Cymraeg

The Digital Champions

Illustration of a person wearing a virtual reality headset and gloves, surrounded by a spiral of floating screens. The screens show stars, tools, constellations, charts, and abstract symbols. Darlun o berson yn gwisgo clustffonau rhith-realiti a menig, wedi’i amgylchynu gan sŵril o sgriniau arnofiol. Mae’r sgriniau’n dangos sêr, offer, cytserau, siartiau ac arwyddion haniaethol.

The Digital Champions are early adopters of new technology, and prioritise digital skills for their learners. They are comfortable with using and exploring different tech, and in most instances:

  • Use AI tools to streamline their work.
  • Trail new digital tools and technologies in their teaching.
  • Adopt a “digital first” approach.
  • Promote the use of digital tools to colleagues, friends and family.

Resource preferences

Digital Champions are digitally fluent practitioners who are highly engaged with new technologies, tools, and platforms in their teaching practice. For these teachers, resource use goes hand-in-hand with exploration and experimentation, as they are often early adopters of new digital approaches.

These practitioners value platforms and tools that offer interactivity, engagement, and independence for learners. They often draw on multiple digital sources to create dynamic, often blended learning environments, using platforms such as Hwb (especially J2E), Canva, Google Suite, YouTube, BBC Bitesize, Kahoot, Blooket, and ChatGPT. AI tools are particularly popular for generating content quickly or supporting with tasks like comprehension creation, image generation, or vocabulary building.

They are not necessarily wedded to one platform but instead look for tools that:

  • Enhance learner engagement and participation.
  • Enable independent learning and ownership among pupils.
  • Are easy to access, especially in-class.
  • Support differentiation and personalisation.
  • Facilitate multimodal learning using videos, quizzes, games, or interactive tasks.

Resource preferences lean toward platforms that are intuitive for both teacher and learner, offer collaborative potential, or allow learners to explore content themselves.

Common challenges

Despite their enthusiasm for digital tools, Digital Champions face particular frustrations that shape their resource journey. These include:

  • Navigating a crowded landscape of tools and platforms, leading to “rabbit holes” when searching for certain resources.
  • The time investment needed to vet, trial, and adapt new tools, especially for different learner abilities.
  • Finding Welsh-medium or bilingual resources that are interactive or digital remains challenging.
  • Compatibility issues when transferring resources across platforms (e.g., Google vs Microsoft tools).
  • Inconsistent internet connectivity or limited device availability in some schools.
  • Platform fatigue: needing multiple logins or tools to achieve one goal.

There is also a noted challenge in aligning innovative digital resources with traditional curriculum expectations or senior leadership preferences, particularly where worksheets or tangible outputs are still favoured.

Opportunities and recommendations

To best support Digital Champions, resource platforms should position themselves not just as repositories but as toolkits for digital exploration and creativity. In particular they should:

  • Offer curated collections of interactive or digital-first resources such as editable quizzes, games, or collaborative tasks.
  • Build in AI-powered tools that can support teachers to create or adapt content (e.g., AI quiz generators, comprehension creators, image generation).
  • Provide clear filtering options for digital formats that are searchable by resource type (video, quiz, template), reading age, or topic.
  • Develop seamless integrations with classroom platforms like Google Classroom and Teams to reduce switching between systems.
  • Offer clear guidance or walkthroughs on how digital resources can be applied in a Curriculum for Wales context, particularly for those in secondary settings.
  • Provide ready-to-use visual content, interactive templates, and scaffolded resources for independent or group work.
  • Allow communities to contribute to digital resources, including reviews, ideas for classroom use, and examples of pupil-led projects.
  • Encourage adaptive resource models: these can be resources that can flex between independent online learning and in-class collaboration.

Ultimately, supporting Digital Champions is about enabling flexibility, saving time, and inspiring creativity while making sure digital tools remain accessible and inclusive for all learners.

Case study – The Digital Champions

A secondary school teacher embodies the Digital Champions archetype through confident and pragmatic use of digital tools in the classroom. With over 20 years of teaching experience across subjects like IT, Computer Science, Psychology, and the Welsh Baccalaureate, this teacher is deeply embedded in the digital learning landscape.

The practitioner is proactive in seeking out resources from a wide range of platforms, including BBC Bitesize, WJEC, and Teach Computing. Increasingly, AI tools such as ChatGPT and Teachmate.AI are playing an important role in the teacher’s planning: they are used to generate ideas, find up-to-date sources, or create starter materials. However, while enthusiastic about digital innovation, this teacher is clear that technology is only valuable when it meaningfully enhances learning, rather than being used for its own sake.

Adaptation is a key part of this teacher’s practice. The teacher rarely uses resources exactly as found, preferring instead to tweak content to fit specific learners, context, or curriculum requirements. This is particularly important given the need to tailor resources for the Welsh curriculum, rather than relying on materials designed for England.

The teacher’s digital practice is also shaped by an awareness of digital exclusion. Many of the learners have limited access to devices at home, meaning digital tools are primarily used in-class rather than for homework or independent study.

Looking forward, this teacher sees value in:

  • Shared platforms like Hwb for bringing resources together in one place but with improvements to search functions and resources that cannot be easily edited.
  • Resource platforms that better integrate teacher guidance.
  • A platform that allows for a great deal of customisation and provides smart search tools – ideally underpinned by AI – that save time rather than add to workload.