Narcolepsy, Principals and classroom technology. Is there a connection?

Published by Chris Ogilvie-Taylor, CEO of Marsden Grant Int on 11 December 2014

Does the very mention of classroom technology give you the screaming abdabs? Would the prospect of water boarding in Guantanamo Bay be less frightening? When the subject of edutech is discussed in your presence do the symptoms of Narcolepsy come over you?

If so, I have empathy with your position. I run an educational  technology company and yet I’m not a techie. Actually, far from it. My first career was in advertising and I only entered the edutech sector eight years ago. I honestly have few technical skills but I do appreciate and understand the value and importance of the role for classroom technology in supporting teachers with their delivery of increasingly ambitious lessons. That delivery, by the way, being to digital native pupils with devices seemingly welded into their palms and for whom ADHD seems to be the normal descriptive condition! And I do “get” why pupils who out of school are making and posting videos, selfies and all manner of digital messaging can become bored rigid in classrooms that frankly haven’t changed all that much since the school days of their parents. Even smart boards or IWBs, albeit progression from chalk and ink markers into the digital arena, weren’t exactly sizzling with presentation values and were more of a catch-up for the classroom in comparison to pupils’ digital emporia that so many residential households were becoming. So, in short, I can and do appreciate why edutech seemed to some at a senior level in school management to be a necessary evil, best left within the IT bods’ jurisdiction. Until now, that is. 

The recent advent of high definition Interactive Flat Panel Displays (IFPDs) has completely transformed and revolutionised the central display in classrooms. Looking like giant iPads and operating in much the same way, IFPDs are the closest we have come in a millennium of schooling to creatively supporting teachers with presentation values that, used to their fullest extent, gloriously enhance and extend every curriculum subject using technology that has come about as a direct development of the Apollo space programme. To techies and non-techies alike, IFPDs are simply the most creative presentational support for teachers presently known to mankind. And therefore as a non-techie providing IFPDs (our model is called CleverTouch LED) I urge you to consider their adoption in your school during 2015. 

Contact me by email on cot@mardsengrant.com and I will send information of a non-technical, revelatory nature on your request. And I absolutely promise that what I send won’t put you into a coma or induce a raving fit!