ABOUT ME
I have taught English, history and Computer Applications Technology with a full timetable, register class, duty roster, marking and reports finished at midnight. Then I moved into innovation, which in a school means you are the person who must make the new thing work after the demo is over and the budget is already spent.
Before the digital work I was a writer. A master’s in creative writing, workshops taught at UCT, time at the Wits Writing Centre followed by years of marking and moderating English to matric.
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AI arrived first in the one place I know best. What a child writes, and how you judge whether they wrote it.
Policy is writing too. I have written online safety and social media policy and taught digital citizenship to learners: what you may put online, what you owe the person you are talking to and what happens to a thing once it leaves your hands.
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A policy written by someone who has never handled an incident reads exactly like one. Staff can tell in a paragraph.
A policy is the document you reach for at four in the afternoon, when a parent is in reception and everyone is looking at you.
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I have done this from every side. Training teachers, running parent evenings and working with leadership, who have to be willing to say the thing out loud first. And working with learners as champions, the part most schools skip. A message that comes down from the staff room is an instruction. The same message carried by learners a year or two older reaches the ones you cannot reach yourself.
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A cascade starts at the top. It is only a success once it has reached the bottom.
I am not an AI expert. Nobody is yet, and anyone selling you that title this early is selling you something else. What I am is a specialist in making technology work inside a school, with a longer memory than most of the people currently pitching to you and a reliable instinct for which parts of a wave are still in daily use in three years and which are in the storeroom.
The rest is detail.
