was not the worst thing that has happened or could have happened. Discovering that the internet connection in a school was not working moments before I was due to give 100 teachers internet training was arguably worst (especially in terms of blood pressure). But it was definitely an experience that might have been avoided.

And much as I am prepared to take full responsibility for my part -- I could have given up a day and arranged to check things out before I was due to start work -- other people were culpable too. In particular, surely one of the roles of management is to keep an eye on whether or not facilities are being used. If they’re not, then that could and should inform future spending plans. In addition, why wasn’t the technical support team more proactive? Could it have been that they didn’t have the time or resources to go around checking all the equipment because they were too busy fire-fighting, dealing with urgent requests such as the one I made? If so, that in itself is a management issue (see below). all intents and purposes.

I could name several government-led initiatives that have followed this route. Does that mean that such initiatives should be opposed? Not necessarily, if money is made available for teachers to have time to develop resources or go on training courses, or if resources are provided from ‘on high’. Believe it or not, occasionally some of these are actually useful. The money in particular can come in handy (to put it mildly in these cash-strapped times), especially if the rules according to which it is to be spent are reasonably flexible.

I do sometimes wonder, though, whether I have not finally turned into the archetypal cynical grumpy old man sitting in the corner of the staffroom mumbling!

Managing a technical support team

You don't have to be a "techie" in order to be able to manage a technical support team effectively. These guidelines explain how.

Recognise that output is more important to most people than input. In other words, what matters is not so much how long or how hard the technical support team works, but whether the systems are reliable and functioning well most of the time.

Most technical support problems have non-technical causes, and therefore non-technical solutions.

If you have just started in the role of managing a technical support team, undertake a fact-finding exercise, to determine what the technical support experience is for various groups of people in the school -- including the students. I have undertaken this work for schools on several occasions, and the findings often come as a surprise to the technical team.

Introduce reporting and measurement procedures. How many faults were reported this week? How long did it take, on average, to resolve them? What has been done to reduce the risk of the same fault occurring again? It's crucial to have the right data in order to make informed decisions.

Insist on the proactive involvement of the senior management team. In the work I've done with schools, a consistent message has come through that a passively supportive attitude, while better than an unsupportive one, is not enough.

Invite the network manager to your department or curriculum meetings, both to listen to what's important to you and, perhaps either briefly every time or, say, once every 6 weeks, to give a report about the network and any matters of concern.

If you are the educational technology co-ordinator or manager, work towards having the line management of the technical support team taken out of your hands. The technical infrastructure and support of the school ought to be regarded as a maintenance function, not part of a curriculum area.

In the meantime, allocate some of your budget for training purposes for the technical support staff, especially if they will be asked to implement or manage a new network system, say.

Ensure that there are clear guidelines for responsibility in place. The role of the technical support team is to advise, implement and maintain. It is your role to ensure that learning takes place. When new computer facilities are being planned, both parties will need to be fully involved in the discussions from the outset.

Even if part or all of the technical support is outsourced to a third party, you still need interneal procedures which state who should be called, and at what point. For example, there may be first level support, second level support and so on. And you will still need metrics to determine how good the service is.

My worst IT training days #6: The day my website was shut down (updated)

As I said in the chapter about an interactive whiteboard not working, teachers and trainers should lead by example. I get really frustrated when I am in a training session and the presenter or trainer is faffing about plugging things in, fiddling with leads, sorting out their presentation or whatever. It’s unprofessional, and it’s even more annoying if we’re paying this person a load of money. They should have sorted it all out in advance.

By the same token, I also start huffing and puffing when the session is due to start, and the trainer says, “I’ll just give people a few more minutes to arrive.”

Why? We’re here, and we managed to get here on time. Surely the people who are present are more important than the people who are absent?

Yes, I admit it: my attitude is somewhat uncompromising. It can be summed up as: my time is valuable, so stop wasting it.

Therefore, you can imagine how mortified I was when this happened:

I was teaching the ICT/Computing class on a teacher training course (the Post-Graduate Certificate of Education, or PGCE). I explained a few things, and then said, “Now, if you go to this page on my website, you’ll find all the resources you need for this piece of work. Here’s the URL, and now I’ll click on it so you can see what it looks like.”

What it “looked like” was a big notice in a large red font stating:

This website has been deactivated because of security concerns.

Fortunately, being completely paranoid, together with a dread of letting a class down, I’d printed off all the resources. I handed them out, and then phoned my ISP, which at the time was pretty much a one man band.

“What’s going on?” I said.

He didn’t know either. He called me back later to tell me that the company who ran the server on which the website was hosted had detected that I hadn’t installed an upgrade to one of the programs on the site -- an upgrade I had no knowledge of.

“Surely they could have given me some warning?”, I said. “Apart from the fact that it could have ruined my lesson, it was highly embarrassing.”

I spent a couple of ours that evening installing and testing the upgrade.

Here’s what I learnt from this experience:

• No matter how well prepared you are, something unexpected can go wrong. This is a fact of life, especially where technology is involved. That’s why it’s essential to have a Plan B. In this case, it was the printed resources.

• I should have preferred to have used the institution’s own VLE for storing my resources, because then if something had gone wrong someone could have sorted it out, possibly immediately. However, I have a vague recollection that gaining access to it wasn’t straightforward for some reason, but I may be misremembering. But that’s the option I’d recommend, with your own website as a backup, just in case.

• Don’t use a one man band for your website if your website is, in effect, the shop front for, and showcase of, your business.

• Unless you like nasty shocks, or enjoy checking for upgrades and glitches and sorting them out, use some kind of managed service. It was this experience that made me move my main website to a Squarespace platform. I do miss experimenting with interesting JavaScript and other applications, but at least I know that if something does need updating or sorting out, someone else will be dealing with it while I’m doing what earns me money.