When I was studying for my first degree at university, the hardest essay I was ever set in the whole three years was “Explain the competing theories about capital in no more than 500 words.” To give you an idea of what that means, 500 words is approximately a side of A4 – not exactly loads of space to summarise what has taken scores of economists and thousands of trees. In this, the third part of this mini-series, I explore how you might use this “less is more” approach in school.

The clock is ticking...As Shakespeare said, “Brevity is the soul of wit”. I’ve looked at the idea of “less is more” before, in an article entitled Technology and communication: less leads to more. But here, I just want to suggest a few uses for it in school, including the staffroom.

Talking to colleagues

In my opinion, it’s crucial to be able to explain how technology could benefit them, either personally or in their teaching. But not just explain, but do so in a couple of minutes – and certainly no more than five.

What I’m saying is that it’s good to develop an elevator speech for ed tech. Actually, several elevator speeches, to cover a number of contingencies:

“I already get great grades for my kids, so why do I need to bother with this stuff?”
“I haven’t got time to learn this stuff because I have to spend too much time marking books”
“How can technology help me teach X better?”
“Go on, show me something I can do with technology that is going to knock me off my seat, and that I can apply in my next lesson!”

Over to the kids

Setting a 5 minute limit is great for use with students:

What is computing all about? What is it in a nutshell?” (See the video below in this regard.)
Make a 5 minute video explaining how you can keep safe online.
Answer 20 questions in 5 minutes on the subject of X.
Create a set of instructions for clearing a printer jam/creating a flyer/etc etc. Here is Freedman’s 5 Minute Rule:

Freedman’s 5 minute rule

I invented this rule when I was a head of educational technology and educational technology Co-ordinator in a secondary (high) school. The way I saw it, someone should be able to come into my computer suite, log on, do some work, print it out and save it and log off, all in the space of 5 minutes even if they had never set foot in the school before. I set up systems to enable that to happen, and it was highly successful.

What a contrast to an occasion in my next job. I visited a school where I was, in fact, well known, and asked if I could use a computer for five minutes just to type up some notes. The conversation then went like this:

Ed Tech Co-ordinator: How long will you be here today?

Me: Erm, a couple of hours, probably, why?

ETC: OK, I'll set the password to time out at 2 pm, that should give you an extra 30 minutes or so.

Me: Right. What is it?

ETC: Your username will be mydogisacat, and your password will be t43egi98sp97

Me: I'll just write that down

ETC: No, we don't like people writing it down, it doesn't set a good example to the students.

Needless to say, by the time I got to the computer room, which had to be unlocked, I'd forgotten all this, and by that time the ETC was teaching. I had to find a teaching assistant to help me. All in all, it took me 40 minutes to get on to a computer to do 5 minutes work. Now, I understand about the need for security, but puh-leeeze! This is a school, not the Pentagon! It is perfectly possible to set up guest user accounts which give no access at all to students' areas.

The “5 minute test” (which doesn’t have to be a test!) can be really useful, very informative and quite fun. It’s easy to implement, and all you have to do really is think of some more uses for it. If that’s a bit challenging, given the busy-ness of school in the first week of term, why not ask the kids to come up with some ideas of using the 5 minute test? Giving them a limit of 5 minutes, of course!

I think you may find the video below quite enjoyable. It dates from the late 70s.