How the Digital School can improve teaching and learning

Colin Rose The digital school changes everything and nothing! Technology has changed the way we live, work, shop and play. We can bank and shop from anywhere that we can access the Internet. We can communicate across continents in seconds. We can work from anywhere and research a topic at the click of a mouse, increasing efficiency and productivity. The web is distributed intelligence, democractising knowledge. Small companies can compete directly with large companies on the web. Technology helps level the workplace playing field. Yet education is largely following the same model as 50 years ago. Seven hours a day for 32 weeks a year - based on the farming calendar. It has yet to embrace the power of technology to truly personalise education and give students the ability to gain knowledge anywhere, anytime. It wouldnt matter if we were all happy with the results of the vast expenditure on education so far, but most are not. Digital learning can change that IF we first define the outcome that we want and make the technology work to achieve that outcome. I started with the statement that the digital school changes everything and nothing. Thats because, whatever the technology, effective teaching and learning will always rely on five essential elements: 1. A teacher who develops positive relationships - between students themselves, between teacher and students and between teacher, student and parent. 2. A teacher who can inspire his or her students with energy and enthusiasm 3. A teacher who treats each student as an individual and can personalise instruction to the students needs. 4. A teacher who can give fast feedback to each student on any misunderstandings and mistakes so that every student can fully master every element in the syllabus at his or her pace and then move on without falling behind. 5. A teacher who can embed learning and thinking skills into lessons so students are learning how to learn and think while they are simultaneously acquiring the knowledge mandated in the curriculum. What they learn may well become out of date but becoming an effective learner and thinker will be the lasting legacy of their education.

So the outcome we want from technology is assistance in creating emotionally engaging, personalised learning that uses cooperative learning, builds learning and thinking skills and therefore more independent learners and can automatically provide differentiated instruction. I suggest thats the objective of the Digital School and we should use the 5 point criteria against which to judge the value of the new technology. Learning at your own pace and own place! Digital learning gives students an element of control over time, place, source of information and pace. It allows students to learn in their own way, on their own timetable, wherever they are, often at a time that suits them. And a sense of control is a fundamental element in motivation. Students are already using digital learning everywhere - except school! They are gaming, texting and posting on the Internet, checking out how to videos on You Tube. They just need an opportunity to apply those digital skills to their learning. Even a few years ago, providing a customized, personalised education for every student in Poland would have been a dream. Today technology can turn that dream into a reality. Students can watch video lectures and listen to podcasts from inspirational educators from across the world. They can master complex theories, especially in math and science, by watching videos and playing games. Digital learning lets students learn by listening, reading and doing whatever works best for their learning preference. With technology, students can learn in their own style and at their own pace. Interactive and adaptive learning technology can enable their teaching source to immediately adjust to their responses and present a greater or lower challenge until they have mastered the topic. When a student demonstrates an understanding of the core concepts, the content becomes more challenging. Its mastery or competence led learning. Instant feedback creates better learners Learning management systems and on-line formative assessments can show the teacher real-time measurements on the progress of each individual student - against learning objectives that the student knows in advance. That gives the teacher the chance to intervene quickly with feedback on what to do to improve the students learning and we know that the faster the feedback to the student on how to improve, the faster that student progresses. Self paced learning means high achieving students wont get bored, while struggling students can get the extra time and support and then confidence that ultimate mastery brings. Its student centered not classroom centred. It directly engages students in their own education, using the sort of technology that they enjoy. Digital learning is a social and geographical equaliser. Regardless of your background or post code, high quality, adaptive, personalised learning can be delivered to your computer or tablet. It extends the available time for learning.

Digital content saves money and liberates the teacher Digital content can be updated continuously and delivered instantly and far more cheaply than printed content. It can be embedded with video, hyperlinks, animations and individualised, self checking tests. The savings may even pay for the necessary infrastructure. Indeed more than one US school district is raising bonds to borrow money for pay for Interactive White Boards and I-Pad style tablets for all their students which the districts calculate will be repaid from savings on text books and materials. Inspirational teachers produce motivated learners. Digital learning makes it possible for every classroom teacher to access inspiring pictures and animations and enlist the on-line support of a national master teacher in his or her subject. And that second, possibly different way of explaining a subject - that virtual learning support assistant - may be just the difference that makes the difference. Finally digital learning can liberate the teacher. Blended learning - or its advanced version flipped learning or 180 degree learning calls for the basic facts and information to be learned by the student on his or her own, on-line via his tablet or computer. When students come to the classroom, the teachers role is then to correct any mis-understandings, provoke discussion and extend and enrich the students knowledge. She becomes a guide rather than an instructor. This isnt theory its already happening in schools around the world. And - thanks to the Digital School initiative this transformative model of education can now happen in Poland. So - job done then? Not quite! Digital learning can do all the things I have so breathlessly extolled but there are challenges. For a start almost all the advantages of the new technologies pre-suppose that students have become more independent, self-managing learners and able to take advantages of the learn any time, any place at your own pace philosophy behind the digital school. Which is exactly why I passionately believe that every school must invest in a learning and thinking skills programme in parallel to installing digital tools. And why I am currently creating a video based Teacher Training Series that complements the Digital School. It takes the top 20 most effective teaching and learning strategies - as identified through the largest meta survey of teaching ever undertaken - and shows how these strategies can fully exploit the new technologies. So lets slow down, look at the detail and learn lessons from those who are (often just a few months) ahead of us. What would an ideal digital school look like? It would have a: A Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), similar to Learning Management System (LMS) or Learning Platform. The basic content on the VLE would include syllabus, lesson plans, and resource materials like pictures, videos and graphics. Students can be set homework, use on-line testing and selfassessment material, and teachers and students will have records of test results. Homework

can be submitted on-line so teachers can see the status of every students work in real time and parents will have access to their childs targets by subject via on-line reporting. It is also a social space where students and teacher can interact through threaded discussions and collaborate on projects. The success of Facebook underlines the fact that students really like the opportunity for social interaction as they learn. A great example of a VLE is the EduScience platform funded by the EU and which will be available to the first 250 Polish schools by September 2012. Its designed to facilitate the sharing of best-practice in science and maths teaching, to reduce teacher preparation time and to help teachers deliver inspiring lessons by making visually exciting resources instantly available. The programme also includes learning and thinking skill books for both teachers and students that I have created, to help ensure that students can take full advantage of the opportunities for independent learning. Interactive Whiteboards (Multi-tablicas). The UK evidence is clear they increase the pace of the lesson, improve the understanding of complex concepts and can significantly reduce the time taken for students to cover the curriculum with understanding especially for the lower ability students. The latest Multi-Tablica has very sophisticated built in software for maths including 3D geometry, the ability to record lessons and an automatic reminder of key point in future lessons to achieve the pattern of spaced repetition that we know greatly improves memrorisation of material. High speed internet access - so that much of the software can be available from the cloud (ie online servers) and updated continuously. Cloud programmes make it easier to offer the same material in cases where students and teachers may have a variety of hardware eg computors, netbooks and tablets/IPads. Mobile learning devices particularly tablets. They are light, with automatic file save, are easy to read, intuitive, and notes, references and handouts are all in one place. They have internet access and the evidence is that students love using them and feel strong sense of ownership and care. The latest have built in Response software so that teachers can pose questions and students can respond in real time. This enables the teacher to immediately see the level of understanding at the class level and at the level of each individual student.

If a number of students answer a question incorrectly, the group can be asked to stop the lesson, discuss the question and its topic among themselves, and then re-answer the question. This active peer-to-peer type of learning has a proven positive effect on attainment. In addition responses by individual students are automatically recorded for analyisis and follow-up action by the teacher. This means that teachers can quickly monitor who has grasped the key concepts in time to ensure that every student has mastered the content before the class moves on to a new topic. In a mastery or competence based system, failure or poor performance may be an initial part of students learning curve, but it is not a final outcome. Competency or mastery based learning is fundamental to personalizing learning and improved attainment and a key advantage of digital technology. One brand of tablet (Multi-Pad) also offers the student an option of learning strategies and formats that they can experiment with to build a toolbox of learning techniques that suits their personal preferred way to learn. The MultiPad also has software that enables the teacher to share outcomes and success criteria with students in advance so they know what what they are expected to achieve and can monitor their own performance. Research shows that this leads to higher involvement and quality of learning. There are an ever-increasing number of learning apps applications to make learning easier or more motivating especially that enable collaboration between students. For example, through Google docs students can work collaboratively on a document and the teacher can monitor progress remotely and give feedback that is quick and constant. Maptini enables a class to create a collaborative Mind Map in real time and Reeldirector enables students to create and upload Podcasts. The provision of tablets or laptops to every student is often known as a 1:1 initiative and helps level the playing field among students with different economic family backgrounds. But the true objective is to provide personalized learning opportunities that match the learning needs and pace of each individual student and develop higher-order thinking skills. This differentiation has always been the objective of the best teachers but has involved much laborious preparation time. Now technology combined with training students to plan and assess the quality of their own learning - permits true personalisation. Blended Learning. A lot of the learning in a Digital School will be blended learning where the basic information is delivered to students individually over an intranet or the internet and then activated and enriched in-class and through group work. (This is the exact model I used when designing the Colin Rose Institute Language courses, which have reduced the costs of language learning while simultaneously greatly increasing the speed at which eg English as a Second Language is learned.) In this blended model of learning, when students

are working on an assignment and the teacher notices a group of students who are struggling with the same concept, she may automatically organize these students into a tutorial group. Then she might conduct mini-lectures with that groups and bring in other students who have already mastered the concept for peer-to-peer teaching. Students therefore help each other learn instead of relying on the teacher as the sole disseminator of knowledge. If students have questions, the teachers job isnt simply to give answers, but to show them how to find those answers. The blended model should not be a sometimes learning strategy, but a permanent feature of a 21st Century school. E-books - The digital school would use e-books which are cheaper and which can be continuously updated. Some authorities calculate that the savings on books could pay for the digital hardware and infrastructure long-term. But be wary of publishers who merely transfer their paper textbooks over to a PDF and say, See, we have an eTextbook! E-books should have animations and hyper-links. A further feature and benefit is the availability of educational games that make testing fun (like Maths games) and virtual reality demostrations eg of atomic structures and elements. Sites like LittleBigPlanet and Minecraft point the way. Assessment of students learning would increasingly be based on portfolios and digital essays which incorporate images, audio, and video into a traditional research paper, on special projects and experiments real accomplishments, not abstract test scores. And at the end of the year, students have archives of their work that can review to see their progress. When a students writing becomes public on their own site in an LMS, it ceases to be an assignment they just hand in for the teacher - they realise that anybody could be reading this, and it really needs to look good! Finally a digital school would take full advantage of the wealth of free high quality video lectures and courses available on almost every school and higher education subject from sites like Khan Academy http://www.khanacademy.org, founded by visionary Sal Khan and which now hosts more than 2,300 videos. Or http://www.academicearth.org/ which has a huge selection of lectures from top universities. Or Discovery Channel http://dsc.discovery.com , which has thousands of videos that the students have approval to download into video-editing software and use to meet the multimedia requirements of their presentations. Take it step by step! Of course all these elements do not need to be acquired all at once! I have presented them as a vision to work towards perhaps starting with an Interactive Whiteboard which is an especially powerful tool in Primary school. One thing is clear this vision is a world away from the one-size-fits-all, teacher-dominated classrooms of the past. It puts the student in much more control of his or her learning with the

teacher as a guide, using technology that they will need to be very familiar with in the fast changing world of work. The aim is nothing less than to educate every single child successfully,with individualized instruction - and theres no way to do it manually in the way we have historically approached education. The Digital School meets the developmental needs of young adolescentswhich is that learning should be technology-rich, personalized, relevant, authentic, diverse, and active. But the difference that makes the difference is the development of academic skills simultaneously teaching students how to learn effectively and become self-directed learners. Without that, digital learning risks descending into superficial fun and games or leaving students needing even more supervision. A simple example: Once students get out in the Google world, they are in the Wild, Wild West of information. They need to be taught how to assess whether the source is credible or not. As always with investments - how money is spent is as important as how much. I suggest we should evaluate investment in the Digital School against the Five Point Criteria listed at the beginning of this article. Then we are focusing on the outcomes for students, rather than being driven by the input of the curriculum. Theres no point in using new technology to implement old pedagogy. The aim is to exploit the new technology to give students new kinds of self learning activities. What are the lessons from the early adopters? The idea of 1:1 education is further developed in USA, so Ill take some examples from there. Pennsylvanias 1-to-1 computing initiative, Classrooms for the Future, has supported 12,000 teachers and 500,000 students statewide. The program equips English, math, science and social studies classrooms with Internet-connected laptops and advanced learning resources. A key finding: Success revolves around training to ensure that teachers had the skills necessary to fully take advantage of the new devices that were available. They received professional development that helped them elevate their capabilities beyond traditional teaching techniquesenabling them to better support personalized learning. Training should also be treated as an ongoing process, not a one-time event. It takes time to learn to teach in a 1-to-1 environment. By providing ongoing support and coaching, key skills and competencies can be cultivated most effectively. And by providing a mix of virtual and face-to-face training, teachers are most likely to acquire skills that stick. Once teachers become digital teachers they cant go back to being analogue teachers! In addition, Pennsylvania ensured adequate IT support staff with tools to enable them to remotely diagnose and repair hardware problems. Teachers are not computer technicians! Success also revolves around staff collaboration. A useful start would be to undertake a survey: Which teachers are adept at PowerPoint, or iMovie, or Movie Maker? Who is comfortable with creating websites, using blogs with students, or posting on YouTube? Who knows how to use wikis or microblogging, or conduct multimedia research? Who might be able to provide in-house workshops? Whom might teachers turn to for specific needs? How might teachers be able to support one another with technology use?

Quakertown Community School District in Pennsylvania that has created a self-blend learning environment for students. Some take on-line classes at home, and others work on them during free periods during the school day. There are cyber lounges, where students can work comfortably in a cafe setting between their face-to-face classes. The online courses allow students to move at their own pace and complete courses based on competency rather than being tethered to the traditional semester timeline. Carpe Diem is a blended school based in Yuma, Arizona which serves grades 6 through 12, and uses a flipped model. In 35-minute increments students rotate from online learning for concept introduction and instruction to face-to-face for reinforcement and application. In 2010, Carpe Diem ranked first in its county in student performance in math and reading and ranked among the top 10 percent of Arizona schools. The San Diego school district have equipped their students with 1:1 computors and, significantly, they highlight the speed of feedback on students understanding as the key immediate benefit. Says Blake-Plock, who writes the popular Teach Paperless blog Its this model of deeply analyzing the data in a way that no human teacher would have time to do, and mapping lessons to kids abilities, thats fundamental to what education is going to look like in the future. Technology allows students to go in their own direction, which is really difficult to do in a classroom with 30 different kids at 30 different levels in 50 minutes. New York Citys School of One is a fascinating experiment. Based at Dr. Sun Yat Sen Middle School in Chinatown it provides math lessons that are customized every day to meet the individual needs, and progress of the 80 incoming 7th graders who volunteered to attend the five-week session. The School of One combined face-to-face instruction, software-based activities, and online lessons designed to move each new 7th grader through a defined set of math benchmarks at his or her own pace. As students entered school each morning, they could view their schedules for the day on a computer monitorsimilar to the arrival and departure monitors at airports!and proceed to the assigned locations. A students schedule could include traditional lessons from a teacher, small-group work, virtual learning, or specific computer-based activities. After each half-day of instruction, teachers entered data on students progress and instructional needs into a computer program that recommended the next days tasks. Preliminary data showed significant student progress toward mastering the skills targeted in the program. The schoolnamed one of the 50 best inventions of 2009 by Time magazine has now expanded to three middle schools in the city as an after-school program. Project Red http://www.projectred.org/ is a good resource on what works and doesnt work - and has pulled together the experience of several thousand early adopter schools in the USA and created 9 steps to successfully using the new technology. They are: 1. Getting the commitment of the Senior leadership group, 2. Timely Professional development, 3. Use the technology daily not occasionally! 4 Use it to promote more student-to-student collaboration, 5. Use it to personalise learning, 6. Get students using technology to create their own e-books, digital presentations and digital stories,

7. Be realistic in specifying devices that stand up to the stresses of daily student handling! 8. Use it to extend the time and place for learning ie outside school hours and school walls, 9. Create quantified expected outcomes for your investment in advance, measure against them and refine your program accordingly. On an international basis South Korea has created a National Virtual School and switched to digital content from textbooks. China with 100 million new students has a Digitized K-12 curriculum and is training Master Teachers to teach online. In Singapore 100% of Secondary schools use online learning and all teachers are trained to teach online and via Blended Learning Environments Where is the evidence that digital learning actually improves student outcomes? To be honest its mixed. Many studies have found that technology has helped individual classrooms, schools or districts. For instance, researchers found that writing scores improved for eighth-graders in Maine after they were all issued laptops in 2002. The same researchers, from the University of Southern Maine, found that math performance picked up among seventh- and eighth-graders after teachers in the state were trained in using the laptops to teach. Why are the results mixed? Because too many schools or districts have bought technology hoping it will improve engagement and prepare students for the 21st Century. All true, but these are vague unquantifiable concepts. Technology is merely a means to an end not the end itself. And the end must be increased attainment. Rather than being a cure-all or silver bullet, one-to-one laptop programs may simply amplify whats already occurring for better or worse, writes teacher trainer Bryan Goodwin. Good teachers can make good use of computers, while bad teachers wont, and they and their students could wind up becoming distracted by the technology. To repeat the opening phrase the digital school changes everything and nothing. Getting value from a Digital School depends on a trained teacher and the right pedagogy. But - when digital technology is combined with good trained teachers and students who are trained to be effective independent learners it does produce significant learning gains. Whilst the normal digital school will adopt blended rather than on-line learning, its interesting that the U.S. Department of Educations study Evaluation of Evidence-based Practice in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies (2009) concluded that: Students who took all or part of their class online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction. Mooresville district North Carolina, which in its fourth 1-to-1 year has stretched its program to reach all students in grades 3-12, appears to be a model of how to do it right. Since the digital conversion began, the district has seen an improvement of 20 percentage points from 68 percent to 88 percentin the portion of its students who scored proficient on all core-subject state exams, in the subjects of reading, math, and science. And its 2010-11 graduation rate rose to 91 percent, up 14 percentage points from four years ago. Where will the money come from? Poland is fortunate in having a foreward looking Department of Education that is providing significant funds for the Digital School. Even so there are savings to help schools fund themselves -for example savings on book expenditure, maps, calculators, encyclopedias. In some countries schools are leasing their laptops rather than buying them, and selling its lease

back after two or three years to a third-party buyer that refurbishes the hardware. Or raising money from local bonds. Summary The Digital school can produce significant learning gains, given a well thought out plan for implementation, given teacher training, given software that allows for fast feedback to each student on how well they have understood key concepts, given software that helps the teacher create differentiated leassons that meet the individual students pace of learning and given that the students are trained in effective learning and thinking strategies. Its an exciting future! Colin Rose is the pedagogical advisor and partner in EduScience and a consultant to the Institute of Advanced Education. He specialises in helping teachers embed learning and thinking skills into everyday lesson plans and in teaching students those same critical skills. Links and further reading: When Success is the Only Option: Designing Competency-based Pathways for Next Generation Learning (2010). http://maine.gov/mlti/about/index.shtml Maine Learning Technology Initiative http://www.inacol.org/ National Association for On-Line learning http://digitallearningnow.com/ official initiative http://www.iste.org/welcome.aspx International Society for Technology in Education http://www.clexchange.org/ Creative Learning Exchange http://www.aalf.org/ Anytime, anywhere learning http://www.projectred.org/ Research on 1-1 learning http://www.watersfoundation.org/ Systems Thinking in schools