Category: Feedback

Applied Theatre: Utilising Technology to Analyse Workshop Processes

Living in a ever-more technological world we often discover technological tools and apps, that can be applied to many different disciplines and practices. This morning a group of students from the BA Theatre course, who attend the Schools module, were introduced to an app – ‘Coach’s eye‘ to use for analysing workshop practice. The session was taught collaboratively between Kay Hepplewhite, Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Dasha Zhurauskaya of Learning and Teaching Development here at York St John University.

The session began with students creating workshop scenarios that involved teaching younger children and some issues that may be faced when teaching. Using the ‘Coach’s eye’ app on the university’s iPads’, the students could record the workshop and then later analyse strengths and weaknesses of the workshop delivery. The app allows for a commentary to be added over the video, it also allows users to highlight specific areas in the video and to zoom in for deeper analysis.

In discussion after the session many of the students agreed that the use of the technology allowed for a closer critique of how a facilitator delivers a workshop. The app also could be used in general theatre practice for analysing live performances. Kay Hepplewhite asked students whether they would like feedback given through an app such as ‘Coach’s eye’. Many responded with positive feedback for use of the app commenting ‘it’s such an easy form to be able to display shortfalls and strengths of practice’. The videos created can also be easily shared on sites such as YouTube and the University’s Media Library.

Personally I can begin to see the benefits of the integration of technology when trying to analyse workshop process. It also stands as a form of documentation for a devising process for performance. After spending more time using the ipad and associated apps, it will become a useful asset for both an applied theatre practitioner and a theatre maker.

On behalf of the module participants, I would like to thank Dasha Zhurauskaya of Learning and Teaching Development for introducing the technology and both Kay Hepplewhite and John Merrylees for organising and facilitating the session.

Simon Bedwell
www.simon-bedwell.co.uk

My iPad

I purchased my iPad during my first few weeks at university as I saw a lot of people using them during lectures and seminars so I thought an Ipad would also be useful at enhancing my experience at university.

I didn’t use many apps but here are a list of apps I used and what I used them for:

  • Pages – this is a really great app. It’s basically like Microsoft Word where you can create, edit, documents. I still use this app to type up my lecture notes and do any research to share with the rest of the class. Here is an example of me using this app for my studies:

As you can see from this photo you can change the font, colour of text, underline, bold etc etc just like you can in microsoft word, it’s very east to use and I would recommend it to any student.

  • Safari/google chrome - Safari comes with the Ipad initially, chrome doesn’t. I use these apps a lot in order to quickly look up something, access my lecture/seminar slides which then allows me to go through them at my own pace.
  • Calendar – This again comes with the Ipad. It doesn’t sound very amazing but it helps to organise myself. It updates me on any meetings i have, i can set reminders about work deadlines etc. It’s just a great organiser.
  • I also use my Ipad for social reasons such as Twitter/Facebook and emailing in order to keep in contact with friends and tutors at university.

I have found the Ipad incredibly useful. It is so quick and efficient, I carry it everywhere with me and I would be completely lost without it! Before I started this project I didn’t really know the extent to which the Ipad can enhance learning for students and teachers, I keep learning about new apps and it really is amazing the potential and Ipad has for students and teachers. Here are some apps that I think are particularly useful for students/teachers:

  • This is called ‘Socrative’ and it really is an amazing app. Teachers can log on to this app and create multiple choice questions, quizes, short answer questions and then students will have to enter the room number for the test that the teacher has set up and then they will be able to have a go at answering. This is great for instant feedback to see whether students understand the work that has been covered and its just a really fun and interactive way of enhancing learning within the classroom. No one likes to just sit and listen to a tutor for a long time, having to engage in something always helps to enhance ones learning. I therefore rate this my number 1 app for students and teachers!
  • This eClicker presenteris ‘eClicker’ it is much like Socrative. eClicker is a personal response system that allows teachers to poll their class during a lesson.  It provides teachers with the real-time feedback they need to be sure their messages are being received.  Developed for smartphones and laptops, eClicker leverages the hardware already in the hands of many students providing a low cost polling solution for the classroom.
  • This is ‘skitch’. It’s a very good app for annotating presentations, posters, notes and whatever you like. Here is a youtube video which shows skitch in use:

 

YouTube Preview Image

I think it is important to show other students how they can make the most out of their Ipad – there is much more to it than just playing games! I personally think Ipads are a great way to interact with students, I think it would bring a bit more excitement to learning.

Lunchtime forum on using iPads in the classroom

At York St John University we run lunchtime forums to provide an opportunity for staff to hear about curriculum innovations that are happening across the university. Today’s forum focused on the use of iPads in the classroom. It was a great session with lots of discussion and hands on activities. The forum was attended by representatives from all four faculties and a few other departments. Having academics who have used iPads before as part of our initiative added an extra value to the session.

Lena and I set the scene by presenting an overview of the project. The tutors who have been part of the project then shared their experiences of being part of the project and gave examples of using iPads. We then shared three other examples of using iPads for inquiry based sessions, peer feedback and video analysis.
In the second half of the forum we had two tutors from the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences presenting some specialist apps and sharing they ideas of how using iPads in their faculty enhanced students learning.

In the end, we asked everyone to give us some feedback on the session using a response system called Socrative. The feedback was 100% positive and here are some comments from the delegates in response to “What did you find particularly useful?”:

“Getting to play! Hearing specific examples or case studies from academic colleagues. Well-structured and clearly delivered”.

“Seeing other lecturers approaches and recognising what we have in common”.

We left feeling very positive and more confident in presenting at a lunchtime forum on iPads in Teesside University in April.  Thank you to everyone who participated!

How an iPad Session Changed My Learning

I was slightly dubious about using iPads in a session at University. I am the first to admit that I am pro-technology within education, but not being an Apple user I could not see the educational potential that iPads had. I personally thought that they would be an easy distraction for people to ignore tasks and play on Angry Birds.

In hind-sight I was slightly ignorant to think as much. Within the session we were advised to use Notability™ in order to create spider-diagram plans of our own curriculums. This required students to research ideas for their own curriculums, jotting them down into the programme. There are many advantages to doing this rather than on a piece of paper. Firstly, the instant access to information is invaluable; not only is this practical, it also defers tutors to sending groups off to the library to do research, which frankly results in not enough computers and people disappearing to Costa. Secondly, the fact that these ideas are now online is much better than having a piece of paper to lose or ignore at a later date. It also allows for easily displaying of the work on the projector.

I think the reason I was wrong about people getting distracted is the fact that students were genuinely interested in the educational capabilities of the iPads. It was a new interesting piece of software that the majority of us had not seen before and we jumped at the opportunity to use it. Also the ease of using the iPads was much more appealing than having to write pages of notes.

The session with the iPads has definitely enlightened me on a personal level. I would always struggle with my notes in class; to keep them organised, neat and understandable. After the session with the iPads however, I have begun to type up my notes onto my laptop, using apps on Windows 8 to complete things such as spider diagrams.

I have now taken this a step further and started taking my laptop to classes with me, in order to compile notes and save myself a lot of time. This has not only helped me organise my work, I believe, it has also improved my learning.

Although using my laptop does not have the same practicality as using an iPad, or the same software, the concept is the same. Developments for me though, would be to see more sessions based around technology. The sessions work so smoothly, I would not hesitate in recommending more sessions like it.

I would also like to see more use of technology/ iPads from tutors. I recently came across a screen recording app that if used correctly, can record anything on screen, whilst highlight and moving around a document, while recording audio. This would allow for much more detailed feedback with assignments and also a lot more clarity. Hopefully we will see an increased use of iPads and technology in general in the near future.

“It wasn’t as easy for me as for other people”

One pleasing outcome from the project has been the engagement from those students who are not completely comfortable with using technology. Although their initial responses were not wholly favourable, their subsequent comments showed that they had soon come to appreciate the benefits of new approaches:

  • “It was the first time I had used an iPad so it was a learning exercise but I found it user friendly.”
  • “I found them helpful once I had worked out how to navigate the app”.
  • “Really good – once I got over my difficulties with technology”.

However, it’s important to point that a small minority (less than 2%) had reservations. This was mainly due to the fears of, or unfamiliarity with the new technology:

  • “They [iPads] were easy to operate in some areas other tasks seemed hard. I was not keen on the idea as it meant I was unable to have my work written out to take away with me. They were useful for group work”.
  • “I am not used to using them so it wasn’t as easy for me as for other people”.
  • “Personally I prefer a text book; friends in the class loved it. I spent ages looking for what I wanted, I’m hopeless with technology”.

The later three responses suggest that we cannot assume that all students are comfortable with adapting to the use of new technology. It takes longer for some students to get up to speed with new technology and this could be down to the individual’s preferred learning style.

This is illustrated by the following comments from two different participants: “Personally I prefer a text book; friends in the class loved it. I spent ages looking for what I wanted, I’m hopeless with technology”. In the other hand another student said:  “Very useful, much easier to find information from rather than using a book. Better for visual learners like myself”.

In order to support the students when using the iPads a member of the project team has been present at the sessions to provide support and guidance to both students and staff.

Using iPads for peer review and feedback – moving forward

In the previous blog post I reflected on the work that has been done with the Initial Teacher Education tutors and students over the past few months. In this post I want to record our ideas for how we feel this project will evolve in the coming months.

The students are currently on teaching placement and on their return we are hoping to evaluate how the use of iPads has informed and impacted their own teaching and classroom assessment practice.

One future plan is to use iPads for recording the university-based assemblies and lessons. This will allow the students who are presenting the opportunity to reflect on their own performance and practice. We will do this using the Camtasia Relay’s iPad Fuse app. This app will allow us to record the session and instantly upload it to the institution’s media library. The students will then be able to review this with their tutor in the discussion at the end of the session.

I have mentioned the limitations of the eClicker app in my previous post; we are now looking at an alternate solution to e-Clicker the software used to provide instant feedback after the teaching sessions and assemblies. The students have expressed that they would like to be able to provide some written feedback when answering some of the questions to justify the feedback they have provided. One potential solution we are looking at is to use  Socrative – an online student response system.

Another development we may consider is the opportunity for the group delivering the lesson or assembly to set their own feedback criteria. This will allow them to control the aspects of the feedback that the students feel is most relevant to them in terms of progression – a more targeted approach that will allow them to focus specifically on their areas for development.

We will post further updates related to Initial Teacher Education further in April when the students are back from placements.

Using iPads for peer review and feedback

Since November I have been using the iPads with tutors and students from Initial Teacher Education to facilitate a peer review and feedback process used on a second year science module.

The students studying this module are divided in to five teaching groups with each group further split into five sub-groups of 6 students. Throughout the delivery of this module, each student sub-group is asked to participate in the following learning activities:

  • A 10 minute science related assembly – a presentation to the remainder of the teaching group that would be suitable for a specified age-range in a primary school.
  • A 30 minute ‘mini’ science lesson with the remainder of the teaching group as participants
  • An interactive science display for a primary classroom on a given topic (for example, the human body)

Each sub-group was required to produce a rationale for their activities justifying the theoretical and pedagogical underpinning.  The discussions, peer review and self-reflection at the end of the activities are designed to evaluate how successful the students feel they were in achieving their aims and what further steps they might take towards improvement.

The diagram below illustrates the peer review and feedback process:

ipads_peer_feedback

The iPads were used by students to facilitate and improve the quality of feedback and the overall feedback process through the use of Notability and e-Clicker.

The students used Notability (a note taking app) to provide electronic peer feedback on each groups science display. The app allows the students to take a picture of each display and provide detailed comments and feedback (typed or handwritten) about the display by annotating the picture. What the students particularly liked about this was the ability to annotate and highlight certain areas of the display. Here is what one of the students said in the initial evaluation survey:

‘It was easy to give feedback when annotating a picture. You can draw an arrow to exactly what you want to talk about and people can see what you are referring to. This also makes the feedback more concise and to the point. Giving feedback in this way allows each individual to offer their own opinions and to analyse the display, rather than using a ranking system that is very closed.’

Once all the feedback was recorded the students used the Dropbox feature within Notability to upload the feedback document to a dedicated folder in Dropbox. The Dropbox account was setup prior to the class by the project lead and the details of the account were shared with students during the hands-on workshop. We found that preparing the iPads by logging into Dropbox prior to the sessions meant there was less confusion for the students when they were submitting their feedback.

One positive aspect regarding the use of Notability was the improvement in the quality of feedback that was produce by the students. Initially when the students first started using Notability the feedback was quite superficial and not particularly helpful to the group that had created the display.

This made the students realise that the type of feedback that they were providing was important and that they should provide the type of feedback that they themselves would like to receive. It was also evident that the quality of feedback improved once the students gained confidence in using the iPads and the Notability software.

Here is an example of feedback provided by one of the students on the science:display_feedbackTo provide feedback on the science lessons and assemblies the students used an app called e-Clicker Presenter. Previously, the students had provided feedback on lessons and assemblies by writing on a piece of paper two things they liked about the session and one suggestion for improvement (2 stars and a wish).

The e-Clicker app allowed students to provide instant feedback straight after the session (assembly or lesson) had been delivered.

The e-Clicker app has two parts: Presenter and Audience. The tutor uses the Presenter app to create and deliver the questions and the students use the Audience app to answer them. It meant that the students could provide an honest and anonymous critique of the session.

The feedback was then used in the discussion at the end of the session between the tutor and students as part of the formative assessment process. One downside to using the e-Clicker solution was that it does not allow the students to provide written answers to questions; just the creation of multiple choice questions. This was particularly frustrating when the groups received more negative feedback after their session. They all felt that with no justification for why they received this feedback and there was no guidance for improvement in the future.

Overall, the use of iPads to facilitate the process of peer feedback has been well received by the students.  In the next blog post I will discuss how this activity is evolving.

Lessons Learnt 2

Happy New Year to all our blog readers!

Following on Daniel’s post I would like to add that probably one of the main lessons we learnt is the importance of having initial meetings and testing with staff. So the way our projects work is we have application forms which are available on-line. Staff are invited to fill them in providing the details of the activity they would like to use iPads for, learning outcomes, dates and times of their session/s.  When a complete application form reaches the project team, it gets discussed and assigned a project lead.  The role of the project lead is to liaise with the stuff member to identify the best way of using iPads to assist the activity. Aside from email communication with staff we try to have face-to-face meetings to make sure that staff are also comfortable with using iPads and that they are happy with the application that we suggested. We also found that sometimes staff need time to get familiar with using iPads and/or a particular app, therefore our solution is to lend an iPad to a member of staff prior to their session. This enables staff to be more comfortable when using a device at their session.

Overall, I would say that using iPads in the classroom really enhanced student learning and especially group work. From one of the latest evaluations students said that “iPads were very helpful and I could interact with other classmates”, also “could do more research without leaving classroom”. Common feedback about having iPads also included that it was “fun , helpful, interactive, interesting and different” .

Lessons Learnt

It’s been great to see staff and students enjoy using iPads in teaching sessions so far this year.  We have seen the use of iPads continually evolve and as a team we have learnt some valuable lessons on the way.

The feedback we have received from students has been overwhelmingly positive however we have found the excitement of using the iPads has on some occasions distracted students from the learning activity they have been asked to participate in. This has been highlighted by some of the feedback from the student evaluation:

“Disable other features such as the internet and TV so that people do not mess around on them.”

“Sometimes other Apps on the iPads can be distracting”

One approach a tutor has taken to help prevent this is to allow 5 minutes at the start of each session for students to explore and experiment with the features of the iPad. We have found that after this initial exploration that students have been much more focussed on the learning activity.

We have also tried to combat this issue by restricting access to certain features and other apps on the iPads. The Apple Configurator software has enabled us to do this – a new feature allows us to lock the iPads into a specific app. It has been more time consuming from an administrative point of view as we are now preparing the iPads specifically for the teaching sessions they are being used in.

A key to the success of the project so far has been the initial meetings we have arranged with tutors prior to them using the iPads in their teaching sessions. We have been able to discuss and advise academics on their use of the iPads to ensure that the sessions are pedagogically sound.

Student feedback on the pilot projects

We’ve now carried out a couple of pilot iPad sessions and are in the process of collating student feedback. Student responses so far have an overwhelmingly positive attitude. It really feels that using tablets for class activities, in some cases instead of the computer in the library, definitely enhances their learning. In addition to informal feedback after the sessions, we have set up an on-line evaluation survey which gets distributed to the students via their tutors.  So far, we have received 33 responses with very positive feedback! Here are some of the quotes from  the students:

  • “Really useful to be able to talk with others and each have the capacity to search the internet on the individual iPads. It’s a nightmare trying to find a free computer for group work and then trying to all squeeze round it.”
  • “Excellent all classes should have them. It is interactive learning visual and shows examples so assisting learning, this is very useful for dyslexia students like myself.”
  • “Found I could easily find specific areas I wanted to explore, to get direct feedback was also really helpful, makes learning more diverse and interesting as its interactive.”