A researcher is recommending caution over schools' growing use of online platforms and videos for teaching.

This country's teachers were among the biggest users of IT in the classroom before the pandemic, and lockdown learning has made it even more widespread.

Teachers told RNZ tools like video tutorials are useful and helped them ensure classroom time is used well.

But some parents are not convinced.

Megan Smith told RNZ she's not impressed by the maths videos her daughter was asked to watch in her final year of primary school.

"It was American and they talked fast and it wasn't at a child's level. It wasn't engaging and it wasn't fun. It was just rattling off how to do it," she says.

Remuera Intermediate principal Kyle Brewerton says his school used video tutorials as a way of "front-loading" information to children as homework followed by in-class work with their teacher.

"It's making better use of time. We know and we hear all the time that schools are time poor. There are so many things that are required to happen during the school day and so many students in the school class. This is about efficiency.

"The benefit is you can rewatch it. So if you don't get it the first time round, unlike the classroom where you have to stop the entire class and say 'please teacher, re-explain that whole thing just because I didn't get it', you can watch it and re-watch.

"If you're still not sure then you can still go to the teacher."

Massey University professor Jodie Hunter says New Zealand schools use technology more than schools in other countries.

Hunter says in maths that was partly because some of the online resources are very good, but those resources shouldn't be a solution for poor subject knowledge on the part of teachers.

"The teacher is the person who needs to be teaching the children, not relying on online resources. And my second part of that where I do get concerned is for a lot of the online resources and tools that you can find online, they're not necessarily quality-assured."

She says teachers are turning to online resources because they were not getting enough locally-made resources from the Education Ministry.

Auckland teacher Subash Chandar K says he has been making maths video tutorials for 10 years and last year his videos received one million views.

Chandar K says there are two main reasons students and teachers use the videos - they provide students with a means of learning concepts when they are ready, and they provide explanations that might succeed where other explanations have failed.

"You can't tell me that all 30 kids in your class are ready to learn at that exact moment when you're about to teach that concept to them. There's no guarantee that's happening and even the best teacher would say that that's actually not possible, that all 30 kids would understand the full concept they're trying to explain.

"Just because a teacher says 'hey go watch a video', doesn't mean that they actually don't know the stuff. It's basically 'well when you're ready to learn, here's a little resource'."

'I have a lot of concerns about it'

Auckland University academic Dr Lisa Darragh is studying the use of online platforms and apps for maths teaching.

Darragh says before the pandemic she was "quite stunned" by the widespread use of online platforms in New Zealand schools.

That prompted her to survey schools, with 80 per cent of 500 that responded saying they used the programs and she's sure their use has grown since the pandemic began in 2019.

"The marketing of these programs has really exploded throughout the entire world so its quite likely we have greater levels of uptake."

Darragh says the marketing is often "hard sell" and the programs suit the way many New Zealand teachers run their classrooms, especially in primary schools.

"We have quite a common practice where the teachers work with some of the children whilst the other children are working independently and I think these programs fit into that style where you can park some children in front of the devices working on these platforms while the others are working with the teacher. I think also when you have the devices in the classroom then you also want to be using them."

It's difficult to know how effective the programs are because it's hard to divorce their impact from the impact of the teacher, she says.

"Children find them fun, they're engaging and motivating. The ones that are pitched at primary schools are really quite gameified and so there's a lot of doing maths via a game but also because of these reward systems embedded into the games."

Darragh says a game might be a good way to practice, but she warns there are downsides.

"I have a lot of concerns about it.

"The removing of the teacher from the equation is highly problematic... The most important thing for a learner is the relationship with the teacher. The teacher knows the child, the teacher can provide the right kind of learning for that child, they can create a really positive learning environment in the subject of maths and that is the number one thing and so as soon as you take the teacher out of the equation you've already got an impoverished learning situation."

However, Darragh says the principals and teachers she surveyed insist the programs do not replace teaching and are used only to support teaching.

She's also worried the platforms are commercial, so they are designed to make money and collect huge amounts of data about how users are using them.

Advances in artificial intelligence are allowing the programs to respond immediately to students' interaction with the programs, she says.

"These platforms can start to make decisions about teaching that cut the teacher out of those decisions and I think that's a trend we should worry about."

Darragh says the idea of a personalised approach to learning is a key part of the marketing for many of online platforms but she warns a personalised approach will not reflect local issues and contexts.

"We're much better off having our teaching tailored to place and tailored to community," she said.

The Education Review Office says it could not talk about the digital tools teachers use in the classroom or how effective they are, but it could confirm that teachers are using them more following the disruptions caused by Covid-19.

There's a big uptake in the use of digital classroom tools during the first lockdown which is maintained to some extent, with the biggest relative increase in low decile schools, it said.

ERO says schools have told it they are planning to make more use of digital tools in the future.

-John Gerritsen/RNZ.