Hi everyone, I am Barbara Holzapfel Vice President education
at Microsoft. I'm absolutely honored to be part of ISTE
and I really appreciate that you're joining me for the
session. I'm looking forward to sharing some of the insights
we've gathered from listening to education experts, system
leaders and classroom teachers over the past several months.
COVID-19 has caused the convergence of three crises. A
public health crisis an economic crisis, and in many
parts of the world, a humanitarian crisis. And education is at the
intersection of all three.
On the one side, the three other aspects directly impact
educational opportunities, for example through the public
health crisis many schools had to close altogether, limiting
education for millions of
students. The education the economic crisis can impact if
and how a student has an opportunity for education and
learning and the humanitarian crisis of severe loss can cause
lifelong trauma for the
students. On the other side, of course, education can serve
as a powerful motor and engine for a better future.
So as the pandemic spread around the world more than 1.6 billion
students had their formal education disrupted. That is an
enormous scale, an impact that we've gone through over the last
several months. Plus an additional estimated 24 million
children and youth could drop out or not have access to school
next year due to the pandemic's economic impact alone. According
to the UN Secretary General's Policy Brief on education. So
the experience across and within countries has also been very
different depending on each country and region's resources
and government. So the extent to which all of the students around
the world have been impact or have been able to stay in their
education journey has varied widely all across the world.
So throughout the last six months, or actually by now
almost eight months. Schools and University responded in various
ways according to their circumstances and their
resources and how well they felt
prepared. So some of them were able to move really quickly to
remote learning, while others had to temporarily close the
schools and universities altogether. But despite all of
these challenges, the situation has provided an accelerator for
schools and school systems to
rethink. To rethink the delivery of education, rethink the
prioritization of different aspects of education and to
rethink how resources are being allocated to ensure as many
students as possible can stay in their educational journey.
So as part of this process, and to address the challenges facing
them, education leaders have been looking for answers
basically for five core
questions. The first one is how can we show equity in
educational opportunities and make sure students are not being
left behind? What is the best way to actually encourage and
evaluate engagement in a remote environment when you're not in
the classroom and can see how students are participating?
How can we maintain the aspects of social connectedness in
learning? We all know how important and how much of a
social experience learning is.
And what is the role of technology in the remote and
hybrid classroom? And how can we integrate pedagogy with
technology and shift technology from being a vehicle for
transmission to a mechanism for collaboration, social
connectedness and culture building. As we know and as you
can imagine, these are all incredibly complex questions
that do not have simple answers and they will take some time to
explore and address as we move forward. And this is all part of
taking education from responding to the disruption
to re imagining and creating positive change for the future
of learning. Now, education systems have always been in a
state of continuous evolution and reform to respond to learning
research as well as to economic and social changes and demands.
We've seen a lot of digital transformation over the past 10
years, but COVID-19 has accelerated the transformation
and we've seen years worth of change in just a matter of weeks
and months. So this acceleration has brought a tremendous amount
of disruption, but as well as an incredible opportunity, and it's
really important, especially in this moment, to recognize the
stress that this has caused for families, the students and the
teachers and educators all around the world. So I also want
to say a big thank you to all of the educators who just gone done an
incredible job and gone out of their way to keep the students
engaged in learning and found new and innovative ways
to do that, so just a heartfelt thank you at this point as well.
On the other side of this acceleration of change also
really brings the opportunity to imagine the future of
education. How do we want to move forward and how can we
take the learnings from the last several months into what
we want the future of education to be like? And
there are a few key elements of this transformation that
will play a very critical role as we move forward.
So soon after everything changed in the spring, we started
working with the education experts at New Pedagogies for
Deep Learning to learn from examples around the world, and
to develop insights to help schools and systems outline a
strategy for moving through the crisis and into a future focused
system. This work has been summarized in the paper
Reimagining Education: From remote to hybrid learning.
As part of this work, we found and identified three key phases
that schools, universities and education systems are having to
navigate. In the first moment it was all about how to respond to
the crisis and the disruption in the most timely manner.
Then we saw a transition phase and had to think about the next
school year and then to take all of those learnings to reimagine
education in a sustainable way for the longer term. So let's
take a quick look at each one of these phases in more detail.
If we look at the first phase of respond, this was the initial
emergency response that organizations implemented in the
early months of physical schools closing. In this phase,
schools and universities had to move extremely quickly, so it
was all about that fast
response. A great example is the University of Bologna in Italy.
As we all know, Italy got hit very hard very early in the
pandemic, so the University of Bologna moved 90% of their
classes to remote learning via Teams within just four days.
That's 30. That's 3600 classes for 87,000 students in just four
days, so a tremendous achievement by everyone at the
University of Bologna to keep
all of those students engaged in
learning. If we look at the K12 side and back here in the US,
the largest school district in Kansas, Wichita public Schools
was able to respond really quickly as well.
The district includes 94 schools, more than 50,000
students, and more than 10,000 teachers and staff.
So when schools closed in the spring, they accelerated their
plans to get devices into the hands of the students and were
able to deploy 32,000 devices in just five days.
In addition, they personalized each students device with
applications customized based on the students classes, and that
personalization is such a critical aspect, especially in
remote learning to really cater to the way each student learns
and make sure everyone is making
progress. So their commitment to students continues continued
with the focus on enabling regular classroom interactions
as much as possible using Microsoft Teams and trying to
replicate that sort of personal interaction by seeing each other
and by leveraging all the collaboration aspects that teams
provides for. Rob Dickson, the district school CIA CIO gave us
this fabulous quote that you can obviously read on the slide and
just bringing out that social aspect of learning and having
those meaningful conversations in a classroom setting or as
close as a classroom setting that is possible. So also huge
thank you to the entire team at the Wichita Public School
District. Now if we forward to the transition phase, this is a
really critical planning phase when education leaders look at
what are the options for reopening, be it in a fully
remote setting, in a hybrid and remote setting or fully in
person. And a lot of schools and school systems are still in this
phase now, or keep going back to that phase as things change, and
that's where educators are working to provide a safe and
healthy environment for the students and the staff.
And continuing to evaluate and improve their systems for
delivering quality learning for
all. There's a recent study from Manchester St Research called
Disruptions and Opportunities: Key lessons from the spring of
2020 and what they found was that for remote learning to be
really effective, there must be meaningful engagement and
interaction between the students and the teachers and the
teachers need to be able to accurately assess the student
progress to see where and how they can best help the students
in their education journey
in a remote setting.
The study also found that teachers that were using
Microsoft Teams were 29% more likely to describe most of their
students as highly engaged. We also found that those users were
on average 23% more likely to say they feel confident in their
ability to assess the learning outcomes while teaching
remotely. And for they were 42% more likely to collaborate
with other teachers to share information and learnings. And
I think particularly this last point is really critical,
because again, there was no playbook for how to do this.
This is a pandemic that hit, and so having the teachers
share and collaborate those best practices and helping each
other move forward was something really really
powerful.
Another really interesting example in this transition phase
is the Miami Dade School District in Florida, and that
illustrates the importance of clear direction in training when
it comes to selecting and rolling out a learning platform. So the
Miami Dade School District had already committed to a Windows
Device plan for the students, and a Microsoft Teams based
learning, delivery and staff communication strategy. That was
already their plan.
And the pandemic forced them to roll out the implementation of
this much faster than they had initially planned, but they were
able to make the transition with their 345 thousand students
across almost 400 different schools and a staff of over
40,000 and keep the students engaged in learning. So it's a
great example of how having a strategy and looking at that in
advance and being prepared and really looking at technology as
that core enabler helped them to them move really, really quickly
when they had to.
Now if we look at the third phase, which is all about
reimagining education, and in this phase, what we see the education
leaders do is building on the best of traditional in classroom
approaches as well as new and innovative practices and
applying the insights and the learnings from the last couple
of months to think about how do we shape a new and flexible hybrid
model where we can take
advantage of what we've learned to find ways to engage the
students in very different ways as we move forward. A great
example for that is the Fresno Unified School District in
California. This district is one of the largest in California and
one of the most economically diverse districts, and they have
been re imagining the district for quite some time with a very
intentionalized, intentional, personalized learning
initiative. The model that they've chosen here is really
centered on student voice choice and collaboration. Combined with
the deployment of technology for every student. So it's this very
student centric approach.
That they've chosen and orchestrated everything around
that. And students who've had teachers involved in the
personalized learning initiative show statistically significant
differences, performing better in six out of 10 subjects,
including math and English,
some of those core numeracy and
literacy skills. We're also seeing this happening across many other
parts of the world, both across K12 and higher education, and
we've chosen a couple of
examples here that we can all learn from. For example, the
Ministry of Education in Senegal, where they had a very
big population of students highly geographically dispersed,
Bringing them together through remote learning that Thomas Alva
Edison School in Argentina and the University of South Florida
here in the US, just to name a few. And the thread that
runs through all of this is how they've really integrated
technology into pedagogy. And looking at that holistic and
aligned model and that will help them move forward in a way that
gives them the flexibility but also the safety for their
Staff and students as they navigate remote and hybrid learning
as we move forward.
So the past seven or eight months have been very difficult
for everyone, but it's really encouraging and inspiring to see
how people around the world have taken up the challenge to adapt
and innovate. So what do we think education will look like
as we move forward?
So as education leaders and educators work together to move
education forward, what we've seen them focus on is on
creating environments that are accessible, equitable, student
centric and powered by technology in a large scale.
So as we think about the priorities in this reimagined
model and with a notion and priority to empower all
learners, what we see evolve is an experience that is
personalized to the specific needs of the students. So again,
a very student centric approach that is socially embedded that
draws on those connections between students and students,
student and teacher, and bringing those pieces together.
That it's inclusive for all learners and all learning
abilities. If you think about just how many students around
the world have learning challenges, speed, dyslexia,
dysgraphia or other challenges, technology can play huge role
here by providing them with tools such as the Immersive
Reader that really helps them to unlock the learning and their
passion for learning and keeping them engaged in learning.
Safety and security is absolutely paramount, especially
in a remote setting, so that's a key consideration for any
learning platform and making sure that that safety and
security is really baked into the entire approach. And finally
that these things can be powered by data and insights. And again,
that's where technology can provide really fascinating
insights for the system leaders. The district leaders, but also
the educators. And most importantly, how other
students progressing, how are my students engaging with the
learning materials and are they making the progress that
they need to? And how can I best help support them? When
can I see that they're struggling? And what is the
best course of intervention and support?
All of these things come together when there is a very
clear strategy between pedagogy and technology and
when its delivered using a unified set of technology
tools.
We all know this is an ongoing journey. And education will
always be in this continuous mode of evolution. Educators
will continue to adapt and integrate new learning
approaches and technologies, and for all of us at Microsoft we
are honored to be a part and a partner on this journey, and I'm
so excited to see the innovations that the partnership
inspires. So thank you again for the opportunity to be with you
today albeit remotely and I hope you're enjoying the rest
of ISTE. And let me just end again on just a big notion of
thank you and gratitude to all the teachers that have done
just incredible work over the last couple of months. So
thank you for keeping the students engaged and enjoy the
rest of ISTE. Thank you.