As someone who cut their teaching teeth in Scotland, I now spend most of my time as a consultant with school systems overseas hearing words of admiration at what we have achieved in learning and technology this past decade.

It was Scottish schools that were first in Europe to blog. It was a Scottish school – mine, at Musselburgh Grammar School – that created Europe’s first podcast from an educational institution and, suitably, it was in collaboration with a school in Poland on the subject of breaking down barriers to learning, across borders and through technologies.

It is natural – and thrilling – that our national learning technology programme has today made it clear that this heritage and ambition is no longer the work of a minority. It has come to recognise what every other great online learning provider has come to realise: if you want to engage an audience, particularly young people, you have to go and meet them in the places where they hang out online already.

Five years ago, there was a compelling set of arguments against this: social networks are unsafe places, young people don’t want to be ‘learning’ in what is a ‘social’ network or video game, teachers don’t have the skill to use these ‘free but clunky’ social media on the web.

In 2011, these arguments hold less value for Scotland’s education.

At least three quarters of teens use a social network daily and have become familiar with the sophisticated social and content connections they can help us make. Young people are avid users of social networks, spending more time online now than they do watching the television.

And they already spend most of that screen time learning (http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/market-data-research/media-literacy/medlitpub/medlitpubrss/ukchildrensml/). They want their “official” online learning space at school to match the quality of and link into the same well-designed, compelling media they are already used to.

Scotland has also pioneered learning with video games, and shown beyond any doubt that young people have no problem using media designed “for play” for learning, as anyone with a child hooked on learning challenges inside Moshi Monsters or reading through Made In Me will know. The public purse will never be able to invest in recreating what the commercial sector does so well already – and so we must build on what they do so well.

Education has the choice to educate, to show young people how they can maintain a positive digital footprint through the digital platforms they use today and the ones they’ll come across tomorrow, or put its head in the sand and hope someone else will show them. Most parents, four out of five, believe that their child already gets taught well how to use the web safely. Now, thanks to a Glow that will more closely resemble the real world of the web, Scotland is going to create one of the most digitally literate populations in the world, leading the way in the media literacy skills required to harness social networks and cutting edge web technology in a positive manner.

The Government has today added a turbo-boost of innovation in the education space by insisting on a national technology programme that meets the ever more ambitious expectations of our young people, their teachers and their families.

Ewan McIntosh
Education consultant

Related information

Watch the video - Cabinet Secretary for Education Michael Russell discusses the future of Glow – the schools website