In this episode, Claire meets with Lee Parkinson also known as Mr P, a part-time teacher, entrepreneur, technology guru and trainer. Mr P starts by explaining how he started his teaching journey as well as juggling his home life with triplets and a stepson!
Mr P and Claire explore the importance of technology within education today. He discusses how schools can embed and incorporate technology within their curriculum and how this can support to reduce teacher’s workload.
They discuss the challenges schools face with funding, society, accountability, workload, curriculum, social media and pressures of delivering technology lessons. He explains the various CPD and INSET training he provides to teachers and schools with technology and computing as well as support on how this can be integrated into the curriculum on a day to day basis.
KEY TAKEAWAYS

Mr P has been teaching for 12 years.
He explains how the headteacher at his school encouraged him to take leadership roles and advised him to take on PPA cover to enable him to broaden his experience across the Key Stages.
His headteacher encouraged him to develop his curriculum area, which at the time was ICT.
Mr P. explains how he progressed in his role as ICT co-ordinator and the challenges he faced with the lack of resources at his school.
He asked the school for better technology and bought a class set of iPads. He then worked with each year group for a half term and looked at how mobile technology can enhance learning.
He then started a school Twitter and Facebook page to help engage with pupils and the wider world. He saw a positive response from the social media accounts as there was lots of engagement from his audience.
Julian Woods recommended that he should start a teacher Twitter account.
He started sharing ‘How to’ videos and blog posts on the teacher page.
In 2012, he created a Facebook page and by the end of that academic year he was asked to do training sessions.
Alan Peat contacted Mr P because he was interested to bring someone on board who can look at technology. They both then worked together to build each other’s businesses and ideas.
Mr P goes on to explain that he learnt a lot about the business side from Alan. They continued to work together and wrote a few books together.
He continued providing CPD training in schools and shared blogs on his pages. He continued to see the success of this and began to create more videos including comical and light-hearted videos of life as a teacher.
The growth and success of his blogs and pages was increasingly rapidly.
He explains the advantages of social media and the support it provides to teachers. It opens the world for teachers to communicate and discuss issues that they be having as well as the opportunity to seek advice from each other.
Nonetheless, he mentions the undesirable aspect of social media as people can be negative online.
It is important that the curriculum is meaningful and purposeful for your school and pupils.
Although Mr P has been working with developing technology within schools for the past 5 years, he doesn’t think it has moved forward as much as he would have liked it to.
The main focus of his training is getting teachers to look at ways they can use technology and helping them to use it more efficiently. He would like technology to be used more creatively but this requires a big culture change as well as the time for teachers to develop and understand this.
He believes schools don’t utilise technology enough to justify the cost.
He narrates that a school has saved up to £10,000 in two years, by using ideas from the technology training which has ultimately reduced paperwork, printing and teachers’ time outside of the classroom.
He believes there should be a lot more education and coverage on technology particularly social media.
He believes there is a taboo around social media for schools, whereby teachers believe they cannot discuss or talk about social media with children as this may encourage the