Impact of learning platform use May 20, 2010

I’ve just posted the response below to a Vital CPD Hotseat where there are some great conversations taking place about the impact of learning platform use. You’ll need to register to view/contribute, but it’s free to do so and well worth exploring:

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What a timely thread! I’ve just spent the day with the NW local authority advisory teams discussing in quite some detail the impact that is being seen in schools now that the majority of schools are beyond the ‘adoption’ of learning platform and associated technologies.

With the majority of schools across the country now using a learning platform – whether through a local authority led project, or independently, there has been a significant shift from the ‘learn how to use it’ towards ‘how are we going to use it to achieve learning outcomes’. This is underpinned by a belief that there are significant benefits to leaning to be embraced – and quite right too!!

Ironically, like Jane (who I happen to know is using the learning platform to engage and motivate her children in a range of very exciting ways), most teachers are very self-effacing, and often don’t realise how much other people can benefit from learning about their work. A superb teacher I met this afternoon gave a presentation which must have had at least 20 examples of innovative or creative practice, but genuinely thought every school was doing most of it already. (Links to examples below).

This poses a strange situation where there are significant quantities of creativity and innovation through excellent learning opportunities, but very few people know about them. Sometimes, this is interpreted as ‘nothing is happening’ yet. I’ve seen this time and time again at a multitude of levels. At one end of the scale there are local authority areas where there are brilliant schools creating transformational learning experiences every day which no-one beyond the school community is aware of. At the other end of the scale there are classrooms where a child’s learning experience is being utterly transformed and no-one beyond the classroom is aware.

The reason I mention this is because we can learn a valuable lesson about what ‘progression/development/impact’ looks like. We often seek to”see it” or “touch it” or “measure it” and we often want a number to prove that something is making a difference.

I, like so many others, can very easily get carried away with trying out the novelty-factor ideas of embedding the latest Web2.0 object into a learning platform area, or adding multimedia content because it looks great. However, it’s very easy to get caught up in the momentum, and forget to ask that critical question “Just because it’s online and looks whizzy, does it actually help the learner understand/do anything differently?”

Yes, the online-ness, and the whizzy-ness is very engaging and motivating, and that in itself is a huge benefit to so many of our learners, but, given some of the questions above about impact-on-learning being achieved within a manageable teacher-workload, we need to be very careful. An approach of creating beautiful Web2.0 multimedia activities online which takes teachers hours to create is not sustainable. Neither will it have much impact on learning once the novelty wears off.

However, learner driven activities which add new opportunities to existing classroom provision are both sustainable, achievable, and will have an impact (eg; recent election debates forums, shared class pet diary forums, topic wikis, branching story with peer review wikis, eportfolio centric exam portfolios, maths strategies image/sound capture – all of these can be found under the link below).

There are a number of teachers quietly carrying out their own school based research projects as we speak which seek to determine impact of learning platform use on learning. The nature of how impact is quantified tends to fall into 3 categories in relation to learning platforms:

1. A teacher will add files (or other ‘stuff’ – content) to their learning platform and measure the number of ‘hits’ that these resources receive.

2. A teacher will explore a range of learning activities with their class as they learn how to use each of the learning platform features, and will then compare the predicted v. actual end of year assessments (eg; CATs, SATs, Exams).

3. A teacher will identify a target group of learners, and a target area for development (eg; Borderline Level 3/4 Non Chronological Writing), and will then dig into the hard-to-teach/hard-to-learn aspects of this target group/area to identify exactly what the ‘need’ is. Knowing this need, the teacher then considers ways in which learning platform opportunities can add value to existing provision. The measurable is then the impact on the “up-levelled” outcomes for the target learners.

Needless to say, the first method makes approximately 0% impact on learning but may provide some administrative benefits, the second methods sometimes makes a coincidental impact, but the third area turns up trumps for learning pretty much every time. It’s because the measurable impact was also the initial focus and goal for the action that took place.

The biggest challenge facing anyone looking for impact (progression, ‘difference’ or whichever term we use) is the relationship of what we’re hoping to find, with the action we took in the first place.

So, the easiest way to measure the impact of any learning platform use (or indeed any other area of learning!) is to look at what you want the impact to be, and work backwards – what is the thing you want to change / what are the current challenges facing your learners / what are the areas of engagement, motivation, attainment, progression or school improvement that you want to develop? Once you have identified this, then think about how to tackle a specific element with a specific group of people, and consider exactly what ‘needs’ to be achieved.

The challenging part of this process is having the knowledge to be able to understand what your learning platform can offer to support these goals and intentions, and that’s where the teacher-sharing that I mentioned above comes into play. No-one has tried everything, but everyone has tried something! Looking / Talking / Searching / Sharing is a great way to identify ‘how’ the learning platform can help you to achieve your goals. To this end I’ve been encouraging teachers to share via an Innovative Teacher Network (link below) which is proving highly successful (18,500 at last count). More on that in a moment.

Once you have a clear goal, clear focus on what you want to achieve and who will be involved, and once you have some ideas about how your learning platform can support you, then…. once you’ve carried out these things, you will be in a position to be able to ‘judge’ whether it has made a difference.

So, I think perhaps the next question in this sequence should be ‘what are you trying to achieve’?

I wrote up my own school research on the impact of using a learning platform to support learning – I carried the research out over about 18 months, and used once a term levelling, and SATs as a measurable of the children’s progression, and the Becta SRF as a measure of staff perception/reflection. The short version, is that targeted use of the leaning platform did make a measurable impact on children’s attainment and progression in hard-numeric assessment data. But…. this happened because all the teachers were focusing on specific areas of the curriculum, and used the learning platform as a mechanism for differentiation, extension, special provision, home learning, nurturing independence & independent learning. (Equally, if we’d done a project on the impact of sandpits, we’d have had to focus on the way that the sandpits were being used and how they added or enhanced learning opportunities!)

This research in summary form can be found on the NAACE site: www.naace.co.uk/178

In terms of some of the questions further back in this thread, I’d suggest a 5 stage approach for CPD that encourages every member of staff to undertake a small, informal, reflective project (could work as accredited action research, or just an informal exploration)

My suggested 5 step plan would be:

1. If you had to choose 1 area of your children’s learning (note: learning, not ‘teaching’ or ‘management/administration’) that you’d like to improve/enhance, what would it be and why? This becomes your Goal. (Keep it small scale so that it’s achievable).

2. What opportunities do you need to be able to achieve this?

3. Who needs to be involved, and in what way?

4. How can the opportunities that the learning platform provides help you to achieve this? (See link below for ideas)

5. What is the timeframe for this, and How will you know how successful this has been when you reach the end of that timeframe? How will you measure/reflect the link between the Goal, the Action and the Outcome?

Schools where I’ve seen whole-school transformation have all followed this kind of model in one way or another – teacher’s have a sense of motivation and personal ownership because the area that they are exploring is relevant to them (perhaps through their Professional Targets or current class challenges). Where all staff are working on something, it’s good to have regular opportunities to share back with colleagues – for example through staff meeting slots – to share ideas, challenges, solutions, observations on improvements, and encouragement). This is of course a common model for providing whole-school improvement (eg; everyone tasked to choose something relating to Parental Engagement or AfL), but which is personal to each individual class/teacher (eg; my class are focusing on engaging parents of the “6 children in Strawberries group”).

For anyone looking for Ideas, Examples, Case Studies, or Articles about learning platform use I’d strongly suggest having a look at  www.school-portal.co.uk/Grouphomepage.asp?GroupId=859283

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