Going to the Polls 2016

Going to the Polls 2016 (#gttp16) was organised by Paul Foxall, one of Birmingham University’s Digital and Technology Skills Advisors and aimed to showcase "how the use of interactive technology can enhance the student’s learning experience in the classroom". The event was held at the University of Birmingham on April 20th, 2016 and sponsored by TurningPoint, which the University used, as well as ResponseWare.

The day kicked off with Turning Technologies Distinguished Educator, Dr. Fabio Aricó (@fabioarico), the Senior Lecturer in Macroeconomics at the University of East Anglia, as the keynote speaker. His talk was about the use of Peer-Instruction to develop self-assessment skills and to generate learning gains in a flipped classroom environment. His extremely thorough research was backed up by quantitative data to prove the learning gains achieved. 

Peer-Instruction (PI) as a teaching method was made popular by Eric Mazur (@eric_mazur) and there are many studies on its use alongside the Flipped Classroom approach in STEM subjects. However, there are fewer studies on its use with social science subjects and Dr Fabio Aricó's work clearly adds value to demonstrate the application of PI in the subject of Macroeconomics.

His key messages were:

• Engage in teaching-led research for personal development (Let your teaching lead the research, not the other way around).
• It's not about the technology, it's about the pedagogy and more importantly, it's about the students.
• Be concerned about ethics but do not be discouraged or scared as the students are not according to JISC.
• Choose your demonstrators carefully - the average user of technology may be more convincing than an expert.
• When you move from 'novelty' to 'norm', then everyone can just get on with the learning

Fabio was also to be praised for his overt attempt to raise his learners' epistemologically awareness. The learners were able to see for themselves through the polling data how much better they understood concepts after discussion with their peers and this gave them buy-in to the method of teaching.

Prof. Prem Kumar (University of Birmingham) was up next and presented on the highs and lows of adopting a flipped approach. His humorous but insightful talk was full of encouragement for lecturers to 'try, try and then try again' when it came to implementing the flipped classroom. He labelled the four stages of learning as Clueless, Naïvely Confident, Discouragingly Realistic, and Mastery Achieved, paying homage to the Conscious Competence learning model. In fact, his labels on these four stages are much more sympathetic than the original - no one wants to be labelled 'consciously incompetent'! His struggles with implementing the flipped classroom approach led him to add a stage before Mastery Achieved: Semi-Conscious Competence or Nagging Self-doubt. This is a stage where "you know there's even more about what you don't know, than what you do know." Prem's talk was very much about the challenges he faced and provided the yin to the yang in terms of approaching self-development - rigourous and data-driven like Fabio's approach, or deeply reflective and anecdotal, like Prem's approach. He raised the point that changing practice was no longer an option - improving the student experience and increasing learning gains in a lecture was part of a practitioner's commitment to teaching quality, now driven by the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF).

Prem spent a little time talking about the discomfort of the change in practice in the lecture theatre - having to stand and wait while learners discussed things, or thought about things in silence. Having the presence to 'control' the class while using such disruptive techniques was clearly something that needed to be mastered. 

David Matthew is a learning technologist from the University of Bedfordshire and he talked about 'Textwall for the shy'. His definition of 'shy' was anyone who was previously unengaged in the classroom or felt unable to contribute in some way. Working in the Health and Social Care department at the university, a key conflict of using Textwall with the students was the modelling of practice. The students were likely to have to turn off their mobiles in a Practice situation. However, this also became a good incentive to aid learning, almost as a reward for participating and contributing in class. Like Fabio, the experience was that after the novelty factor had died off, both staff and students could just focus on the learning and the affordances of the tool could be taken for granted. 

Other presentations on the use of clickers were of less interest to me, I must admit, although it does form a necessary part of learning about any technology. 

One presentation that did make me sit up and take notice was Annette Margolis' use of Socrative as an alternative to clickers. Annette works in the Language department (apologiesbif I have got this wrong, but I will follow up and find out!). She engaged us in her Socrative exercise and used it as a way to illustrate how she triggered active learning in the students by making them choose an answer when there was possibly no one right answer. She encouraged us in peer discussion before the results or consensus of the room was revealed and this led to further insights into the way our minds were working. 

Annette inspired me to go away and create an example for Textwall users (Fig 1) to demonstrate how using voting could result in an activity that was higher-order thinking on Bloom's taxonomy. 

Fig 1 - Possible example for ethics discussion, demonstrating how the 'no right answer' technique can be used to trigger active discussion or learning

Designing questions can be a difficult task and questions used to trigger discussions in the lecture are of a different nature to questions used to test knowledge and understanding. When the delegates were polled about whether they thought they needed training on this, the answer was a resounding (and surprising) no. Either the audience was very clued up and pedagogically expert, or they were (in Prem's words) Naïvely Confident.  This topic will probably become another blog post at some point.

There was an overwhelming consensus that the event had been successful and that we should form some sort of online community to support each other in our progress.

I must compliment Paul Foxall and his colleague, Debbie Carter, on their choices of presenters and the range of topics covered, ensuring that all aspects of using student response systems (SRS) were covered as well as could be in a day. I made some valuable contacts, learned much and look forward to participating again in future in the 'polling' community. 

Mini-projects

My favourite mini-projects can be found here:

Flipped Classroom with Textwall

The future of VLEs

'Podcast' about using textwall in a flipped classroom context

Here's a recording of a conversation a fellow Masters student, Ono, and I had this week about using textwall in a flipped classroom context. I've never put the two things together before, so thank you, Ono, for a fabulous idea!
Select this link to listen to the recording (20 min)

Back to basics with marking rubrics

I had the opportunity to work with the Sparsholt College ILT team on Nov 29 on behalf of the JISC RSC SE. They are also involved in the #jtdambassadors project, a joint project between the JISC RSC SE and JISC TechDis.

For the #jtdambassadors project, they have started taking videos of the students in the kitchens as evidence, and Mary's going to look at the easi-speak microphones for the learners to use. They will play back the videos for the learners so they can record their own description as a voiceover. We felt the 'offline' method was better as the learners could take their time recording their voices on to the easi-speak mic rather than feeling pressurised recording a soundtrack over the video. These can then be edited together using Movie Maker.

Sparsholt have a committed ILT team but elearning practice is still not as wide-spread as they would like. Our mission over the two days of training (the other day takes place 6 Dec) was to explore ways of breaking down the barriers to enable good practice to be embedded across the college.

The first barrier is the very significant IPD. (For those who don't know, IPD stands for Innovation Prevention Department.) Without a can-do person helping you with technicalities, organisations are really handicapped in their elearning developments. What ideas do you have for getting on with or around this department?

Despite this barrier, the team have managed to implement quite a few technologies. I saw some really good practice in the use of Mahara, and their vShare work is great. vShare is a video sharing site that they have installed on a College server and allows them to have their own version of YouTube. This means they can upload all the student work for assessments without it being in the Cloud. An example of some really good practice that they are developing is this: they are going to use last year's students' videos for this year's resources. So where the students used the videos last year to demonstrate their understanding of horse conformation, this year, they will use the videos to look at the retail value of the horses. It's a good way to recycle the student-created resources.

This led me to discuss assessment rubrics with them. It's amazing how a simple pedagogical tool like this can really augment what you are doing in elearning. We looked at some examples and discussed the students creating a rubric for peer-assessing each other's work. We also talked about providing the students with the marking rubric for a project as this will show them how they will be assessed by the tutor and allow them to understand how to achieve better quality work.

There are lots of resources on the web for rubric templates and how to create rubrics for assessment. Here's one resource that I'm going to explore further that gives lots of rubric-development resources for technology-enhanced lessons from edtechteacher.org. On this page, there are resources on how to assess student contributions on Voicethread! (Voicethread has been a thread in my previous blogs.)

Sparsholt are also using SkyDrive significantly and finding it extremely helpful in sharing resources and for assignments. The IPD has been very helpful in getting this set up for the students. The only down side is that the teachers don't have accounts set up and have to create their own hotmail accounts to use it. It's not the first time I've heard of this practice and it really puzzles me - why would you set things up in such a way that didn't help the teachers to work with the students? It would be like creating classrooms where there is no space for the teacher to teach in.

Much of the day was spent looking at how you could work at the higher end of Bloom's taxonomy with simple tools like textwall and also the concept of moving people from the bottom to the top in a scaffolded way to help them. This may help the team to redesign their training so that those who are not so engaged with them can find a way to get on the first rung.

I shared with them the use of Voicethread to augment what they were already doing in video. We used ipadio to record some reflections and again, this was something they were very keen to adopt.

With both textwall and ipadio, they could easily embed these in their vle, allowing updates on the fly. They were keen on the ipadio app as it would allow the land-based curriculum tutors to easily make recordings outside of wifi range, then upload these when they were back in College buildings. They could also ring up with a basic phone and make a podcast recording that way.

In terms of gadgets, we looked at the Easi-speak microphone that I discovered at Treloars, and the ipevo camera that I had brought along. It's basically a usb 'webcam' with a stand and therefore lends itself to working like a direct projector. You can put all kinds of gadgets or even paper under it to project on the screen via the computer.

So what can i share with them next week that will help them to bring more staff on board with elearning? Clearly just having the tools available isn't enough to change the practice of a lot of the tutors. From my own experience, these are some ideas that may help:
1. They have just purchased a range of mobile technologies and where other technologies have not piqued the professional interest of their colleagues, these may interest some people. Same with textwall and the use of sms for learning. You just never know what technologies may trigger an idea in someone's head so having a range of tools and allowing people to adopt the one that interests them will start them on the first step of the journey.
2. Get the tutors who are doing good work to share their practice during staff development sessions - better yet if you have people who were hesitant adopters. Not all ILT practice has to be all-singing and all-dancing. The good use of a simple tool can make a great impact. The advantage is that the simple tool won't be difficult to learn either.
3. Implement a student mentor scheme where identified students have the role of helping the teacher with technologies in the classroom.
4. Use oblique methods like introducing rubrics for assessment. When it's clear to see how you might 'mark' a student's participation in a discussion forum, it doesn't seem as daunting to implement it as an activity.
5. Work on the mindsets of people. The fear of no longer being the sage on the stage can prevent people from changing their teaching practice. They stick to the transmission mode because that's where they think they have the advantage. We have to work on their mindset first and for that, I would refer you to Carol Dweck's book on Mindset.
6. Reduce the fear factor by letting people bring some technologies home with them to play with. Once they get over the fear of pressing the wrong button, it can really help to move them on.
7. Work on one person at a time. An individualised learning plan can do wonders for staff development. Starting some people off with learning to use Word or PowerPoint more efficiently (I recommend the JISC TechDis Toolbox!) or for greater accessibility can build up confidence in technology and provide a route into learning more.
8. A pincer approach from all angles so that the managers and students are involved in the picture. Build in a change of mindset as part of the person's goals for the year. Note it's not about the technology, it's about the pedagogy and the professional practice of the teacher. If the teacher has not developed his or her practice in any way at all through the year, shouldn't we be looking at this? Develop the reflective practitioner through the organisational culture. Educate the students on what makes a good lesson so that their feedback on their lessons isn't based on their low expectations from the past. Get them to design a lesson feedback rubric!

Yes, we're gong rubric-mad at Sparsholt and I think it's a good thing. I hope to find out from them in months to come how this idea has taken hold and hopefully helped them to progress their ILT strategy.