By Eve Debbage, Project Officer at Teacher Tapp

There is no shortage of education data on schools. It is gathered by a wide range of organisations and individuals to meet a variety of objectives. From government polls and online censuses, to mobile apps that deliver daily teacher surveys, technology has given us access to all the data we could want, both big and small.

Schools are increasingly taking advantage of technological advances to collect their own data. Information management software such as SIMS and MIS has been an established part of the classroom for many years. Once a tool used primarily for registration and storing student records, teachers now rely on these software packages to provide all the data they need for Ofsted inspections and to support their teaching and learning.

From government polls and online censuses to mobile apps that deliver daily teacher surveys, technology has given us access to all the data we could want, both big and small
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Many schools use innovative assessment tools and software applications to provide real-time data on students’ progress. But collecting data is a pointless exercise unless we do something useful with it.

there is a lot to be learned from reviewing data collected by surveys of the wider teaching profession
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How Can School Leaders Use Data from Teacher Surveys? 

When it comes to improving teaching and learning, there is a tendency to focus on student data, and data gathered internally. However, there is a lot to be learned from reviewing data collected by surveys of the wider teaching profession. As debates over the use of standardised testing rage on amidst record number of teachers leaving the profession, surveys of students and teachers are being used more frequently as a means of measuring the performance of a school.

Schools are increasingly taking advantage of technological advances to collect their own data
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Surveys provide immediate insights into teacher satisfaction levels — which can have a significant impact on the effectiveness of teaching and learning. So how can school leaders use data from teacher surveys to improve teaching and learning?

1. Make changes to retain high-quality staff. Staff retention in schools is a nation-wide problem. Teacher surveys provide valuable insight into their satisfaction levels. School leaders should review teachers’ perceptions on key issues and evaluate their school to determine if there might be issues. Often, addressing simple causes of dissatisfaction can significantly raise morale and performance.

2. Identify the teacher’s needs for specific resources and spend the budget wisely. Teachers are in the classroom every day so using their feedback on which resources work, which don’t and which they feel they are missing, is a logical way to determine where to spend the school budget and be rid of what isn’t working and replace it with something teachers feel will support effective teaching and learning.

3. Identify CPD needs. Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is crucial to the effectiveness of teaching and learning. The teaching profession is continually evolving as government expectations change, so teachers need ongoing training to ensure their teaching meets the standards set. Data from teacher surveys provides school leaders with an insight into potential areas for CPD, but also barriers to teachers’ participation in their development. If 80% of teachers feel their school does not support CPD or they cannot find the time for it, perhaps changes need to be made.

4. Update school policies. Teacher surveys can reveal teachers’ perceptions on everything from staff dress codes to salaries. If there is a common theme of dissatisfaction amongst teachers, a simple amendment to school policy could increase staff satisfaction. Even if changing policy is not appropriate, use the data to invite feedback and start a discussion with staff.

5. Gain new ideas for developing best practice. Data from teacher surveys can often inspire positive change in schools — or at least start useful discussions in the staffroom. Identify trends in data and consider these findings in terms of your school. If 90% of teachers polled feel they don’t have time for lunch, perhaps school leaders should consider making changes to provide teachers with a suitable break, so they return to the classroom ready to deliver their best teaching.

Advances in education technology make it relatively easy for schools to amass big data on their student population
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School leaders, government and other organisations which lead the way in shaping our schools, can learn a great deal from listening to teachers. If teachers feel their voices are heard and positive changes implemented, they are more likely to feel happy in their work and less likely to leave the profession.

Data from teacher surveys can often inspire positive change in schools — or at least start useful discussions in the staffroom
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Many schools use innovative assessment tools and software applications to provide real-time data on students’ progress
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Is an Obsession With Student Data Damaging Teaching and Learning?

The pressure of Ofsted and league tables has led to an obsession with pupil progress data. Advances in education technology make it relatively easy for schools to amass big data on their student population and many schools rely on this data to drive improvements in teaching and learning. But is this endless quest to collect more and more student data actually impeding teachers’ ability to teach? If there is no clear purpose for data collection it becomes a pointless exercise which consumes precious time in a teacher’s day and zaps their energy for doing their jobs and doing them well. While some data shines a light on progress which enables targeted interventions and differentiated teaching, focussing too much on it can result in significant losses in other areas.

Budgets are limited for the majority of schools, so ensuring that the most effective technology is in place is vital for maintaining effective teaching
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In a classroom where data is everything, high achievers will be constantly rewarded by graphs trending in the right direction and numbers which signify their success. But pupils who are not meeting expected performance targets will be continually reminded of their underperformance, down to the exact percentage. This could be extremely damaging for the morale and motivation of these students.

Student data can be a valuable resource in understanding progress, adapting teaching practice and improving student outcomes, but using it in isolation can be dangerous. Software can record and analyse quantifiable data but this can often be misleading or give an incomplete picture if it is not viewed in context. And there are certain types of qualitative data that technology is just not designed to gather. No algorithm will record how a nervous child who has always been too frightened to put their hand up in class does so for the first time. Yet this would be an important milestone in a child’s learning and a clear indicator for the teacher that they’re on the right track.

Gathering huge amounts of data simply because we have the technological capacity to do so is pointless and could reduce the resources available to achieve improvements
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Student data is often touted as the ultimate resource for demonstrating accountability. Not just to HMRC but to parents and carers. Parents are bombarded with statistics about how their child is performing in school, how they compare to the national average and how much they need to progress by the end of the year. Some schools even send text updates and photographs so that families can share in a child’s school day. Including parents in their child’s education is a valuable and important role of schools, but it can go too far. Access to endless pupil data can result in parents becoming excessively demanding of the school and the child. Parents should be involved in but not leading their child’s education. Equally, where a child perceives excessive pressure to perform, they may become anxious and depressed.

Schools should continually review the data collection software and hardware they use
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The technology available within schools and to external organisations has allowed access to a wealth of education data. Schools should continually review the software and hardware they use to collect this data. Budgets are limited for the majority of schools, so ensuring that the most effective technology is in place is vital for maintaining effective teaching and learning.

Both school leaders and teachers must carefully consider what data they need to collect and why. Gathering huge amounts of data simply because we have the technological capacity to do so is pointless and could reduce the resources available to achieve improvements. Education data — if used effectively — can significantly enhance teaching and learning, resulting in a more positive experience for pupils and their teachers.

The post Education Data Optimizing Learning appeared first on Tech Trends.

Virtual Reality Technology doesn’t have to be disruptive, and teachers are already using it to bring lessons to life

You’re on your way to Mars – says my Virtual Reality lesson prompt. This particular VR journey starts with a look around a spacecraft hangar and eventually takes me to the surface of the red planet itself. But I’m actually sitting in the San Francisco offices of Nearpod, an EdTech company that has already introduced millions of K12 students to this type of experience.

Over 3 million kids log into our platform every month, and about 60% of those have accessed VR content, Guido Kovalskys, Co-founder and CEO of Nearpod tells me.

Which is impressive, especially considering they only launched the VR feature just over six months ago.

The Virtual Reality experience doesn’t actually replace a teacher’s traditional lesson plan; it adds visual elements to it at the right moments to increase engagement and drive up comprehension and learning,” he explains. “Research shows that student engagement drives better learning outcomes, but it has to be meaningful engagement, relevant to what you’re learning at that moment. The lessons take longer to put together than the actual VR content, because there’s a lot of pedagogy and planning involved.

Nearpod has introduced millions of K12 students to the Virtual Reality experience
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Those lessons transport students to locations ranging from the Egyptian pyramids to Easter Island caves and the marine biomes of the Great Barrier Reef. In a way, it’s similar to Google Expeditions, but with a much stronger emphasis on lesson plan structure surrounding the content.

An example of how that works in practice: One French teacher recently used the VR feature to create a scavenger hunt when he took his class to a field-trip at a local museum. Students looked for Impressionist works on loan from Paris museums, and whenever they found one, they could look through their VR goggles see that same painting in its original setting in France. The Nearpod platform then let the teacher assign related homework where students wrote in French about their favourite discoveries.

What we do is essentially help teachers quickly create learning experiences for their students in class, using their own devices or the school-supplied gear. Being cross-platform eliminates the need for special hardware, so a teacher can control a lesson directly from their iPhone, and integrate into apps such as Google for Education if they want. Says Kovalsky.

Every single day 55 million kids in the US go to school, and the core of what they do is spend time with teachers in the classroom, that’s not changing any time soon. So we looked at ways of enhancing that experience. In a classroom where you have one instructor and lots of students, how do you make learning as personal as possible without losing the social aspect? We started by creating a type of interactive PowerPoint that let teachers share content not to the projector, but to student’s individual devices. That way, a teacher can control their lesson from their smartphone, and students can interact with that content live in their hands, responding, adding their own notes, etc.

To bring immersive VR into that equation, they studied what the minimum viable experience was that could be produced at a relatively low cost:

Our challenge was how to bring the best aspects of VR to the classroom without having to invest $600 per student plus $1000 for a computer that has to be attached to the device. That’s not going to be realistic for most schools, so we looked at what was already being used today – smartphones, Chromebooks, and tablets, and worked on making those more immersive using tools like 360 video.

Nearpod are targeting a market worth at least 12 billion dollars by the latest estimates. They operate on a freemium model that combines selling licences to schools and charging a few dollars for individual lesson plans, but a lot of the content is freely available.

The pedigree of investors betting in that vision is more impressive than the actual amount it raised – $9.2 million so far. These include the Emerson Collective (founded by Steve Jobs’ widow Laurene Powell Jobs), Salesforce CEO  Marc Benioff, and Zynga, which also hosts Nearpod in its impressive San Francisco building. One of those investors, Ben Wirz from the Knight foundation, says that what makes the company’s proposition so exciting is how it brings best practices from consumer mobile media into the classroom. Now they’re applying the same bottom-up strategy to VR.

Our challenge was how to bring the best aspects of VR to the classroom without having to invest $600 per student
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Although Kovalskys agrees that VR is about to hit the mass market in areas such as gaming, he sees K12 education taking another 5-7 years to implement it meaningfully across the board.

Schools are naturally very conservative, and the system makes it difficult to scale up until the research behind it is proven. We get concerns such as ‘will this make our kids dizzy,’ does it amount to just more screen time,’ and ‘is it just Silicon Valley pushing this?’ We’re still trying to prove to some people that mobile devices can be more than a distraction in the classroom, so it’s a long-term project.

He has no fears about the technology catching up with demand, however, as he’s already seeing a dramatic rise in accessibility in the year since they started offering VR lessons: “Six months ago you needed about an hour of editing to stitch together every minute of 360 video you shot, but that’s no longer the case now. The hardware has also become a lot more affordable. We started out with Cardboard but now have our own gear, which is similar to what Samsung offers and provides a fantastic user experience.”

Kovalskys sees those experiences as the ultimate antidote to lesson boredom:

We’re going from kids looking at 2×4 pictures of corals to literally being immersed into a coral reef that reacts to their movements, but it goes beyond just visual immersion. The fact that students can control what they look at gives a personalized feel of exploration to their experience. We’ve seen the sense of wonder, excitement and energy that it generates in them, and the possibilities of what that can achieve are virtually limitless.

This article was originally published in EdTech Digest

We’ve seen the sense of wonder, excitement and energy that VR generates in students
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Find out how to leverage VR/AR/MR in your enterprise with Tech Trends Virtual Reality Consultancy services

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post  Exploring the New Frontiers of Classroom Virtual Reality appeared first on Tech Trends.

Immersive technologies will transform teaching resources, but while we probably won’t see the death of the book, reading experiences are set to change for the next generation of students.

One of the greatest fears people have about VR is that it will be socially alienating, but these experiences should not isolate students in alternative realities, but use social interaction as much as possible
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Most of us grew up with a schooling system based on Knowledge transfer. The assumption was that this knowledge was contained mostly in books, and should be delivered through mechanisms such as exercises, drills and tests. Teachers have, of course, always found ways of further engaging students with creative lesson planning, but in the digital age, there are a lot of new tools to help them do this.

In a recent trip to Brazil, I caught up with Felipe Rezende, CEO of EvoBooks, a start-up based near São Paulo that has supported over 1000 schools in integrating such digital tools into the curriculum.

“Increasingly, we will come to think of education as a series of enriching life experiences rather than a straightforward transfer of knowledge,” he explains “We now have Virtual Reality technology to enable us to create immersion and enhance engagement, but in order for those experiences to be truly effective, they must be well designed to be engaging, immersive and relevant. We’ve seen this shift over the past 4 years as we worked to build these on mobile and make them accessible to schools.”

He emphasizes how the close relationships his team built with teachers, parents and students informed the development of hundreds of classroom hours of “deep and complete learning experiences” across core subjects such as Maths, Sciences, Biology, Chemistry, Languages, Physics, History and Geography.

“It is not enough to have digital learning experiences that are well-developed, interactive and aesthetically pleasing if there isn’t a clearly defined pedagogical strategy designed to boost learning outcomes. These new experiences must be in every sense superior to the traditional non-digital alternatives, so the educational community can see real value in these investments,” he stresses.

Rezende says his platform stands at the intersection between educational incumbents and technology, providing clear structure and detailed lesson plans with minute-by-minute suggestions of how to manage classroom workflow, but in a much more interactive and engaging way than what he describes as “your standard PDF, or Sage on Stage videos”

“Let’s be absolutely clear: teachers are the cornerstones of the educational process, and these tools in no way replace what they do, quite the contrary. Education is a much more complex process than most of us – who are not teachers – realise. The greatest danger in adopting new technology into the classroom is precisely that it will alienate teachers. It’s important that we see ourselves as an education company just as much as a technology company, as that mind-set enables us to push the limits of what is possible in the digital age without compromising on educational consistency.”

This involves providing an implementation framework, including training and professional development introducing teachers to the new technology and helping them put it to practical use in the classroom, within the context of what they are teaching. As we argued in a recent EdTech Trends post featuring Skoolee, education is about a lot more than just performing well in standardized exams, and also involves the development of social and emotional skills. This means empowering teachers through technology so that they can better leverage their personal knowledge of each student to build better social learning dynamics in the classroom.

Most of us grew up in a tranfer-based schooling system where the assumption was that knowledge was contained in books, and should be delivered through mechanisms such as exercises, drills and tests
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With only about US $1M in funding, EvoBooks has so far managed to grow its team to over 60 people, and now runs a successful business model where schools pay a fee per student enrolled in the program. Many thousands have used their materials since the company launched in 2012, but Rezende believes they have only started to scratch the surface of a market worth an estimated US$ 1Bn in Brazil alone, and about 50 times that amount globally. Yet he is keen to point out that in spite of being a for-profit company, these experiences are not exclusively aimed just at those who can afford them, and is proud of having rolled out the programmes at many schools in underprivileged communities as well.

With about US $1M in funding, EvoBooks has managed to grow its team to over 60 people, and runs a successful business model where schools pay a fee per student enrolled in the program
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“The future is probably going to be more exciting than any of us can imagine. I see all content – educational or not – evolving into a more organic, interactive and immersive experience. All our environments such as home, work, schools and public places will have many different screens with which we interact with the digital world to enhance our own reality. That includes augmented and virtual reality devices, which I believe will have a huge positive impact on education, and we’re already starting to see some of that.”

The company has, in fact, now set its sights on the booming Virtual Reality market, where they see huge scope for developing new educational content. Rezende points out that although VR technology has been around for decades, it is only within the last couple of years that advances in graphic processing, sensors, screens and mobile technology have allowed content developers to enable a true sense of presence in these virtual environments.

“One of the greatest fears people have about VR is that it will be socially alienating, but these experiences should not isolate students in alternative realities, but rather use social interaction as much as possible as part of creating truly immersive learning experiences. Personally I’m very excited about this, as I have always been very engaged with technology from a very early age. I got first Nintendo when I was 2, and never looked back…At 10 I was having robotics classes using Logo programming language and by the time I got to my teens I would build my own gaming PCs. It was all very compartmentalised from the core curricula disciplines, though, and the difference for students these days is that technology is embedded in everything we do, so our education methods and materials really need to reflect that.”

The future is probably going to be more exciting than any of us can imagine. I see all content – educational or not – evolving into a more organic, interactive and immersive experience
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Tech Trends’  Virtual Reality Consultancy services offers support for companies looking to enhance brand strategy with immersive technologies such as Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality.

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post Evolving Books into Virtual Reality Experiences appeared first on Tech Trends.