More tips from Kate Jones
Video transcript
okay tip number four please okay and my next tip carrying on with the theme of vegetable practice is using technology for retrieval practice so we’ve all had a lot of cpd with technology with online learning people have different feelings about using technology but i’m a big advocate for technology in the classroom with retrieval practice and i have three golden rules with technology and the first one it should be workload friendly to support the low effort high impact so i’ll give you some examples of online tools that are workload friendly it also should be user-friendly now this is probably the most important user friendly for the teacher for the student so that you can use it regularly it becomes automatic it doesn’t take up that space in working memory and then the third one is that it must be low stakes and the reason i say this is because in my previous school key stage three were online for over a year and we did online exams i don’t know how reliable they were at home but we did them formal exams on google forms and it was a combination of cued rico free recall multiple choice they had a score a percentage a grade that went on a report to parents and for key stage three didn’t get any more high stakes than that and i remember when we returned back to the classroom when i did a google form quiz and panic setting miss is this going on that report is it getting a grade i said no you know about my dream of practice but i then said to my colleagues at us at school we’re using google forms for summative assessment and it works great let’s keep it like that but there’s so many other online quizzing tools let’s not use google forms for retrieval practice let’s have that clear distinction so that when they do a google form they know very clearly and they’ve been told this is an assessment but then we can use kahoot carousel quizlet anything like that for retrieval practice and they’re all low stakes in their layout and their the way they have the images and the music and the things like that so as long as that’s really clear for students as well this is great well today let’s dive into some of the tech that you’re a fan of kate because again i’m always fascinated whether with my maths head-on this is something that works well in maths or not so so tell me some of the ones that you use and why you like them quizzes so quiz iwz.com is amazing and i’m really reluctant to write about online quiz and tools now because they keep developing and improving at a rapid pace and quizzes anchor who have actually listened to me and taken on advice um because it’s grown so much it was just multiple choice now there’s cued recall you can include an image so like we said about the encoding cues you can include images with questions you can include equations you can include audio which is great for some students with learning difficulties or for languages the fact that an audio clip can be inserted there’s also a teleport feature which i love so i type in the topic of a quiz that i i want to quiz my students on type in the french revolution all the public quizzes made by other teachers are available but if i don’t like some of their questions then i don’t have to but i could say oh i’ll take that and you teleport it to your quiz and even then once you’ve teleported it you can edit it and amend it so that’s just a fantastic feature and then when you set the quiz you can personalize it to remove the music because that’s very annoying and distracting you can remove the leaderboards which i do think teachers should do especially in mixed ability classes or i’m not sure about your classes but it tends to be the same top three on the leaderboard and it’s just it shouldn’t really be about that it should be about them and their individual recall and also remove question timers and that’s really important for students with send an eal but perhaps other students as well because the minute that the the clock is ticking for some students that makes it high stakes pressure panic sets in they form bad habits such as not reading the question carefully and we don’t ever want them to rush i also don’t think it’s fair and i don’t know if kahoot still does this i i didn’t use kahoot for a long time because you couldn’t remove the leaderboard feature and you could only use the whole quiz not bids but they have changed um but i didn’t like on google you could get more points for answering quickly why when you’ve got two students that both got the right answer should someone be a lot higher than the other student because we want them to take their time and get the answer correct and so often when they’re rushing they go i knew that miss i just didn’t read the question you know i just because the clock is ticking so the fact that you can personalize all these things on quizzes um you can also share the quiz with your colleagues you can upload it straight to a google classroom the results um it has a spreadsheet which is just green and red it’s so easy so you could just have a snapshot of the class oh there’s a lot of red for this question oh everyone got this question right it tells you your class percentage which is brilliant and really really helpful um and this links in with what rosenschein said about the 80 success rate well if you set a class quiz and it’s 99 your quiz is probably too easy but if you’ve then looked on your percentage is it’s probably too difficult so there’s all these things with quizzes that i can use to help me i can create an effective quiz quickly i can set it easily i can share it with colleagues and students it will market for me and provide useful information for me moving forwards something else that teachers should do but they don’t do enough is repeat quizzes don’t just do the quiz and then do it once do that quiz again when you do the quiz again it reduces the low stakes nature even further because you said we’ve already done this you could add three or four more questions in from the content that you’ve done in between and then that is really where students should be seeing the progress and even if they say well we’ve done this miss well we know how memory works or even if you get it right the second time your retrieval strength could is still getting a boost so it’s still a good opportunity it’s a quizzes brilliant okay a few questions a few questions on this uh so the first is where do you tend to use these cases does this tend to be more in class with the kids on devices or is this homework as well yes you can set it as homework and but i did work in a school where every student had access to technology and this is another thing obviously that varies for teachers who don’t work in a high-tech environment clickers is has been around a while but it’s still good you just one device needed an ipad a phone you scan the class and clickers when they have these paper codes they cannot cheat it’s not like a mini whiteboard where they can have a sneaky peek if someone’s someone’s answers plickers because the codes are unique and the way they have to hold up the code it is impossible for them to cheat they don’t know what their other students have answered so yeah and i used that for a long time when i worked in a school without technology but then when i did work in a school with technology i thought oh i’m really going to embrace that and trial uh lots of these i know you’ve had adam boxer on and carousel learn is great and they have a mini whiteboard mode um so actually you don’t need technology in class for that you can have the questions up the on the whiteboard and the answer on the mini board so there are ways of of doing this um and there’s also features if you do set it as a homework to try and stop cheating where it might block things or so on or um but yeah i’ve used it mainly in lessons fantastic just a few more points on this so we’re gonna go controversial now kate so um dylan william often makes the point that he he when he uses diagnostic questions often it will just be kids voting with fingers one for a two for b three c four for d or a b c d cards because he doesn’t like the idea that every answer a child ever gives is recorded somewhere and on one of his arguments is this raises the stakes of the assessment and also it maybe kind of causes some kids like it knocks their confidence they tend to kind of clam up instead of kind of being more open and honest well what’s what’s your view on that as a potential issue with technology for for retrieval you can use technology for no stakes retrieval practice to make it anonymous um mentemeter.com students don’t put their name in they answer a question there’s pros and cons to that because as a teacher you see a snapshot of all the class responses but you don’t know who the individuals are but if you are trying to do a no-stakes approach and that’s great that could be frustrating for the student they’ve often gone miss that’s my answer they want the teacher to know um i did a no-stakes quiz on quizzes when my um year seven class i met them for the first time probably because we’d been online and i did not want them to think this was a test or anything like that so the first quiz i did with them they had to have a quiz name that was a harry potter character and actually that was the only time i’ve ever kept the leaderboard up because we was like dumbledore hagrid and it was really fun and it was anonymous because i didn’t know who dumbledore was and that’s not something i would do regularly but they’re still going through the act and process of recall and retrieval practice even though i couldn’t see the individuals with their real names i could still see who scored correctly and incorrectly on what questions so it still was useful for me so we can use technology anonymously or we could use something like padlet and jamboard they’re like digital post-it notes as well um but i do think again it’s really difficult the low-stakes nature of it because mentimeter thankfully has a profanity filter because if you’re to say to students i don’t know who wrote what they could think oh right mrs just give us a green light and actually that has worried me what if a student did just write something they never have they never have um what if they did like something really really bad and i wouldn’t be able to know who wrote that so it’s just about sort of the pros and cons and the variety but the more that you do retrieval practice anyway the more just normalizes it as a classroom routine amazing one one more thing on this kate i’m interested in using technology for self quizzing because we know from research whether it’s the dolosky paper or whatever that self-quizzing is a really good way for for kids to remember and we’re promoting good study habits and so on do you do do you find any of these technologies lend them particularly well to kids revising independently at home and if so which ones yeah so digital flash cards are great for this and a question that i’m really interested in and i’ve asked daisy chris a doula and i’ve asked other people is about should students create their own flashcards or use pre-made flashcards now obviously the benefit of them creating them themselves is they’re thinking hard about the questions and this that’s a good strategy in itself but as we know question design is difficult and if students are going to create flashcards they need to be taught how they need examples modeling scaffolding all these things was if our sole purpose is retrieval practice then actually it could just be better to use ready-made flashcards that are specific to an exam board and a topic and so on and there’s quizlet there’s anki anki has millions and quizlet and anki just as two and also quizzes has flash cards they have the options where you can create your own or select ones that are already made now these are great because actually if you think about gcse how many subjects students have to have and imagine all those physical copies of flashcards even though i am a bit old school and i prefer if i was revising i would have paper flash card but let’s just think practically a student always has their phone on them was not going to carry around these flash cards packs around with them but they could be traveling somewhere they could be waiting and they could just get out their phone and use the flash cards and anki although i don’t know how this works because it’s the tech has um when a student answers a question and they said whether it was correct or not it records that and it has an algorithm so it knows next time which questions to focus on the problem with most online flash cards though and actually paper flash cards is that students don’t always do the act of retrieval you have to write it or say it so and that’s a problem with the digital flash cards and that could be a little bit embarrassing if you so you’re not going to say it out loud um if you’re on your own or if you’re on the bus or something but what ideally students should do is probably read the question write the answer then look for the answer and put a ticker across but they don’t they just read the question think flip it over and they haven’t done that they haven’t done that physical act of retrieval practice so flash cards can be brilliant but they can be bad if they’re just copied out rereading if they’re not doing retrieval practice but digital flash cards my students have really liked them fantastic i’ve just thought of one more question kate again you say too much good stuff here so i’m gonna have to just throw this in there’s a risk this will open up a whole can of worms so feel free to swerve this one but let’s say a student is revising they’ve made themselves a set of flash cards digital flash cards or physical ones for history geography english and so on now what’s the research say here about let’s say they’ve got half an hour to revise should they do half an hour and spend that half an hour in geography and then the next day half an hour in history and then the next day half an hour in english or should it be half an hour where any card from any subject can come up and it’s a mixed bag because i’m really torn on this my my understanding of interleaving is that it’s a good idea to mix things up but also i understand the idea of kind of thinking deeply and having a coherent kind of chain of thought about a subject and tying together ideas so any thoughts on that should we mix it up or keep it subject focused i can answer that because i asked john dunlosky the exact same question nice let’s go and he is just amazing professor anyone who’s not aware strengthening the student toolbox so i i asked him that same question as well because i have seen students take it to the extreme where they’ve just mashed up all their flash cards now they do need to reshuffle and we order them we don’t want them to just learn it answer by answer by answer but actually across different subjects dunlosky was quite clear and said no i don’t think that’s a good idea he said of of course the idea of interleaving um and doing half an hour one night of one subject and then all why not have 15 minutes of geography 15 minutes of history and then another day have 15 minutes of history that type of thing so there are ways that we can interleave but yeah i’m really interested in flash cards and i think we haven’t quite fully got there with really embracing them because if we’re asking students to create their own they need to be creating them from the start of the year because otherwise it’s a huge workload issue just before the exams making them and if they are using them online we need to quality assure and check that they they are correct but that question yeah i put it to donovsky because interleaving in terms of cognitive science i teach history and i have a very different approach to interleaving the new in maths because my curriculum is driven with chronology so it just would not make sense to teach a lesson about keep going back and too so i don’t have that same level of expertise but john delosco was really confident when he said no don’t think that’s a good idea keep the flash cards and sessions subject and topic based amazing i love nothing more than a clear definitive answer kate that’s fantastic