Using professional development to support a cultural change in using technology in schools

Phil Herd and Graham Trick, Transform Trust, UK At the start of 2018, some schools within Transform Trust were introducing more technology through purchasing class sets of iPads. On seeing this, other schools became interested in doing the same if it proved impactful to the children’s learning. In order to support schools, we needed to understand what worked with our early adopters and set up systems that would take others from inception to impact. Our methodology involved teaming up with an education specialist, Jigsaw24. From this, support for different stakeholders was introduced, as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1: Overview of support for different stakeholders   Digital Champions development iPad impact study group First, an iPad impact group of Digital Champions was created involving six schools. These early-adopting schools had a teacher who would be able to investigate different uses of the iPad in their classrooms, being researchers in their own context. Fr