Pedagogy First, Technology Second: Free Guide

Last week I said I’d say more on the day. Today is the day.

When I started this six weeks ago, I wasn’t sure how it would go. The idea was simple enough: take the areas of teaching and learning that matter most, retrieval, formative assessment, feedback, questioning, explanations and modelling, metacognition, ground each one properly in the research rather than in whatever happens to be trending, come up with 24 ways each can help, consider how and where technology could assist, and see if people found it useful. One a week. See how it goes. Now we have it: Pedagogy First, Technology Second: The Complete Free Guide.

I’ve been pleased as punch with how the series has gone down, and at the thought of it being used in classrooms, staffrooms, and CPD sessions I’ll never see (although if you’re looking for someone to run one… 😉 ). I’ve always believed in paying it forward and sharing.

Pedagogy First, Technology Second: the complete guide

From today, all six come together into one free guide: Pedagogy First, Technology Second. All 144 strategies in a single place, and alongside each topic, the writing of the infographics never had room for. Not a tidy summary. The thinking. Why forgetting is what makes learning stick. Why a test with a kinder name isn’t formative assessment. Why telling has never once been the same as explaining. And running through all of it, the question I actually care about: not what the tool can do, but whether the learning needed it. Sometimes a mini whiteboard is considerably better than a virtual one. Sometimes the virtual whiteboard wins hands down. The job isn’t to pick a side, it’s to understand the why for each scenario and reach for the right tool for the job. As I always say, my Bananarama principle holds: it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it, and that’s what gets results.

That’s really the whole argument, and it’s the one I have always come back to. Start with the pedagogy. Work out what the learning actually needs. Then, and only then, ask whether a tool helps. It sounds almost too obvious to say out loud, yet it’s the easiest step in the world to skip, not because anyone’s getting it wrong, but because the pressure of the job can often leave you with little time to learn how to use technology, let alone consider its pedagogical value.

The thinking is important, though, particularly in a world of AI.

Why the thinking matters, especially with AI

I wrote about a bowling machine last week. The batter who looks magnificent in the nets, getting the same amazing hit against the same delivery, then walks out to face a real bowler, and the shot’s all over the place. The practice that felt most productive taught the least. The same trap is everywhere in learning, and it’s everywhere in how we’re tempted to use AI, the most accommodating bowling machine ever built. A smooth answer arriving without effort feels like understanding. It isn’t. That tension runs underneath all six guides, even the ones written long before any of us were thinking about large language models.

A quick word on how this was made, because I’d rather be straight about it and it seems like I’m anti AI, obviously, I’m not! I used AI throughout this process, as a thinking partner, to curate, to synthesise, to help build the thing. It didn’t think, or write, for me. The work is mine, the arguments are mine, and the judgement calls are mine. I mention it only because the whole point of a distillation is that the work is already done. A consommé takes far more than opening a tin, and it’s meant to. If the thinking underneath saves you even a little of the reading, the weighing-up, the where-does-this-go that went into it, then it’s done its job, and you can get on with the most important bit, the teaching.

On accessibility

There’s one part of this I care about more than the rest, so I thought I should talk about it. Throughout the series, each infographic went out as an image. The trouble with an image is that a screen reader can’t read it; there’s no text for it to reach, so anyone relying on one is locked out. For the guide, I’ve rebuilt every infographic in HTML, the content made as actual text and then rendered it all out to PDF. That means a screen reader can get to all of it. Every card, every strategy, every thing. If we’re going to keep saying accessibility matters in EdTech, the least we can do is build as though we mean it.

Now, the part I’ve been looking forward to writing.

Big thanks

Before any of this went out, I asked a few people whose judgment I trust to read it and tell me straight: Olly Lewis, Al Kingsley, Emma Darcy, Jacqui Hughes, Dr Zoë Elder, Gemma Gwilliam, Tom Sale and Jo Fletcher-Saxon. Thank you, all of you, for your kind words and feedback. Thank you.

So here it is, yours. Free to download, print and share across your school or your whole trust, under Creative Commons, the same as every infographic in the series. No paywall. No sign-up. No catch. Honestly, the only thing I’d ask is that it stays free for the next person: please don’t rebrand it and sell it on. Other than that, take it, use it, make it your own.

If you lead teaching and learning, I hope it gives you and your team a shared, evidence-informed foundation to build from. If you’re in the classroom, it’s a year of things to try, every one grounded, every one with a clear action attached.

Bring this to your school or trust

And if you find it useful, if a department picks it up, or it sparks something across your school or trust, that’s often where I come in. Helping schools turn this kind of thinking into something that changes classroom practice, through keynotes, INSET, or working together over time, is what I do. If that would help you too, drop me a line via ictevangelist.com/contact, I’d love to hear from you.