#PedagooLondon2015

Very swift blog post following on from a session I delivered to this year's (inspiring!) #PedagooLondon2015 conference...

Apart from the sheer joy of getting to meet forces for positivity such as the likes of @Kevbartle, @hgaldinoshea, @Edutronic_Net, @joeybagstock and several other personal heroes(!), the conference gave me the opportunity to reflect on my own practice, collect my own thoughts on how well it was going, and be realistic in my appraisal of the major obstacles I was facing. Through the ensuing debates about the validity of what I was proposing as a pedagogy on Twitter, you'll see there were plenty of questions which are hard to answer over 140 characters, so if you would like to engage in debate and discussion, please feel free to email me, or leave a comment.

If anyone wants some practical help with implementing the nitty-gritty of this stuff in their school, I'm sure mine will be happy to release me. Probably for a fee. Don't go thinking I get a cut of it neither!

Anyway, here are the slides...

Flippin gthe classroom using mobile technology - #PedagooLondon2015 presentation from Mike Gunn

Flipping the classroom using mobile technology

BYOD in schools - Part 6: Engaging parents

One of the most important factors in moving forward towards a roll-out of any form of mobile learning school, whether it be iPad 1:1, or BYOD in our case, is getting teachers, students and parents on board with the process simultaneously. Try shooting five basketballs towards a basket at the same time: It's more or less the same exercise. Or planning, teaching, marking, answering a thousand e-mail requests for paperwork and having any sort of life outside of school, for that matter.

I've dealt elsewhere with our general strategy and rationale for the roll-out , and looked specifically at the issues of staff training, student engagement in the process and the part played by Digital Leaders in this process, so forgive me if I don't revisit old ground here. We developed our strategy, worked out how we could train teachers gradually, and interviewed and trained our Digital Leaders to help us with our class trials. But now the big step to a whole-school roll-out looms, and we really need to get ALL of our parents on-board, or they won't allow their students to bring their devices in in the first place.

These are the key points we need to communicate to them, in my opinion:

• They need to understand that this is not a gimmick to engage students: There is a clear educational rationale behind the move, which we consider will help improve the performance of our students on a long-term basis. In other words, they have to understand that our move is fundamentally about teaching and learning, and that the use of mobile devices in lesson will occur when there is a clear way in which it can augment, modify or redefine the learning in that lesson, and not otherwise.
• 
  
• They need to understand why we have decided not to specify a particular device (often iPads in these types of schemes), or indeed pay for the roll-out ourselves from school funds. Essentially there are two key reasons for this move, which are economic and pedagogical. Economically, we as a school cannot afford to pay for them ourselves (£70000 every three years?), and if we passed the cost on to the parents, many of them may not be able to afford it either, especially in times of recession, economic insecurity etc. So not only are we saving ourselves money (three more teachers potentially to help their students?), we are also saving them money, as 99.6% of our students already own devices which they probably bring in to school on a daily basis. Pedagogically, much as I am a fan of the iPad itself, I can't pretend that other devices are not catching them up quickly. Each new iPad seems less of an education game-changer than the last, and yet the premium is still charged. More importantly, I think there is real benefit to be had from giving students and parents the choice of what to bring in, and getting them to discuss issues of what each phone/tablet can and cannot do in the context of teaching and learning, rather than mere functionality (my graphics card is faster and bigger than yours, sort of thing).
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• We as a school need to address insurance worries head on: Many parents could quite reasonably object to their children being asked to bring mobile devices into school on the grounds that they could get damaged or stolen. But what if they currently allow their child to bring their phone into school at the moment? Then there is no change in the situation. The phones can still be insured as part of household contents insurance or, as many people already do, can be insured as discrete devices. Having said that, we as a school do also need to make it as secure an environment as possible for our students to bring their phones and devices to school safely. That means addressing potential areas where students might have to leave their devices unattended (changing rooms for instance), and ensuring that we are vigilant at all times, and have water-tight security systems in place to protect student property. To my mind, we should be doing that already. Similarly, in this new digital learning environment, we as a school ought to be pressing the insurance industry for easy, cheap and viable schemes which will allow us to protect our students' devices without costing the earth. Already, some financial institutions are beginning to respond to these requirements.
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• Finally, I think it is imperative that parents can SEE the enhanced learning which occurs as a result of using mobile devices. They need to see it in action: We should be inviting them to watch model lessons with students, with a debrief showing how it has enhanced the learning, the students' organisation, their motivation and the differentiation which devices can enable. They need to see these enhancements to lessons in order to understand just how much difference mobile learning can make to their child's education. If we can accompany these sessions with Q&A at the end, with both the teacher and the students involved, (as happened here when I taught a lesson in front of colleagues from across the city using the same techniques as part of a rolling programme of CPD observations "for real"), then I think parents will be a lot more positive about the use of mobile technology as an integral part of their child's learning experience.

My ideal way of organising this would be as follows: A festival of mobile learning. As part of this, the school would perhaps need to be open a day at a weekend (and perhaps have a day off as recompense?), and invite parents and members of the local community in to see a variety of activities in action. We would have different subjects running workshops on some of the ways in which they use mobile technology as part of teaching and learning and explaining how it works in an open session for all students and parents. We would also have several "show" lessons occurring simultaneously which parents could visit, look at the teaching, look at the types of activities students were undertaking, and talk to both students and teachers about how exactly the mobile devices are enhancing teaching and learning. You could even invite local companies connected with mobile devices and mobile learning to come in and sponsor the event, and use it to pitch the benefits of their products to parents, showing them the possibilities.

A fundamental building block of this strategy would be the involvement of students who already use mobile learning, and Digital Leaders in particular. Alongside the teacher-led workshops and model lessons, the student leaders could lead "Genius bar" style sessions including videos of other lessons throughout the year, the students' own thoughts on mobile learning, and the advantages it gives them over other learners. They would be able to show how they themselves support the process in school, answer technical queries, and could also talk to parents knowledgeably about the different sorts of devices they have used, the advantages and disadvantages of each for different subjects, and they could blog about this afterwards so that this advice is permanently there for parents to refer to, with direct links from the school website.

One of the other things this type of festival would facilitate is for other teachers who are less confident about tech use in lessons (from other schools, or from within our own) to get the same information, to interrogate the possibilities for themselves, and to make their own first steps. This would be great CPD for all involved, sharing best and next practice widely, and also enabling schools like ours to clearly demonstrate our role as a support school to those in the wider community. In fact, I think it would be great to follow this up with an hour's TeachMeet at the end of the day for teachers to share their best apps and resources, divided into different categories (AFL, BFL, differentiation and personalisation, etc), so teachers can get what they want out of it. That would act as a great summary of everything which has been shared that day, and really send people away with lots to think about.

After an event like that, I think very few parents will be in any doubt about the school's rationale for using mobile devices to enhance learning, and I would hope that teachers and students would be enthused, and that the wider community would be able to see just what a forward-thinking institution this was...

If we don't engage parents, and show them the realities of modern education, and the potential mobile technology brings within that environment, we risk them not understanding what we are trying to do, and we all know where that leads...

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GoogleDocs, Evernote and visible feedback

It's been a while since I've blogged with the pressure of impending OFSTED, marking every single word every written by any student to please the new guidelines etc etc, but today I learned something new about GoogleDocs. And it's worth sharing. I thought so, anyway...

Context: I was presenting at Coventry's Partnership Plus Teaching Conference today about the way in which mobile devices could help teachers improve teaching and learning. Initially I had divided the talk into three sections: Assessment for Learning through questioning, differentiation and fostering independence in students. As a last minute addition (and by last-minute I mean at 4.22 a.m. before the 9.00 start!), I thought I ought to include marking and feedback as OFSTED seem to be putting a great deal of onus on those aspects of teaching and learning.

As many of you know I use GoogleDocs and Evernote constantly for formal written work.

EVERNOTE
The students use Evernote as their note-taking tool first and foremost:

• It's easy to use
• It can include all sorts of other media (videos of a practical, photos of notes on a board, attached documents you send the students etc)
• Documents are easily shareable, through email, link sharing, or on Twitter
• Notes are taggable for easy cross-referencing (especially useful when it comes to revision of topics)
• And most importantly from my point of view, for verbal feedback

Use the mic (top right) to record a verbal feedback file (bottom left)

Let me explain the last point, as it saves a lot of wasted time. It seems to me that the new focus on marking and feedback is leaving many schools floundering in a tidal wave of evidence searching, to prove that we do what we do every day, namely talk to our students. In our school it's "Verbal feedback given" stamps. In other schools, there will be some variation on that theme. And for the sentences or two of advice I give, the whole rigmarole of getting a stamp out, getting students to mark in books what has been written etc is precious time being wasted, which often takes longer than what I'm asking them to action. So here is where Evernote comes in useful: You simply record yourself as you talk to the student, and an audio recording is automatically appended to their notes. It's simple, it's no extra work, it's evidence that I do it, and it's there when ten minutes later the student is about to ask me for the fifth time what I said!

GOOGLE DOCS

For more formal assessed writing, I use GoogleDocs (for presentations, essays, spreadsheets, forms etc). There are several areas of functionality that Docs has which are easier to access than in Evernote, as follows:

• Collaborative writing is easily done by students sharing the link to the document they are creating with whoever else they wish to work with. This is useful for collaborative classwork and homework. It is also incredibly easy for me as a marker to see who has contributed what sections of each document, and therefore to distinguish between their input levels, and justify different marks to examiners.
• Peer feedback is easy through the comments section, again simply through sharing the link to the document with a given peer. In particular I like the fact that the person sharing the document can set preferences so that they control whether collaborators and peers can view, comment upon or actually edit a document
• Sharing documents with me as a teacher creates a system of visible, trackable marking, the "paper trail" OFSTED are often looking for. All comments are dated, and each different collaborator's comments, including mine, come in different colours.



Comments added down the right

• This then begins a mythical and trackable dialogue with students, through which we can start the processes of DIRT, reflection or whatever you wish to call it. And again, it's very visible.

MARK SUPPORT COMMENTS FOR MODERATORS

Throughout the process of drafting, marking and re-drafting work, the student has a record of everything that has been said, and the teacher has a record of everything which has been changed, which I think is pretty neat. But someone was about to help me out even further with some learning of my own. During the conference today one colleague stopped me short and asked if we could print out the document with the teacher comments on, as she wanted to write to send her work off to the moderator with her comments typed in the margin. Great idea, I thought, before investigating and finding out it wasn't possible (Google, if you're listening, sort it out!). Another colleague however, reminded us you can export documents as a variety of formats including Word. And lo and behold, when you do, there are all the comments!

Comments to support marks down the right, including those of internal moderators in different colours

So there you have it: Today's revelation. Use GoogleDocs not just to annotate for your students, but also do it for your external moderation: If you cross-moderate within departments, it's even better as the internal moderator's comments are in a different colour. Export the document as a Word document, and print. Job done!

My workshop, but it was me who was learning as much as anyone there. I do love it when teachers share...

Lesson Observation for Real

Last month I blogged about a lesson I taught in front of a number of colleagues from around the city of Coventry as part of our Partnership Plus CPD programme. An OFSTED inspector was present, and the rationale behind the lesson was to not only see a different type of lesson, but also to hear an Inspector's thought processes when observing it and judging it.

At the time, 70 plus colleagues attended and saw the lesson live, but I'd forgotten that it had been video recorded as well. My thanks for this go to @AlternativeLive for recording and editing this for us. I received it yesterday, and have been poring over it this morning (with mounting embarrassment, it should be said!). One of the things which has struck me however is the fact that the cameraman has captured a lot of aspects of the event that I didn't remember while writing the blog. The other thing I've really enjoyed reviewing is the comments and questions which followed the lesson (from about halfway through - Feel free to skip through my bits!): The students are talking about their learning and their experiences in class, the teachers are asking really good questions about what was happening, whether technology was useful in moving learning on, and what OFSTED's views on it would be. The OFSTED Inspector's comments were really useful for me to now reflect upon too, as was the ability to see my teaching in action, and I would honestly say that, while it scared the bejeezuz out of me at the time, it's a really useful reference point for me to use to tweak aspects of my delivery, my task-setting, my explanations, and my body language.

So anyway, I thought that in order to share a little of what I do, I would put the video up for perusal. Please go easy on me personally: The bags under the eyes are a clear testament to the 1 a.m. return from a West End trip two nights before. But any comments on how I can improve my teaching, or comments on how people viewed it afterwards, are most welcome.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frySoGxNKxI&feature=youtu.be&a

By the way, I apologise for breaking with tradition and not providing any form of silly cartoon at any point in this blog: I think after you've watched the video it will be clear that I've already offered by far and away enough entertainment material for you already!

An outstanding lesson using mobile learning?

Recently I was asked / was volunteered to lead something called a "lesson observation for real" in Coventry. This is essentially a lesson taught in the round in front of anything up to 100 colleagues and, crucially, an OFSTED registered Inspector. The rationale behind it lies not in the inspection of the lesson for a grade, but the sharing of the inspector's thought processes when observing the lesson, and illuminates the (at times unfathomable) thinking behind it all. As a teacher, I think it's useful to be able to hear that explained with regards to a lesson I can watch live, although I'm not sure that as the person conducting the lesson I was aware of much more than the slight niff of me crapping myself throughout! Not a nice image to leave this first paragraph on.

Hopefully you've followed me through to this second paragraph. You'll be pleased to know that, if you have, the worst of the offensive language is over at any rate. Preparing for the lesson was a bit of a nightmare, especially as the closer we got to the event, the more people I knew told me they were coming to see it. As Billy Connolly once said, it's like being forced to sing in front of your aunties! My brief was simple: The previous lesson observations for real run in Coventry (there are at least two or three a year) had tended to focus on KS3 and KS4 classes. This time they wanted to see some KS5 teaching, and it had been suggested that it would be good to see some practical use of mobile technology as part of teaching and learning. As half of my timetable is KS5 and I have been leading our school's BYOD roll-out so far, that was me pretty much dropped in the sh*t and "volunteered" (there's that niff again...)". I had to start thinking...

So, if I were creating a perfect lesson using mobile learning what would it involve? Well, of course the first thing it would have to do is focus on the learning, not the apps. I would think about learning and visible progress or at least visible problem-solving, and frame those into learning outcomes. For me, it would probably involve SOLO levels as a clear way of demarcating progress from one level of skill to the next, which means it would need a baseline. I also tend to think my best lessons would allow the students to select their tasks (according to SOLO levels), and set their own learning objectives in doing so. It's also important for me to give them freedom in their methods of presenting their learning to me and to the class, as that seems to engage them much more. I don't think that just because students get to post-16 study they are any less likely to be disengaged by poorly conceived tasks and activities.

Once I've got that idea of the elements I want to include in the lesson, that's when I'd start to think about apps and the technology.

Another couple of key considerations were how to demonstrate progress and learning. Don't get me wrong: I'm fully aware of the OFSTED dictat which stipulates that they must look for evidence of "progress over time", not progress within a twenty minute segment of a lesson. But the fact remains that students who have had a lesson in which there has been no learning or challenge are not likely to make progress over time either. As such I wanted to include a presentation of the students' work at the end of the lesson for myself and the rest of the class to see, and I wanted to punctuate the lesson with good hinge questions which interrogated what they were doing, and how well they were doing it.

So this is what I came up with...

The starter activity was a Socrative quiz: Five questions, each of which would tell me their ability to work at a certain SOLO level. I could then analyse the results very quickly, see what levels they were working at, and direct them towards tasks at that SOLO level. (By the way, if any of you have not come across SOLO Taxonomy as a pedagogy before, check this out, and then get yourself involved in the SOLO Taxonomy network).


I should say at this point that on the back of my task sheets was the summary (left) of how I felt the SOLO levels equated (roughly) to the sorts of grades the might get in the exam. The students are all aware of their "working at" grades, and the grades they themselves have targeted, and could then refer to this summary as a way of seeing how far they had made progress not only in relation to the difficulty of the tasks, but also in relation to what they wanted to ultimately achieve by way of grade.

If students were struggling with definitions for even the most basic analytical terms and techniques, they would do the Uni-structural activity: They would be given a list of key subject terminology relevant to the lesson which they had to be able to define and remember by the end of the first twenty minutes. Using Quizlet, a great little flashcard creation app, they were asked to look up these terms, write the definitions for themselves on the back of the electronic flashcard, and then use the 'Test" facility within the app to see how many they could get correct.


If they got over 80% of the answers correct twice in a row, I'd be pretty certain they had learnt the terms, and move them swiftly on to the tasks at the next level. (The fact that this app is self-marking is an easy AfL win as far as I'm concerned)

The following activity involved the students showing me that they could recognise a variety of the techniques they'd learnt in the first activity in practical examples, to take their knowledge beyond the abstract. Using one of two apps (they could choose whichever they felt most comfortable with, Thinglink or Explain Everything), the students were sent a still image from the film we were analysing, which was also an AURA* which could activate the scene itself on Youtube straight to their devices (I could have done this with a shared QR code too, but most of the students went for the Aura). They had to use their key terms to label the techniques used in the still, and then add others used in the scene itself which might not be evident in a still image (use of editing, soundtrack and diegetic sound etc). The task was peer marked with overview from me, making sure that the students' ideas were correct, and questioning them individually to test the solidity of their knowledge. While from the lesson plan you'd have thought there was very little teacher involvement in the lesson at all apart from setting up the activities, this is where I think the beauty of SOLO lies. It frees up the teacher to test every individual and make these individual interventions where necessary. Even in a 30 minute lesson last night, I managed to spend some good time with each student answering questions, clearing up misconceptions, questioning and guiding students individually if they were having difficulties. That level of differentiation is hard to do when you're teaching a whole class I think.

Towards the top of the class, the students were working more in pairs, bashing ideas off each other in response to a task which asked them not only to look at the techniques used in the scene and their connotations, but relate them directly to the intellectual, emotional or visceral reactions they might cause in audiences. In a nutshell, the students had to work out why the techniques were used by the director, and whether they worked on all sorts of different audiences. This then allowed me to add additional hinge questions about why they felt certain audience members would react one way and other audiences would react another way. The students embedded the scene clip from Youtube into Explain Everything, labelled the techniques and connotations, and then created an audio commentary on what was happening in the scene, and what they were personally feeling, thinking etc, and then wrote down the key audience effects, and worked out the key techniques used to generate them. They could then create a summary annotation from their thoughts, and send it to me for marking via email (or export it as a movie). I think if the lesson had gone on longer, this would have been a longer task to give time for a deeper level of thinking, and once I'd checked the projects they'd produced, I would have them exported as movies and put on our Youtube channel so as to teach other students further down the SOLO scale. I accept that they could simply have taught this verbally as a presentation in front of the class without the need for tech, but the fact that this "lesson" would have been curated under our online resources is a powerful augmentation of the task which makes coming back to the material at a later date for revision purposes easier for students.

The final activity on the SOLO scale was given much more time to complete, as it involved thinking about things at a much more profound level. Students were asked to recreate the effect of the Schindler's List scene using different techniques of their own. They could cast it differently, use different camera shots, sounds and edits, and even change the setting and contents of the scene. The task relied on students knowing what Spielberg was trying to achieve in the scene in the first place, relating this back to their prior knowledge on how to create emotional effects in viewers, and using previous work on different filmic techniques to create a new unique piece of their own. Think about that task for a second and ask yourself how easy it would have been for you to do yourself. I think I would have found it difficult, and it's my subject area! But by the end of it, the students who had attempted it were thoroughly immersed in the creative task, and you could see they had really been thinking about it. (As the questions started coming from the audience after the session, she pulled me aside and asked if she could carry on with the task!!)

Here was an activity where the tech did more than simply assist the task, it transformed it. The students could approach the task one of two ways, either by taking stills from Schindler's List itself, and narrating their ideas over it using an app called Tellagami (they hate presenting in person, so this app gives them the chance to disguise themselves. It's very quick to set up a character, and gives them plenty of time for thinking the problem through, though I have to watch that they aren't getting over-distracted by dressing their character up nicely!). This then acts as a presentation for other students, which would be given as the plenary in the lesson to show others a complex response to a higher level task, and again, is archivable on the Youtube channel.

The alternative approach to this task was to show how they would have done it rather than offering a verbal commentary, using a storyboard app called Cinemek. The app allows students to take photographs of themselves and their classmates recreating a scene, and annotating movements, dialogue (they can write as a script or record as audio if they want to perform it), camera movements and edits in such a way that it can all be strung together as one scene at the end. It's a really great app I use constantly because it gets film-makers thinking on a much more technical level about how they show a scene rather than tell a story, but it can be used for a whole number of sequencing and commentating functions in other subjects. In this case, none of the students during the observation used it because frankly, in front of a bunch of other teachers, I think they were embarrassed to be taking pictures of themselves in costumes and theatrical poses! That said, it's certainly an option I would use in other creative and "normal" lessons taking place in my own environment (rather than the gladiator arena of public scrutiny!).

The half hour lesson gave me plenty of scope for asking questions, for individual interventions, and moving students forwards, but in a full hour's lesson, I would have ended with the students showing their work to me, or at the top end, to the rest of the class, becoming the "experts in their field" by way of a plenary. I would have rounded off with a repeat of the same Socrative quiz as they came in with, slightly modified to make them think a little more. If they've made progress, I should be getting more complex answers to the questions they were initially reasonably insecure about, and an ability to answer the more complex questions at a higher SOLO level.

After the session the students and I took part in an interesting Q&A discussion about what the teachers and the HMI had seen. It was clear that several of the onlookers had concerns that the learning they had seen had not been "traditional", and many were anxious that there had not been a clear end goal for the whole class. I think my students were brilliant in answering many of these questions, as they made it clear that this model of learning allows them to learn at their level and their (albeit challenging) pace. There were perhaps concerns about how "visible" the learning was, but it was all there on the students' iPads. There was a definite sense of engagement from every student, but where, I was asked, was the progress after 20 minutes? A question which comes from having it ingrained in us that we must demonstrate progress in 20 minute chunks, I suspect. Fortunately, the HMI was fully supportive, and pointed to the fact that we are looking at lessons as an indicator of challenge and progress for all, but only as one factor in judging the key criteria, which is whether or not students made progress "over time". My students could show how these types of lessons have clearly made them think much more deeply, and could show people examples of their GoogleDocs essays, with my comments, which demonstrated this progress. The key to showing progress in SOLO is to show students improving their skills to a point where they can attempt more difficult and profound thinking tasks, and as far as the HMI was concerned, the movement of students from one task to the next, after careful checking by the teacher, was clear evidence of progress. Huzzah!

Copyright 2005 by Randy Galsbergen

Now I shall wait for the nervous tension to subside, and get back to my normal life... Maybe.

By the way, I should also at this point like to publicly thank my colleagues who encouraged me to do this, and supported me with their kind words. Most importantly, I want to thank the members of my Year 12 and Year 13 Film Studies classes for their help in being guinea pigs for this session: They were truly brilliant, magnificent ambassadors for the school and for our style of learning. My sincerest gratitude. Cakes on the way...





* If you want to see how Aurasma works for yourself, simply download the free app (Android link here), find fpsmediateacher in the search section and follow, and then hover the aura target over this picture: If you've done it right, it should turn into a purple swirl, play a weird video quickly, and if you tap on that weird video, it will take you to the link for the scene on Youtube. Simples.

Addendum: I understand that the video of the lesson may be made publicly available in a few days time. I'm not sure this is a great idea from my point of view (I don't think I got my hair right for a start, and the suit/tie combo I'm told was not up to scratch!), but if anyone is interested, please let me know and I will see if I can get a link to put on the blog.

Creating a feedback loop with students: Written formative assessment made easy

Copyright 2009 Jeffrey Weston

One of the key improvements I've been wanting to make to my teaching and learning this year has been to put a system in place of improved formative written feedback within my KS4 and KS5 classes. My feedback has always been decent, but I have a tendency to over-mark, and to get little action from students as a result of my efforts, which can be very frustrating. In addition, I hate having spent a load of time on marking which consequently gets lost by the students, or tucked away in a folder never to be referred to again!

This year, as those of you who follow my blog will know, I've been trying to exploit the potential of mobile technology to improve a whole raft of areas of my teaching. But before you stop reading because you have no access to this kind of tech in your schools, the solution I've found to the marking issue is simple, and doesn't require anything more than the computers most schools and students have already: GoogleDocs.


There are several key advantages to using electronic cloud-based media for your work portfolios, regardless of whether or not your school has iPads, Mobile technology etc. Try some of these for size...


1) Students just need a gmail address (free) to get their own Drive. Drive is like a huge hard disk in the sky. You can store anything on it, and it will be there any time and anywhere you can access the Internet. If you use the Chrome browser - again free, it will be at the top of the page every time you open it and sign in.


2) There are no more excuses for "forgetting" homework: It's always there, online and accessible.


3) Students can no longer get away with saying they have made huge alterations to drafts when they've barely touched them. At the top of their documents, you can see the date they were last modified, and you can even see previous revisions: Anything that's pink is new.

     



4) Another key advantage is that there are no compatibility issues between versions of software, such as when Kevin can't access his homework because he has a more up-to-date version of Word at home!


5) Similarly, there are no issues with losing work: Every keystroke is saved.


But the main advantage is the ability to save all your work and organise it into folders, and then share it with anyone else who has a gmail address, for assessment by a teacher or a peer. This is how it works in my classroom...


Students create the essay in Documents, or a spreadsheet, or presentation.

Students share it with the teacher and other students, and can specify whether or not they want the document to be editable, commentable or simply viewable to each individual. The teacher or partner receives an email telling them a document has been shared with them, with a link which takes you straight to the document.


Personally I tend to organise my Drive into folders, and put shared work into a folder I set up for each individual student, that way I know all of their work is in one place. Once it's in there, I start reading. 

Leaving questions and comments

My next job is to leave comments on sections which could be improved. This could vary in content depending on the student. I can simply highlight or correct errors in the comment (sp denotes a spelling mistake, P a punctuation error, Phrasing a grammar error etc), or highlight something which needs to be re-written, or I can ask questions to extend the student's thinking. This then engages the student to improve a particular section, or to engage in debate with me about what I mean, allowing me to draw out deeper understanding over the period of the conversation (this conversation can happen over time or live, as one of the features of Google Docs is the ability to see when other people are contributing to the document in real time - Great for writing collaborative pieces!). If the student thinks they have got it, they can mark my comment as resolved, but I can go back to that section any time and re-open the comment thread if I feel they haven't quite got it.

Leaving formative feedback summaries

Finally, at the start of the piece, I will leave formative feedback: A maximum of three things which deserve praise (What Went Well), and two key areas to improve (Even Better If). This I have found focuses my marking on the most important aspects which will help the student to get to the next level. 


Recently, a couple of additional features have suggested themselves to me. The first is simply to highlight areas of good practice, so that the students can see examples of what they are doing well (you can choose any colour - I use green, below) . This also helps if you ask them to share a piece of work with other students as a model.

Highlighting elements of good practice

The comments function is also a nice way to get better annotations on essays you can then send to moderators for coursework. You have a couple of choices:

1) Print directly from GoogleDocs: The essays will print out without any of your formative comments, which you can then annotate by hand;

Annotated coursework for the moderator

2) Make a second copy of the document and add your support comments at the side, and then "Download as" a Word document, which keeps all of your comments alongside the essay, ready for the moderator to read.

And there you have it. An easy way to show progress over time, to evidence marking, but more importantly, to enter into a meaningful formative dialogue with students so that they improve with every piece.

Simples...

For easy tutorials on how to use GoogleDrive, please check out our department Youtube Channel.

Fostering independent learning through mobile technology

Today's blog post was inspired by a talk I was asked to give at #SSATeachMeet on how mobile technology can foster independent learning in our students. It wasn't a great talk to be fair. The speaker was knackered from an observation by the Head in the morning, a full day and a break and after school duty, had tried to cram in too much to his 7 minutes, and then garbled his way through most of it when the tech gave out (the irony is lost on nobody), and consequently, had anyone tried to get a question in edgeways, they would have been greeted by the old Queen song "Don't Stop Me Now" (though the second line would have been omitted for obvious "bricking it"reasons). Well, that's the last time anyone asks me to do anything like that again.

I've already written about how to use some of the apps I talked about here, so the purpose of the talk wasn't to re-hash old ground. Rather, I wanted to try to pick apart some of the key aspects of independent learning that mobile technologies can help us with, to provide a solid founding rationale for anyone wanting to move in that direction. It's a huge step, and long before you start thinking about when, how or what you're going to do, you need to ask yourself why you think mobile learning is the answer: What is the problem you are trying to solve?

In my case, I tend to get a lot of students come to my A level Film and Media classes who have ever studied the subject before. We never turn them away, but it has come to my attention that they have often scraped through their 5 A*-C grades, and been heavily supported especially in their English. Which is great to get them through the GCSE hoop, but unfortunately now I need them to start thinking for themselves, and very few of them are capable of doing that. So my original rationale for looking at mobile technology in learning, the "gap" I'd identified (to use the jargon), was student independence. I looked at many solutions, including SOLO taxonomy and flipped learning, as well as mobile technology, and ended up using a combination of all three to get my students thinking independently of me. These are my conclusions...

Mobile Learning Gets Students To Take Responsibility For Their Learning

In itself this is a huge step. A student who has a list of excuses for why they can't do something is a student who spends more time thinking up the excuses than doing the work. Mobile learning turns the onus onto them to get themselves organised. At the start of their courses, my students get a Google mail account so they can create and share Google Docs, and they create an Evernote account, so they can make their notes. I've blogged elsewhere about these apps (here and here, if you must), and I've even put tutorials online for how to use them on our Youtube Channel, so forgive me if I don't dwell on the "how to's" too much. Suffice it to say that an Evernote account allows my students to access learning in several new ways:

1. By allowing them to supplement written notes with pictures (often of what I've drawn on the board), audio notes and attachments;
2. By allowing them to organise these into subject files, and topic sub-folders;
3. By allowing them to tag their files, and cross-reference them
4. By allowing them to be stored on the cloud

There was an understandable sound of "whoop-di-doo" as I was talking about this, until I pointed to the  fact that a student who arrives at his terminal exams two years down the line with a full set of notes intact and cross-referenced was already at an advantage to probably well over two-thirds of the cohort. We seem to take loss of learning material as an occupational hazard in Sixth Form, but it's tantamount to prolonged absence in some cases, so I felt that this was a great starting point when discussing the advantages of mobile technology in developing independent learners.

The Big Picture

The second area in which students benefit from the use of mobile technology is in the ability to simply and quickly create permanent mind-maps and brainstorms which allow them to think about the bigger learning picture. Right from the start, students will use Popplet or one of many other mind-map apps to think about what they know about the topic before we start, to think about what they want to know, and to think about knowledge and skills from other subjects which they might be able to use in the one they are about to tackle. These types of connections are crucial, as they encourage students to think outside of the usual boundaries of subject areas, and to see how the world really works in an inter-connected way. Moreover, they can start to explicitly think about the big picture, and get a sense of how the topic they are about to embark upon affects the real world. In itself, this one change in outlook can provide students who are used to learning topics because "it's on the syllabus" with a much better notion of why it is important to study them, and what use they will be to them later on.

Applied Learning

The next benefit I've found in using mobile technology is in the way it facilitates flipped learning. I've talked about what flipped learning is before, and in many ways the idea isn't revolutionary (last century  it was simply called "prep", but I like the fancy new pseudo-pedagogibabble!). But the world of homework research is made immeasurably easier and more interesting when combined with mobile learning. Not only can we set learning from a variety of different sources and source types, matched to the students' ability levels and the types of material they access most easily, from videos to online powerpoints to audio podcasts, but we can also use some great online tools to set associated quizzes for our students to try at the same time as the learning, in order to allow them to judge just how good their understanding or mastery of a concept is. I talked last night about TED-Ed as one such resource. It has allowed me to find some great videos, and flip them by creating quizzes for each one, as well as flipping some of my own Youtube tutorials: Here is an example of one I got my A level students to do, with initial quick-fire recollection and deduction questions (to make sure they'd watched it and learnt the facts!), and other more open-ended questions which prepared them for the sorts of issues we'd be talking about in the classroom.

What that means is that I could come into the classroom, look at the test results, and straight away split my students into differentiated groups on the basis of how well they dealt with the material: Groups needing more support get extra scaffolding, groups who clearly dealt with it easily get stretch material, and off we go. Tick the OFSTED boxes about personalised learning at the same time. If that's your cup of tea.

Inter-Dependent Learning and Collaboration

If mobile technology does one thing, it allows students to share and work together in a much more meaningful way than ever before. Apps like GoogleDocs and Evernote are great for sharing over a variety of platforms, including Twitter, e-mail download etc. With GoogleDocs, students can even work simultaneously in real time on the same document from different locations, whether that be classrooms in school or from home. Not only that, but they can comment on each other's work. While at first one area of mobile learning I struggled with was showing evidence of self, peer and teacher assessment, this kind of sharing makes that easy and permanently recorded for them to refer to, unlike the sticky notes I used to find lying around my classroom after an über-fruitful peer assessment session, where the fruits had clearly fallen on stony ground!

Recently, however, I have seen others extend this idea even further by publishing essays and research online via Twitter or other forums, and asking the outside world for feedback. As I mentioned in my talk, a couple of weeks back some students of mine had been researching, discussing and writing about the problems facing the UK film industry. When we put their essays out for public critique, can you imagine the level of motivation they got when they received two comments from two British film producers? "Quite chuffed" doesn't really do it justice! But this invitation to outside experts to scrutinise our work grounds the students in the real-world context of their learning, and gets them already engaging with the issues and the people they aspire to work with in the future. Do they really need me any more?

The Meta-Cognitive Dimension

The real benefits for me of using mobile technology to foster independence are about the meta-cognitive skills the students develop. A mobile device, with an array of apps which do similar but not identical things, gets students really thinking about learning itself, and selecting the tools by which they learnt best*. They have to think about how they will research, assimilate, learn, remember and revise their work. They have to think about a way of presenting their learning to me which most clearly demonstrates their understanding and their progress. So I could end up marking an interactive book with videos and full glossary in it (Creative Book Builder), or an animated walk-through of a process or timeline (Videoscribe), or an interactive whiteboard presentation which is narrated (Explain Everything), or even a simple collaborative pin-board where all the students have collated their ideas (Linoit). To be honest, as long as the focus remains on the learning and not the tools, then I don't mind what they present to me. But the very fact that students have to think carefully about this aspect of their learning clearly leads them towards greater autonomy.

A Changing Role For Teachers

Finally, I ended with the contention that this direction I had been talking about necessitated a change in the way we as educators view our role in the whole process. I think everyone on Twitter would agree that the idea of teachers as the sole repository of knowledge within a classroom is bunk. We have to get away from that notion of "sage on stage" and move towards being the "guide by the side", no matter how much this might threaten our little egos. "Grow a pair and get on with it!", as my mother would never have said to me, ever. It is in fact much easier to play the role of guide given the time freed up by students not needing us any more thanks to mobile learning devices! It allows us to get stuck in to some seriously timely and highly effective personalised interventions (OFSTED box-tickers: Fire away again!). But we can only do that if our interventions are informed by a system of diagnostics which is highly accurate, targeted and instant in its feedback. I've used simple apps like Traffic Lights for a quick RED/AMBER/GREEN response from students (this often tells me more about their confidence levels than their levels of understanding), as well as Socrative, an instant quick-quiz app which allows you to set multiple choice or open-ended questions, single or multiple question quizzes, starters or plenaries and even hinge questions. Each one an opportunity to change the direction of the lesson for any individual who looks like they need a bit more guidance.

The results for me have been really good, if anecdotal as yet. My Year 10 class now moan that I don't test them enough to check their understanding, or if I tell them a particular way to do a task. "Can't I do it this way?" they will ask, before justifying their request with a perfectly cogent reason why they would present their learning more effectively a different way.

It's enough to make a bloke of my age need a long lie down. Which is easily done now that I've got all this spare time...



If you're interested, the original prezi from TMBrum2 is here, in glorious techni-thingy. I'm sure you'll agree from above that I did astonishingly well to get it under the 6-minute limit, even though I do say so myself. @Danielharvey9 may have a video that tells a different story...


* If that sentence sounds wrong, check it again. It's right, I promise: The plural "do" refers to the multiple apps, while the singular "gets" accords with the "mobile device". But it took me three read-throughs (should that be reads-through?) to see why it was right!

Bring Your Own Device in schools - an implementation strategy Part 1

Forgive me in advance, this might be a long one. Cartoon at the end for your efforts? Deal...

The following describes our arrival at a scheme for deploying SMART Learning across our school, a scheme to use mobile devices as a learning tool. But it might need some context first. Quite a lot of context actually. Bear with me...

(Quite a lot of) Context

As part of our ideas for moving the school I work in beyond its current "Outstanding" I have undertaken a project as part of my ASLDP course. We were asked to identify "gaps" at the start of our course, which we would have to close with a whole-school project. This isn't so much a gap as an area where students cannot always move beyond at present. We have really good, keen students in general, but very often they are not as independent as we want them to be. There is some excellent practice across the whole school, but not consistency. One of the things we are hoping to achieve is a level of student autonomy and independent thinking which will free them up to work at their own pace, to their own potential.

I've talked about the idea of "flipped learning" before, as it caught my eye a year or more ago. While I don't subscribe exclusively to Salman Khan's methods, I think the principle of getting students learning content at home and putting it into action in class is a sound one, as it allows the teacher to look at how well learning is applied, and to address misconceptions more individually, and more quickly, thus keeping students all moving forwards, albeit at a pace which is appropriate to them. I also think the idea of using videos is a good one for many students, but I'd be foolish if I told you it was the only way to do it (and who am I to tell you I'm not a fool, eh?). Some students work much better from reading material, others from videos, with examples and short tests, while others prefer something more auditory like a podcast.

At the same time I have been exploring the fantastic opportunities to work with iPads in my classroom, and I could see immediately the potential they had for integrating with flipped learning and enhancing it further. My early attempts were limited, but at least I could see the potential, so I started using the iPads in class, and invested in them within the department so that each student could have one whenever they were in my class. This has been a huge step forward, as the quasi-ownership of the devices has allowed students to store some work on there, but there are limits to this when other students come in for the next class, and want to use the same apps. Sign the last student out, sign yourself in, yada yada, faff faff faff. Not a good use of "bell work". Ownership is definitely key when it comes to using mobile devices in schools, so it soon became apparent that we would need to get a device into the hands of every student if we were to move this forward. We started talking about iPad roll-outs, leasing schemes, BYOD, and pretty soon were lost in device considerations, and getting into pointless Android vs iPad vs Microsoft Surface (obviously that last is a joke) arguments. At the end of it all, we've had to remind ourselves that the learning is the key goal here, so our iPad or BYOD scheme ideas have now given way to SMART Learning (© Jason our fab techie)...

SMART Learning:

SMART Learning is predicated on the idea that we can use mobile technology in classes in order to achieve the following aims:

• Increase student motivation and engagement in class, especially boys
• Stop students relying on teachers as their first recourse
• Promote student independence and inquiry
• Allow for personalisation within class, and more individual and effective interventions by teachers
• Remove the ceiling over highly motivated students' heads
• Get students ready for the demands of the future workplace

Following on from this, we have discussed ideas for overcoming key obstacles which present themselves to us currently. The key areas, and our solutions for them so far, are as follows...

Cost:
We live in a relatively affluent catchment area, but the recession is biting everyone, and now isn't the time to ask everyone to pay for new devices, to lease them, or the like. However, the key factor of ownership must still be tackled, so we have opted for a system where we allow students to bring their own devices (BYOD) over a roll-out of one particular type of device. While it is true that in my media class we use iPads only, that is largely because of the productive rather than consumptive nature of what we do with them, and I have to acknowledge that many teachers will not need as much out of the devices being brought into their classes as I will. Students already own their own phones, and bring them in every day anyway (because as we know, and contrary to the evidence of hundreds of years of children getting to and from school without them previously, the poor darlings can't be without their phones in case of an emergency). Why not make use of what they already have? Indeed, many of them also own tablets, or laptops, and feel eminently more comfortable working on those than they do on school PCs. Cost bullet dodged...

Technical Obstacles:
The right infrastructure is key to enabling a solid, reliable use of mobile devices in all lessons. The whole advantage of mobile devices over computers is the fact that I don't have to set half an hour's worth of bell-work just to kill time while the damn things boot up! Why would we then negate that with a network which slows to a crawl when all the students are on it? Besides, if we save money not issuing all students with devices out of our own pockets, then we can afford to invest in the best servers, bandwidth and access points to ensure full coverage anywhere in the school.

Technical obstacle number two is app incompatibility. "Sir, I can't get that app on Android", that sort of thing. When you're used to the iPad, the limitations of other devices can be a pain. But there are two answers to this. The first is to use web-based apps as much as possible: Popplet, Socrative, Prezi, GoogleDocs, Dropbox, Evernote are all excellent web-based solutions which cover all sorts of key workflow areas, from mind-mapping, to document creation to storage and sharing: They have the advantage that once students get home and need to access what they've been working on that day, they don't have to do it on the phone, they can do it from their laptops, computers or whatever.

A more intriguing second argument for a "deal with it" attitude to incompatibility issues was put forward to me a while back when someone suggested to me that different devices forced students to examine the needs of tasks, and to find different solutions for themselves. They then often ended up engaging in meta-cognitive discussions about the relative merits of different apps, and by extension different devices, to assist their learning. The creativity and awareness of their learning needs which this generates are perhaps a price worth paying for the odd compatibility issue.

Test, Test and Test Again:
A new idea is hard for many people to accept. In the ever-changing world of teaching, it is too easy for teachers to dismiss new ideas as "yet another initiative" in an already over-initiatived system. Any technical difficulties presented by new technologies are the perfect excuse to ignore the idea, so you have to make sure that issues of workflow, technical problems etc are ironed out well before everyone gets into the training phase. We are going to run a variety of class trials by teachers who are more tech savvy, who can try to raise the technical issues which were unforeseen, and get them dealt with promptly. God knows, in the last year, I've come up with a lot of them, and it's important to overcome them, and give the technical teams time to get to grips with these issues. We assume that because they're techies this should all be easy for them, but this technology moves them largely out of their PC and network-based comfort zone, and that can be hard for them. In my case, bringing in iOS devices alongside a PC system has raised some issues (as well as hackles!), but better they're raised now than when every single student and teacher in the school is using them.


The limited class trials I'm running will be accompanied by student voice surveys to measure the initial impact of the technologies on learning. So far, I can tell you that it started as a distraction, and sometimes an obstacle whenever technical issues occurred, but students are now reporting that the technology is almost a non-issue for them, and talking about the learning opportunities they have offered, and the efficiencies they have brought into the classroom: There have been plenty of cheers for the "photograph the notes from the board rather than copy them down approach" for a start. Students have appreciated the ability to dictate notes sometimes, to share their work easily, to show work to the class through the AppleTV, and to collaborate on projects online in real time. More importantly, the students are also the best people to tell me what the problems are: Brutal honesty can be instructive, as long as I've forgotten my ego hat at home.

We are also hoping to put together a "Dangerous Teaching" Group, a cross-curricular forum for teachers who are interested in using mobile technolog to enhance learning and student independence in their areas. I get some great ideas from Twitter which I can share with them, but they will all have ideas of their own, and the power of group collaboration will bring swift advances in our use of the technology to enhance our core activities.

Once we've tested these things in a few lessons, with a few regular classes, and evaluated the impact on learning, the next stage will be a wider trial. It will probably involve opening the wifi network to Sixth Formers, a safer option perhaps than lower down the school at first, and again they will give us plenty of evaluative data.


Student Training:
What training do students need in using mobile devices? They use them every minute of every day they're allowed to, and many more when they probably shouldn't in all likelihood. Well, that doesn't make them good users in an educational sense. Students need to be taught how to use the devices responsibly as educational tools, but also as social tools. If the wifi network is always available, then break time use is likely to be a very different beast compared to classroom use, with cyber-bullying more than a possibility, and we need to teach students about the safe use of these devices, social networking etc. Internet Safety Day next week provides us with our first opportunity to talk to students about these issues, about social networking, about what they think are their rights and their responsibilities. We would hope to expand this so that students can use PHSE sessions to devise a whole-school Acceptable Use Policy, which could then be reviewed annually as the technologies change. Education in digital citizenship is one of the most pressing needs our students have in this decade, and as my good friend @Gripweed1 is fond of telling me, you can't leave these things to the ICT department alone (this may largely be about avoiding doing any more work though!).

(This last phrase is an excellent example of something which, though written online, is nevertheless clearly libellous, and I expect he'll use it to exemplify cyber-bullying to the students on Tuesday, after he's had me arrested!)

And finally, there's the issue of digital leadership. This idea has been written about a great deal on Twitter by folk much more practised at developing it than we are, and we'll be nicking their ideas in due course! You know who you are. Suffice it to say that the students are probably your best advocates for any mobile technology roll-out, and if they can be convinced of the merits of using them for learning, they will probably be more than willing to engage in training in how to use the devices, how to trouble-shoot them, and how to help staff to get the most out of them. Our intention is certainly to get students trained up so that they are as much learning ambassadors as they are technical support, and attaching them to departments will enable departments to get to grips with the potential of mobile learning with digital natives by their sides. We hope the students can trouble-shoot for staff, can find them appropriate websites and apps to teach certain tasks and concepts, and whenever anything tech goes awry in the room, they will be the ones who should come to the rescue. Teachers may take a while to get used to this role-reversal (I know I did!), but for the students, their new role is nothing short of empowering, helping them to become much more equal partners within the school's learning community. Not a bad place to start when you're trying to foster independence, engagement and inquiry...


This is just the first phase of our plan, and any feedback would be really useful. We appreciate there will be issues, but this blog is a bit of thinking out loud, in the hop that many of you may have walked down the same path, and be able to share your experiences with us, and help us avoid too many mistakes.

Next issue: Staff training, parental involvement and buy-in.

Will keep you posted.

Oops, your cartoon.

My iPad journey - Updated

Cards on the table: I've been teaching 17 years and have always been a huge fan of computers and their potential for learning. I'm not an ICT teacher, nor am I any more than a gifted amateur in the ICT world. I am not a geek, except insofar as I watch The Big Bang Theory. And love it. OK, I'm a bit of a geek. But I have some semblance of social skills, so I'm not sure it counts really.

My journey with ICT began with computers, always Windows, big Apple hater to be honest. Then the iPad came out, and I liked it. I liked it a lot. But it bugged the hell out of me the number of work-arounds I had to find for functions which would have been simple for a PC. As a media teacher, it irritated me that I had to wait until iPad 2 for a camera, but once I had the camera, it didn't take long before the iPad gradually rendered my computer almost obsolete. The iPad started as a replacement for computers, in the classroom as well as at home.

And so the iPad began to replace many PC functions in my classroom, as a simple swap. There were limitations, but more advantages than I'd thought. the "switch it on and it's on" facility (revolutionary, I know: Who thought that one up?) was a huge time-saver, meaning I didn't have to plan whole lessons around computers just to make switching them on and the 10-minute boot-up worthwhile, or introduce lessons with 20 minutes of board-work just to kill time so the damn things were ready to go. (Honestly, all the tasks were really useful, promise)

At the same time I started on twitter, where all my best ideas came from. More or less all my ideas, if I'm honest. I am not one of life's creative thinkers, it's fair to say. But I do have a much under-estimated skill of being able to look at things which are beyond my creative capacity and give them a slight tweak to improve them. This was more or less how I treated most of my PLN's contributions: "Like that, how do I make it work for me?".

Our school has been on a three-year drive to improve AfL, and this was brilliantly served by Socrative quick tutorial here if you've never seen it before), which had the advantage of being usable on computers and phones as well, useful for classes where we didn't have enough iPads to go round. In fact, it's the ideal tool for any BYOD environment too. I started realising that the iPads had loads of advantages, but these were often negated if you didn't have a device per person, so using web-based apps helped as I could supplement the ipads with conventional PCs. This was enriching the learning in my class, with a greater variety in my students' educational diet which was keeping them on their toes.
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By now I was starting to see the creative potential of the iPads for making movies, podcasts, comic strips, posters etc. It started out as a solution to my attempts to "flip the classroom", buy allowing me to create simple tutorial videos I could set as homework preparation for lessons (Our Youtube channel gives you a few examples which you are welcome to share). I could even put them into Playlists so that the videos became more advanced, and students were able to go as fast in their learning as they wanted to, which was really useful at KS4 and KS5. Using the camera on the iPad and iMovie enabled me to make these short videos within half an hour sometimes, and as they are all online now, they are permanently there for students to refer to. Which means I've stopped repeating myself in class, a lot. Apart from the phrase "Do you know where to look for your answer?" which is getting trotted out more...

My own forays into creativity also showed me the iPad's potential for increasing the number of ways my students could respond creatively to tasks rather than just using them to find out information, browse the internet and write notes. Creation is perhaps the one area the iPad really has it over other tablets, as it has a huge amount of potential. So my students would be using creative apps to illustrate their learning, and this, I realised, was enhancing learning dramatically, by deepening the way the students were thinking, and really getting them to synthesise and apply the information in new and creative ways. Twitter and @Gripweed1 added more apps from a fabulous website of the week feature he does, eg Explain Everything, and the ways in which my students were able to demonstrate their learning continued to grow.

Explain Everything has been a great case in point, one which I am developing my use of consistently. At first it was me making tutorials, or explaining concepts for students. But after a while I started asking the students to use it to explain the concepts themselves. The beauty of it was that it allowed them to use pictures, labels, extended writing, but also make these into movies which they could produce verbal commentaries for. A lot of my students with special needs have benefitted from this new way of accessing and showing their learning, or boys especially who never quite get round to writing things in any more detail than the absolute minimum they can get away with. Tell them they can explain it verbally or make it into a movie and they're mad for it. Tell them how brilliant the answer is but they now have to write it in ten minutes for an exam response, and they suddenly realise that succinct writing is a skill they also have to learn. Importantly though, those who always thought they were not much good in class because their written responses got low marks now realise that the knowledge is more than adequate, and that the only obstacle to good marks is writing. Somehow, that seems to make the task of improving slightly less daunting to them.

Then the enhanced learning led logically into sharing our work. Students were so proud they wanted to be able to show their work to everyone, through the Apple TV, and to their parents. Students sharing their work with each other on Twitter has increased the collaboration in class dramatically, for a start. QR codes, tweeting, Creative Book Builder (another easy tutorial here for those of you who've never tried it), were my first steps into this curating work and bringing it together. Again, @Gripweed's app of the week showed me countless possibilities for doing this, such as Wallwisher, Edmodo, Scoop.It. And my eyes began to open to the number of different ways I could do that.

I ignored virtually all of them, because if there's a down-side to Twitter, it's that it can deluge you with too many ideas. But I had enough to fulfil the functions I was after, and it was clear that sharing work was having an additional unexpected effect: It was extending learning. What students were producing was changing, the way in which they were doing it was changing, and they were now learning outside the classroom much more. I'd been toying with flipped learning for a long time, but suddenly these tools made it not only possible, but also driven by the students.

So the next stage was to stop exploring too much, and sit down and rationalise things. I spent time thinking about the functions I wanted my students to be able to undertake using the iPads, and created a list: Mind-mapping, AfL, writing and recording, researching, demonstrating learning, sharing learning, creating posters, word clouds, videos, demonstrations, podcasts, revision, online accessible storage.
Here are the tools I used, for those of you with an unhealthy interest:

AfL - Socrative
Mind-mapping - Popplet, iThoughtHD
Note-taking and recording - Pages, Evernote, GoogleDocs, Keynote
Research - Safari, Skype/Facetime, Khan Academy, TED and TED-ED
Word clouds - TagCloud, Word Collage
Demonstrating learning - Explain Everything, Skitch, Timeli, VideoScribe, Creative Book Builder, iBooks, Apple TV
Creating - CeltX, Cinemek, Pinnacle Studio, iMovie, PS Touch, PS Express, StripDesign, Phoster, Flipbook
Revision - Quizlet
Storage and sharing - Evernote, Dropbox, Cloudon, iBooks, Twitter, QR codes

Way too much info, huh? Up until the list you were busy thinking "Wow, great, cool, I should try this!" And then this turned into those, and I can feel your enthusiasm waning with the immensity of the task! I've been there. I sympathise. I call it "My inspirational Twitter PLN hell". But here's the thing: To quote my favourite philosopher Lao Tzu, "the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step". There is no minimum speed limit on this journey. There is only DO or DO NOT. So pick one app. Try it. When you've got it wrong a few times, try it some more, get the students to help you out, or find work-arounds, and get good at it. Embed it. And then add another, and so on.

And add in your other learning styles: Flipped learning works brilliantly with iPads, as does SOLO Taxonomy. As, I would imagine, does co-construction. It's only a tool after all, and there are a whole load of ways it can help you do your job more effectively. The final thing you'll discover on this journey is that, beyond changing how you do things, varying your educational activities, deepening the learning of your students, and extending the ways in which they learn, you will ultimately have empowered your learners to take charge of their own education. Which is technically, I reckon, Outstanding, is it not?

The process so far has taken me a year. I now have four classes using iPads most lessons, for a variety of tasks, and constantly coming up with new ways to learn. Sometimes I feel like a spare part, but it just gives me a precious second or two to sit back and smile to myself. Before I get back on their backs expecting even more!

Thank you. Once again, you've made it to the end of the post. Here's your cartoon... At least I'm getting more consistent with my rewards system, eh?