Championing Sustainability

Can you please introduce yourselves?

Robin:
I’m Robin Yeats, and I’m the Head of School at Greenside Primary School. We’re a state‑run primary school in Shepard’s Bush in the center of London. We have 228 students, a very mixed multicultural group — almost 50% of the students speak English as an additional language. And myself and James Tilden, we lead the drive on integrating Apple technology into our school.

James:
Hi, I’m James Tilden, a year 4 teacher at Greenside. I’ve been here since January 2019, and two years ago, I took on the role of being the ICT (Information, Communication, Technology) lead here. Because Greenside has 1‑1 iPad devices, the role requires not just device management, but also integrating technology into the curriculum and coaching teachers who feel less confident with technology to find new and creative ways of using iPad in class.

Why is sustainability important at your school?

Robin:
At Greenside, one of our main strands is being world‑ready and making sure our students are the positive citizens and leaders of tomorrow. World‑ready means students are able to have formulated opinions, know how they can make a positive impact on the world, and have the agency and confidence to go out and do it. These students will be the future stewards of the planet, so it's our responsibility to ensure that we educate them on how to look after the planet and how to look after themselves. A lot of our sustainability work is encouraging students that they can make a positive difference, even on a small scale. Small, marginal gains will make a massive difference.

Our ethos is: Everything is learning and learning is everything. We have that passion towards technology and integrating it into everything we do, hence why we have a 1‑1 iPad set up from year 1 right through to year 6. So there's no reason that sustainability can't be integrated into everything we do at Greenside as well. In fact, our first step into sustainability work was born out of the brave idea that we would run our own kitchen. The food quality from the local caterer was pretty poor and we wouldn't accept a poor math lesson or poor English lesson, so why accept a poor lunch? We decided to take over the kitchen ourselves and source fresh, seasonal vegetables locally grown in the UK.

From there, integrating sustainability into our curriculum wasn’t difficult; it just takes a bit more thought and a real desire to factor it in. For example, when we first started brainstorming, we looked at the existing curriculum and asked, “What’s the sustainability angle?” There’s never any time in the curriculum for new things, but we decided to integrate a geography curricular unit for every year group through the lens of sustainability and consumption of food and fashion. We picked different food staples, like rice and corn, and focused on different places around the world that grew it. We could tick off National Curriculum geography strands like climate zones and land use, but all through the lens of sustainability by asking the students, “How are these foods grown and why? Are there better ways to grow it?” We didn’t create extra time to be able to “do” sustainability; it was integrated as part of our geography work.

Now, when our planning sheet goes out to teachers each half‑term, there's a required question: Where does sustainability come into your planning? Once sustainability is non‑negotiable to all teachers, slowly but surely, it eventually becomes embedded. And now we’re at a point where, as opposed to us saying, “Can you please do it,” our teachers are coming up to leadership and saying, “I'd really like to do this with climate change — can I?” It's a mindset shift.

James:
I’ll add that the success of our sustainability initiatives is also about the use of our school space. At Greenside, we do a lot of outdoor learning and a big part of that is students and community members tending to the school garden. When it comes to harvest time, they get to go and pick the vegetables that've been growing all summer and get to take them down to the kitchen to be cooked into lunch.

It gives students an understanding that education is not just about knowing your timetables; their education is to go out in the world. It's about thinking beyond the walls of the school and having students take ownership and understand the importance of their education — that eventually they won't have us teachers to guide them.

How has technology enhanced your sustainability‑focused projects?

Robin:
We want our school to be innovative and on the cutting edge of pedagogy. We want to take risks and try new things, and a huge element of that has always been technologically driven. In terms of using Apple technology in the school, we always ask ourselves, “What’s the best way we can get our students to be creative and collaborate?” Because we know that their future will inevitably be filled with technology, so if we're not integrating technology into their world, we are doing them a disservice in terms of our world‑ready mission.

One way we integrate technology into the classroom is in the whole school’s Soil Project. We have a link with a farmer in Cornwall who has massive fields. Students realize that while we’re figuring out how to grow the tastiest vegetables in our school garden, this farmer is asking the same questions about his soil and produce. From our school gardens, we FaceTimed him on iPad while he was walking through his field in Cornwall and the students asked him about his soil pH levels. Every class had five or six different types of tests that they carried out on the soil to be able to scientifically track the impact of our work. We would Airplay the tests taking place in the garden to the classroom using iPad for all to see in real time. The students put the data in collaborative documents, like Numbers spreadsheets or Google Docs, to be able to create the charts to analyze our soil quality progress. Our intention was to give students real‑world science investigation experience that was driven by sustainable practices, but also had a real purpose to them. They grow the vegetables that go into their lunches. Seeing the farmer and then connecting their work to the food on their plates helps students realize that this project is not just us in their classroom — it’s something that's happening around the world. It brings it to life for them.

The technology we have also allows us to have a really significant impact on the school’s consumption. We asked ourselves how we can use iPad and AppleTV in the classroom to decrease our overall paper use. One way we do this is by having a weekly arithmetic test that used to be printed out on paper. Now we have the tests sent to their iPads or we mirror the screen on AppleTV, so we immediately save 228 sheets of paper every single week — and there are four or five different versions of those digitalizations every week. We track our energy, water, and paper consumption as a school so teachers and students know it. There’s a financial saving and an environmental saving.

James:
We’re using Apple technology as a tool to first and foremost drive any kind of lesson. It becomes a pedagogical tool that teachers go to first and can be way more efficacious and efficient than using a bunch of paper. A good example of this is a project where students represented sustainability through collaging. They used an app to create collage art and there were a couple of really brilliant pieces that are actually adorning our school walls. We easily could have brought magazines in and had students tear out pieces. But it was more efficient and definitely way better for environmental goals to represent sustainability using iPad.

Tell us about your school’s podcast.

James:
The podcast is called Radio Greenside and it’s on Apple Podcasts. It’s our official podcast channel with different shows we publish to it. There’s a special episode called COP26 Special Report from November 2021. The whole school was learning about COP26 and the importance of world governments coming together to solve climate change. And so I invited some students to come and learn how to be a podcast host for that episode. And then in April 2022 there was a Sustainability of Food and Fashion episode connected to the geography learning Robin mentioned earlier. At the end of each week of that geography unit, everyone from year 1 to year 6 wrote a reflection in the form of a podcast script. I chose some students and helped them edit their scripts and rehearse at the end of that half‑term. We recorded it on our equipment and edited it using GarageBand on MacBook Air. So we used technology to create a podcast which is a really great multimedia report of their learning. Getting it published on Apple Podcasts gives the students a global platform to project their learning, and helps build their confidence to share their learning and understanding of the world.

Most of the episodes on the channel are our school’s monthly newsletter, which I call Radio Newsletters. We’ve shortened the PDF newsletter and now several items get put on the podcast version by students. This way, students can share learnings from their classroom and then project their learning to the Greenside community. It's giving ownership back to the students, and it works well to lessen the workload for us administrators.

What impacts and responses have you seen from your podcasts and other sustainability initiatives?

Robin:
We try to show the students they can have an impact on the world, even on the small little patch that is Greenside Primary School. If you can do it here on a small scale, when you go out into the world, the choices you make will have an impact on an even bigger level. One of my favorite anecdotes that demonstrates this was a year 6 student who came in during the Sustainability of Food and Fashion unit. She said she was shopping with her mom who was about to buy clothes made of synthetic fabric and she told me, “I stopped my mom from buying anything until she listened to the latest episode of Radio Greenside that I’m in, because she clearly missed the episode!”

James:
That’s a great example of how we want students to have the sense that they are not just students; they're citizens of the world. Because on the podcast, their voices go out globally, and I mean that literally — if you look at our stats, our audience is all over the world. When students are able to write for audiences beyond the classroom, it gives them new skills and a bigger platform to talk about their opinions on real‑world problems of sustainability, like in our COP26 episode. Technology like iPad helps them investigate different elements of the world, and the podcast helps them project their learning out there as well. Our vision has been to have students come up and ask to make their own podcast, and it’s happened. A few who were particularly keen on reading came together and volunteered to host a new show, the Greenside Bookworm Show.

And the parents love it. One big draw of the Radio Newsletter is that audio is easier for some parents who have English as an additional language to understand. Two days ago, I met a parent in the staff room who works here and she told me that people in their parent group chat were commenting that they really liked the latest episode of Radio Greenside and wanted to hear more. I’ve gone to conferences sharing this work and now I’m talking with some schools in North London about how they could bring podcasting to their schools.

Robin:
And on the food aspect of our sustainability, all the local produce that we get and food we grow in the garden either goes to the school lunches or the lunches we make on Fridays for the local homeless shelter. Everything else gets composted back into our garden. We also do community outreach at Greenside making bread in our micro‑bakery in the kitchen, using wheat grown from our garden or flour from our organic supplier who uses regenerative agricultural practices. We have a bake sale on Fridays where we bake a whole bunch of sourdough and cinnamon buns in the kitchen and sell it to the community as a pay‑what‑you‑can model. Everybody has the right to access good quality food and not the stuff at the grocery store with 17 ingredients — our bread is just flour, water, and yeast. At some point everyone in Greenside has made bread; even our caretaker has fed the sourdough starter.

James:
If you walked around during dismissal time on Friday, you’d see students with loaves of sourdough, eating it straight up! I think they now have a really great appreciation for the quality of food.

What advice would you give a leader who wants to take the first step in prioritizing sustainability at their school?

Robin:
Make it non‑negotiable. When you're mapping out your values from the top, ask what it is that you're passionate about the students learning. What do you absolutely believe in? Then make it part of everything and make it non‑negotiable. And look at your community, your context, your area, and decide what's going to work for you. We chose to focus on food, but your starting point has to be something that is relevant to you and your context and your community for it to really have buy‑in. And it has to be consistent. If you want to do something about sustainability and you only tack on a little one‑week sustainability project, that’s great, but it will fall by the wayside. We’re continually trying to create a culture where sustainability questions and sustainable practices are at the forefront of teacher and student thinking. We make sure these are questions being asked all the time, so that we are educating people who will think about these environmental questions all the time.

James:
And once all the teachers begin seeing it on a daily basis, it becomes impossible to ignore. If you were to have a new teacher step in the door tomorrow who had no idea how to teach sustainability, they'd be inundated with how people think about sustainability and they'd find ways to incorporate themselves in it. Because it is just a daily existence here.

Robin:
As James said, you come in and you'll see lots of different ways people want to tackle sustainability, and then it slowly starts to have ripple effects within the school and beyond as people inspire others.

One of the things I always remind people about Greenside is that we are seven years along in our journey. So when people see that we have a school garden, student podcast, and zero‑waste food production in our own kitchen with a micro‑bakery, they respond, “How could I possibly get there?” But each one of those little elements came from an individual building on until, seven years later, we've got all of these initiatives.

So the starting point has to be, first, that sustainability is important enough to be non‑negotiable. And second, you think about your students, your community, your site, and the technology resources you have or can implement to support everything. For us, we tied sustainability with this deep commitment to food, which is great because everyone can take a little bit back home with them. This is our main driver at Greenside — to create a holistic learning program based around experiential learning, and driven through technology, food, nature, and sustainability. All these elements help students grasp that their marginal, everyday gains are really, really important. Even though you think it might be something small, you are making a difference.

Please introduce yourself.

I'm Brad Bergsma, the Vice President of Information Technology for Northwest Kansas Technical College in Goodland, Kansas. We offer 18 different technical programs, many of which are closely tied to agriculture, which is the primary industry in the region. What’s unique about us is most of our curriculum is driven by our industry partners who form an advisory committee for each program, so our students are learning skills needed as soon as they graduate.

We attribute our success to our small classroom sizes and strong faculty, plus all students have access to technology like iPad and computer labs equipped with Macs. We offer programs on everything from diesel technicians all the way to cloud computing and precision agriculture.

Our precision ag program in particular is technology‑heavy because it’s about constantly learning and incorporating new technology, like GPS mapping, soil mapping, and sensors, to develop efficient agricultural practices. We test these things on our college farm to see what works best for our climate and plants. We teach students to be well‑equipped for these types of technological advancements so they can be successful in the industry as it rapidly progresses. Even before they graduate, they’re implementing tech solutions in the local community that are both more economical for farmers and more sustainable for the region.

Tell us more about the precision agriculture program. How do sustainable values tie into the program and the industry in general?

In our part of the world, it's really arid and windy. There's a growing need to find solutions to reduce water usage and the application of herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizer. Advancing technology in the past few decades has been driving this resource efficiency, and our precision ag program started because our industry partners were reacting to those rapid shifts in the industry.

Sustainability starts literally from the ground up — sorry for the bad pun. It begins with soil health and involves taking a smaller, pixelated view of what your field actually looks like. For example, we now have the ability to map and precisely plant from zero to 100,000 seeds with sub‑centimeter precision. In the past, you would see one giant field of brown dirt, but with soil mapping, you may find the field has six different soil types. From there, you can analyze soil health and nutrient availability within those smaller pixels and make decisions based on the data. The technology has advanced so much that 20 years ago, tractors were glorified bicycles. Now they look like an airplane cockpit and we need skilled people to run them. Our program wants students to ask what they can do to help the soil become healthy enough to produce and continue producing.

At the end of the day, our producers are thinking about how they manage their farms so that the soil and water resources of the region will be healthy for generations. You'd be hard‑pressed to find any grower that doesn't have plans for kids and grandkids to come back and run the family farm. The end goal is we want to keep this business and our land healthy so kids and grandkids can come back.

Can you talk more about how technology has shaped the industry and how your program integrates technology into learning?

One of my favorite classroom tools is a programmable indoor grow lab, about 20 feet long by 10 feet wide. Coding is a big initiative for everyone right now, and teaching the logic for this grow lab is quite simple. The coding uses blocks of easy programming to make commands. You can conduct small‑scale experiments in the garden and test elements like soil moisture and light intensity. We run experiments and ask questions like, “Which type of plant grows best in this soil? What if we weed in this area and not that one?” The grow lab is connected to an iMac and the soil scanner we have is hooked up to an iPad that tests aspects of the soil, like pH and nitrogen content.

We also have an outdoor college farm that’s around 240 acres where we test new technology and techniques and have been able to drastically reduce water usage. For example, we’ve tested water probes that connect to an iPad where you can monitor soil moisture and root activity to start reducing the amount of irrigation. In the past, the rule of thumb was to turn the water on when the soil gets dry on top. But the water probe reading on iPad can show that there’s plant development 2 feet down and that the soil profile for water is relatively full. So even if your soil looks dry on the top 2 inches, there isn't a need to water the plant. Everyone knows about the water problem in our arid climate and if the water goes away, we can't live here. So, on the college farm, we can show our community how we implement technology and give them access to come and try the techniques we’ve explored.

We have a really supportive local groundwater management district that's seen our success. Water usage remains an issue in the state, and state management chose to use our area as a model for what other counties could and should be doing. Our students help local growers install moisture probes and help them read data with iPad or iPhone. The farms we worked with last year spanned four counties across about 5,000 square miles, and overall we saw a 20% reduction in water usage. We started with 25 producers, and this upcoming year we’re looking at doubling our impact. There's actually legislation this spring that I anticipate will push other corners of our state to adopt similar practices that we are championing.

If this new technology can help growers be more sustainable and efficient, how do you and your students approach growers who are hesitant to embrace it?

In today's world in agriculture, iPad and iPhone are just part of doing business. Instead of driving 50 miles to check all your sprinklers every morning, you can just check your phone. The industry has shifted towards iPad because it's easy to use and also portable and durable. During planning and harvest, most growers will have yield data, fertilizer application, and other data running on two or even three iPad screens inside their tractors. The whole notion of corporate offices doesn't exist here; most growers around here will tell you their home office is in the front seat of a pickup.

But there’s still a trust issue to embracing new technology. For some more traditional farmers, if it doesn't work the first time, they're done with it. As with all of us, the fear of the unknown can be really difficult, and if we dispel that fear, we have a greater chance of having a positive impact. So we meet these farmers where they’re at. We want our students to be extremely experienced in collecting data and identifying needs, tying in the ability to map and monitor what's going on underneath the soil. Because the mountain of data is no good if you don't do anything with it.

We've received a grant from the Department of Agriculture to expand weekend educational workshops on new technologies and techniques in the area and at conventions, and we now have a dedicated outreach coordinator. But the outreach work doesn't just benefit the farmers, it also benefits our students too.

The precision agriculture program is industry specific, but there are lessons leaders in education can take away about how technology adoption can enable student success. What impact do you want your students to have in the industry?

First and foremost, we want the students to innovate at the frontlines of the industry and be leading the charge because they understand the tech. So while they’re at Kansas Tech, we support our students by putting the latest and greatest in front of them. We have a big, eclectic group of kids from rural areas and the cities, so our goal is to give them exposure and show them what they can do with the right technology, knowing they’re already digital natives. Pardon the pun, but we hope to plant the seed and watch where it grows. In the first year of the program, we give the students a mile‑wide, inch‑deep overview of what technology and insights are available to them. And then in year two, because we have the ability to apply all of that on our farm, we can let them steer themselves and they can use the tools we have to make their own decisions and lead their own learning.

To do this, we needed to get the staff on board too. As we've gone through the years, integrating tech has really become second nature to each one of our programs. We've taken the approach of letting our faculty progress at their own pace. We walked that fine line of guiding them and encouraging them with Apple Teacher resources, but not pushing them over the cliff with it.

Farmers are the ultimate stewards of land. It's in their best interest to make the land as healthy as possible, because the land is providing for them. And even if you talk to the oldest and grouchiest of the farmers, tending the land is like taking care of a child. What often gets overlooked when you start talking about agriculture is that most people don't understand where their food comes from or the food volume that is needed to to feed a global population. Whether it’s from the pure economic basis or from the stewardship of sustainability, I find most farmers really feel that they have a burden to feed the world. Our students and our college are trying to solve for how we can help this industry improve and sustain for another 100 years.