1. Technology
transforming tomorrow
Miles Berry
Chair, Naace

2. The fundamental model of school
education is still a teacher talking to a
group of pupils. It has barely changed
over the centuries, even since Plato
established the earliest “akademia” in a
shady olive grove in ancient Athens.
A Victorian schoolteacher could enter a
21st century classroom and feel
completely at home. Whiteboards may
have eliminated chalk dust, chairs may
have migrated from rows to groups, but
a teacher still stands in front of the
class, talking, testing and questioning.
But that model won’t be the same in
twenty years’ time. It may well be
extinct in ten.

6. The pipe is more important than the
content within the pipe. Our ability
to learn what we need for tomorrow
is more important than what we
know today. A real challenge for any
learning theory is to actuate known
knowledge at the point of
application. When
knowledge, however, is needed, but
not known, the ability to plug into
sources to meet the requirements
becomes a vital skill. As knowledge
continues to grow and
evolve, access to what is needed is
more important than what the
learner currently possesses.
Siemens, 2005

8. Where the focus is on developing problem-
solving skills in a wide range of contexts,
rather than simply practising calculation
skills, using a calculator allows pupils to
think clearly about the strategies they are
using to solve the problem without getting
bogged down in the mechanics of the actual
calculation itself. In other words, space for
thinking about problem solving is created. It
also enables pupils to work with more
complex but realistic numbers than they
would meet using pen-and-paper methods.
The pupils need to understand what is
happening within the calculation in order to
interpret the answer the calculator
provides; for instance the meaning of a
decimal answer in questions about whole
numbers of people.

19. What are the implications of
ubiquitous fully automatic high
quality machine translation for
MFL curricula and pedagogies?