Educators and developers must work together to ensure EdTech makes space for dialogue and discussion.

Building an educational app for my portfolio has got me thinking about the low-tech fundamentals of high-quality teaching.

As an ex-primary school teacher embarking gingerly into a new career in web development, I have previously drawn several parallels between the two professions.. and it’s no surprise that while building my portfolio for potential employers I looked to the teaching world for a unique app to explore. Aware of my technical limits, I decided to start off small and pick a single activity from my previous ‘teacher’s toolkit’ that I could explore and adapt: eventually I picked the Diamond Nine activity.

Diamond Nine is an oral language strategy that encourages debate, problem-solving and critical-thinking skills. It’s a deceptively simple concept: students evaluate nine different concepts or statements and arrange them into a diamond pattern from most important/significant to least (see example). It’s the diamond pattern that elevates this activity from other sorting tasks: the formation has a clear ‘first’ and ‘last’, but in between those two selections there can still be ambiguity: students are forced to make some key decisions about placement, but don’t need to waste time debating whether something should come in, say, 5th or 6th.