In this episode, Claire meets with Nathan Ashman, who is a Lead Teacher for New Technologies at St Wilfrid’s Church of England Academy in Blackburn. Despite having a secondary background, Nathan was delivering a session aimed at the primary-age range at the Lead Learn Lancs 2019 conference, which was where Claire met with him.
Nathan didn’t originally plan to go into teaching (an action hero was his dream occupation as a child!). After studying Theatre, Film and TV at university, and coaching rugby, Nathan discovered he was natural when it came to working with children and so made the decision to go into teaching. His initial plan was to go into primary teaching but his old school offered him a post teaching English and media while he was trained on the job. After completing his employment-based training in Kent in 2005, training in both English and media, Nathan’s career progressed until eventually, he ended up becoming a head of a film and media school in Oldham.
Through his teaching of media, Nathan experimented with different ways of using technology effectively in the classroom. He talks with Claire about using technology, specifically iPads, effectively in the classroom to lessen the workload of teachers and improve learning experiences. He talks about technology and the ways it should be embedded into teaching, rather than just being an add-on or a gimmick.
By sharing examples of what he has seen to work in his own school, Nathan gives lots of practical advice on how technology can be used by both primary and secondary teachers to not only help promote a healthy LIFE/work balance (by reducing overall workload), but to further enhance and cement learning that is already happening in their classrooms.
KEY TAKEAWAYS

Bringing familiar technology into the classroom can enhance learning opportunities. Using technology that the children are already familiar with enables teachers to demonstrate how to use this technology in a productive way that improves the quality of learning.
Technology can be used to improve assessment.In an ideal lesson, teachers should be able to use iPads to get immediate responses from the children in order to gauge levels of understanding. This can be an effective Assessment for Learning tool.
Inductions can help every child and teacher make the most of using technology in the classroom.By training children to use the iPads in a meaningful, productive and safe way, they are then able to utilise the iPads as part of their ‘toolkit’. They can be used to complete whole or part tasks in any lesson. By training teachers to see the opportunities for which iPads can be used, using technology in lessons becomes much less of a token gesture. Nathan stresses the importance to move away from the idea of solely having an ‘iPad-based lesson’ and instead, the use of iPads in class should be a fluid transition where both the child and teacher have a choice in using them in specific scenarios when suitable.
Allowing children to be creative using iPads will enable them to demonstrate their understanding.Children often come up with interesting ways of approaching tasks and by allowing children to be creative and giving them the choice to use technology to complete tasks within school, it allows them to demonstrate a much wider skill set that will stand them in good stead for the rest of their lives.
Using iPads for different purposes can improve learning outcomes. iPads are best used in primary schools for creative application of learning, however they can also be used to assign pre-teaching videos to watch or articles to read. They can also be used for assessment purposes although this is much more the case in secondary rather than primary. By using the flip-learning approach of pre-teaching reading/watching, the teacher becomes more of a facilitator in lessons. In terms of assessment, using apps such as Socrative or Answer Garden allows every child who has an iPad to feedback to a given question, which can then be sh