Connected Blog

A child starts planning the storyboard, while another begins cutting some archived film. Two other classmates seek out some images on the net. Each student in this group, like all those students who attend Islay High School, are using their own Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC), which they bring to and from school to provide a continuous portable base for their work.

But this is not just a story about cool gadgetry – this is a school which has changed itself entirely in the past five years.

I was taking in all of this on Friday, the same day the school won Learning and Teaching Scotland’s Ambition Awards at the Scottish Education Awards. I was joined by John Johnston, primary school teacher and blogger from Glasgow’s Sandaig Primary School, whose account shows how visits like these can lead to new practices in schools many miles away. Krysia and Doug Semple also joined us along with John’s Head Teacher; blog posts to follow, I hope…

But what grabbed us all was the scope of change. First, everyone in the school community (that’s students, teachers and parents, too) is part of a grand peer-assessment ring, with the UMPC acting as a show-and-tell hub for the work and discussions that took place at school that day. Using OneNote, students can capture text notes, audio and video from their classes, with teachers as accomplices in the recording of their explanations and discussions. All too often, the thought of having a teacher recorded on the fly by a student would have the teacher confiscating the device doing the recording. Here, it is celebrated, with OneNote allocating each segmentof audio to each relevant paragraph.

Students can be heard sharing secret numerical codes – their machine’s unique IP Address – so that such documents can be shared and edited collaboratively in real time. This is how students brainstormed and created storyboards collaboratively, keeping all their progress for future analysis in their review of their work thus far.

Andy Wallis, the English teacher running this excited film-making adventure, brings the class to a brief pause, to encourage them to video their own discussions for the next few minutes. It’s a real eye-opener for those who have been hogging discussions, providing a spotlight moment for those who’ve been a little quieter until now. As they say, the camera doesn’t lie. Another piece of evidence for for the formative assessment pile.

It’s not just pedagogy that has changed to make learning work here; the timetable has seen the beginnings of change. Wednesday and Friday afternoons are curious times for the uninitiated: students who, when I was at school, even had separate social areas are now collaborating on projects. It’s not uncommon to have a 14 year old S3 student working alongside a 17 or 18 year old sixth former who’s seeking to work through a brand new subject area. Here, the class you are in is decided by your level of attainment, not your age. Twice a week these afternoons offer an opportunity to expand horizons through extended project work.

As John says, it’s the overriding desire to learn which can be felt from every member of the school community that is quite overpowering – you wonder why you’ve not felt it in every school you’ve ever visited. It’s the responsibility that has been transferred to students – when they misuse their UMPCs they are subject to the ‘normal’ rules of engagement you’d find in any school. The technology has changed all the things it should do, and left some elements of school life, rightly, untouched.

This is a school where the introduction of a new piece of technology has helped introduce changes across the rest of the system. Or where the system’s changes led to the necessary introduction of the technology. You see, that’s the other thing. When change is so integrated into everyday life, it’s hard to remember what happened first.

See the rest of the photos from this trip on Flickr.

Update: Doug “DigitalMaverick” Semple has just added his extensive thoughts, too.

Does your technology make learning better? Does it make assessment better? Does it make learning more enjoyable? These are the key questions asked by Professor Richard Kimbell from Goldsmiths when he’s looking at technology, and he found a problem with all three in e-portfolios. They need to change.

Currently, performance portfolios are created as an end result of project work. With teachers who are increasingly aware and communicating what will gain a good grade, we end up with a project and therefore a portfolio which are not real, which are fiction, which have no real sense. It is, says Kimbell, one of the reasons girls do better than boys – girls have more patience and creativity for presenting the results in a well-finished manner.

Cue Project E-Scape: this project was about generating real-time performance portfolios and finding new ways of assessing them. Initially, the idea began on paper.

A change in pedagogy
The tasks are real: repackaging lightbulbs to make the packaging reusable and multifunctional. The results: the box should be hexagonal, with a taper for the narrow end of the bulb. If you get enough of them you would end up with a sphere to surround the lightbulb. You can cut the ends to create lettering or animals which are then projected around the wall. Their projects are entitled "Your name in lights" or "Jack-In-A-Box light". You can see an example of project in this video.

Students, in their projects, are handed a script by the teacher, which choreographs their activity but does not dictate it. It’s a scaffold for some improv. These students end up working like engineers, with the teacher in a technician role: "you could do it this way, or that way, or this way. It’s your call". Teachers hate it, seeing their role reduced in some way from the sage on the stage to very much the guide on the side.

The need to make assessment digital
The project became digital as a result of an argument, an argument between two students about where their project should go. If only the teacher could capture that discussion it would make such a difference to the final assessment, providing a way to fill a gap in the learning process which is rarely assessed, if at all.

E-Portfolios, though, have three core problems. Firstly, they are generally works of fiction, created in a sterile ICT suite or on a laptop in a students’ bedroom, not in the workshop or art room where the action (and learning) was happening. Secondly, It’s a secondhand activity, digitally constructed as an afterthought to the learning itself. Finally, what kids tell you they’re learning is different from what they write down in a portfolio.

So, E-Scapes asked if they could capture, in a portfolio, the learning that was happening in typical, messy, complex classrooms. They answered with handheld learning devices and collaborative co-creation of ideas: ideas are created, swapped around and extended by team-mates. As work is done, step-by-step, the work is uploaded dynamically to the e-portfolio website. Each stage of the learning ‘build’ can be accessed in a browse mode, or examined in greater detail. It’s real-time, so the teacher can see and hear everything, all of the time, act on the spot or react later. You can see more of the process in this video.

How can this be assessed?
One potential methodology is based upon the law of comparative judgement. Think about eye tests, where we are asked which spot is sharper, the one on the left or the one on the right? We’ve only got two options, so we answer which one is better, without considering or knowing why. Taking this further, the E-Scape team, with their especially hard-to-judge non-identical projects, is to use a comparative pairs methodology (pdf). On a very simplistic level, assessment from seven judges is carried out on pairs of projects at a time, each judge marking 17 pieces of work. The judges decide which one is better, and move onto the next pair for the first round.

In a second round, the ‘core’ of median performances are taken and worked on further to create a rank order of evenly spaced performances. Using the resulting curve of performance, grade boundaries can be created retrospectively to award a grade, and the margin of error between the highest and lowest opinion of judges can be seen as clear as a whistle. These large margins of error are down to judges disagreeing, so these portfolios need to be pulled out and looked at further. We can also look at the judges and how consensual each one is with the rest of the judging team (the principle of moderation, which Scottish schools already practice). Those who are too harsh or too ‘easy’ can stimulate discussion as to why a project might be more or less strong. So this formative assessment informs the judges and teachers.

The reliability coefficient of all this? 0.93% It’s virtually faultless, and no assessment system anywhere else comes close to getting this realistic in its outcomes. The team are working now on the third phase pairs being selected automagically after each judgement has been made, making sure that the process is as efficient as possible.

If you want to take more away from this model, the innovation in teaching, learning and assessment, I cannot recommend highly enough the interim reports on the TERU website: Phase 1 and Phase 2. You might also want to watch this 30 minute programme on new e-assessment ideas, where the E-Scape project is featured, and follow Professor Kimbell in discussion on the assessment element of the project in this programme.

Pic: Moleskin PDA

Test your ears on this Scale Ear Trainer which forms part of Ricci Adams excellent theory site. There’s much more to the site than this but, for it to be really useful to pupils, I feel I need to prepare some introductory material to smooth over the differences in UK and US nomenclature.

A few days holiday last month allowed me to catch up with some reading I’d put aside for later. One such blog post concerns the future of the recording industry in the face of technological change.

It is written by Stephen J. Dubner – co-author (along with Steven J Levitt*) of the book Freakonomics – and its off-shoot blog. Dubner sought the opinion of five people with a wealth of experience in the business and pretty much leaves the article to them:

• Koleman Strumpf – professor of business economics at the University of Kansas Business School whose papers include The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales
• Fredric Danned – author of Hit Men: Powerbrokers & Fast Money Inside The Music Business
• George Drakoulias – producer & repertoire executive American Recordings veteran of Def Jam Recordings
• Peter Rojas – founder of Engadget – co-founder of RCRD LBL
• Steve Gottlieb president of TVT Records

It”s quite a lengthy read but very interesting. One thing which emerges is that audiophiles, being a minority, have little say in how things proceed - convenience seems to be the driving force for most consumers. Another, which made me smile, is that many enthusiasts of the 78 didn’t rate the newfangled LP format. Yet another is the that the link to digital downloading and reduced sales is not as straighforward as it might seem.

Meanwhile, at the Scottish Learning Festival it became apparent how important comments are to pupils on their blogs. Nevertheless, most people decline to comment for a variety of reasons and it can be safely assumed that the number of comments posted bears little relation to the number of readers.

Dubner’s post carries 97 comments. Definitely not as straightforward as it seems…

* You can see Steven D. Levitt give a talk at TED entitled Why Do Crack Dealers Still Live With Their Moms - a look at the surprising economic similarities and differences between gang membership and corporate life in America.

Cross-posted at edu.blogs.com

Thanks to the kind people at Core-Ed the video and slides of my last ’season’ of talks on how all of us can lead education and technology change in our schools, Local Authorities and organisations have been put online for all to view. There’s also a Google Video without the slides.

Every time I do a talk or seminar it’s different; in the age of podcasts, vodcasts and conference blogging it’s only a fool or a lazy researcher who says the same thing day in, day out. The main lines of this talk have been popular but two points were raised afterwards which are worth tackling. They are both related, one about the substance of what I showed in the talk and the other on the ‘entertainment only’ value of new technologies. I disagree (of course) with both, because I believe they’re just wrong.

In this version of the talk I have unashamedly concentrated on the final products of learning, giving passing mention to the importance of the changes in process that leads to them. I was, if you like, appealing to the professionalism and attitudes of teachers to think about what the processes might have been, rather than just listing what changes took place.

The second relates as much to the way I present stuff as to the depth of change and transformation these new technologies offer. Yes, they are entertaining, and what’s wrong with that? Yes they increase motivation for being rather fun to use. But they also transform the way we do things because they open collaborative and time-shifting opportunities in learning that have never, until now, been on offer.

I hope these points come through for most people, but any other ideas or feedback you have that hasn’t already been mentioned would be greatly appreciated.

“If they came into my class motivated to learn then I could do anything with them” – Secondary Teacher

The quote implies that the teacher’s job is to motivate so how can we change to create motivatited pupils.

Consider the pupil experience. Following the pupils is like visiting a series of foreign countries… and the pupils cope very well. Would we?

Consider how motivating a teacher you are… and think about which stage of the day you might be at your most motivating! Remember, you can’t do motivation to someone… but you can encourage motivation with them!

If there is a characteristic feature of the motivational teacher, they ‘go high’… they set high expectations, they set the bar high, and then as people begin to perform at that level, they start to remove the scaffolding. This builds nicely into the requirements of Assessment is for Learning. We can allow the children to learn that they can do something. The achievement becomes the motivation.

It is very important to look at changing behaviour if we are to effect change. There are lots of people saying what is wrong, or what needs to be changed, but where are the solutions?

We cannot come up with simple solutions that will work in every situation, so we need to act smarter.

Behaviour Strategy
By focussing on our own behaviour and what we can change, we can help pupils focus on their behaviour and what they can change. This suggests that we should be re-assessing the importance of Social Education and its place in the school… though my more cynical side would argue that better quality lessons being delivered in Social Education would ameliorate the need to raise its importance in the curriculum.

Let’s take some of Guy Claxton’s thoughts.

How pupils avoid learning in school:

1 – become invisible

2 – be disruptive

3 – go stupid

4 – avoid trying

5 – refuse to engage

The key thing is not to take these behaviours personally. Instead, we need to devise strategies for encouraging the pupils to think about motivating themselves. Fortunately we have a handout with 100 ideas to consider. I’ll get to them later and cherry-pick a few for discussing!