Interactivity in learning

Increasingly, teachers and lecturers are begiining to make use of student response systems (SRS), sometimes referred to as "clickers", within teaching and learning. There is a stong and obvious link between assessment and SRS. Most products provide a battery of techniques for analysing, collating and presenting information gleened from "respondents" in a variety of different formats.

So what are the educational benefits?

Input "student response systems" into your favourite search engine will produce a list with some evaluations and research reports into the use and effectiveness of SRS.

The main benefits appear to be related to increased engagement, motivation and particpation as well as claims of gains in retention of knowledge and understanding. For example, a pilot scheme into raising the attainment in some of the UK's most challenged secondary schools, supported by the Department of Education and Skills (DfES), suggested that there were improvements in the performance of lower ability learners.

Q: Is the use of SRS just confined to the classroom or lecture hall?
A: Certainly not- for it can also become a powerful evaluative tool.

With the increased emphasis on school improvement and evaluation within the UK, a SRS product could also be used to obtain feedback from key groups of learners on a variety of topics and in different ways. For example, evaluating the effectiveness of the Every Child Matters (ECM) agenda is complex and the challenge for senior leadership teams in schools is how to effectively evaluate the five outcomes:

• Be healthy
• Stay safe
• Enjoy and achieve
• Make a positive contribution
• Achieve economic well-being
  

With the creative use of SRS, you could systematically quantify a range of the qualitative aspects through the careful design of prompts or questions. SRS can provide a 100% partcipation from targeted groups of learners, with results used for gauging, recording and giving feedback on the effectiveness of provision. Such feedback and related action on improvement could be incorporated as evidence in the School Self-Evaluation (SEF) form used by Ofsted for example.

As ever, the potential is only limited by the imagination and application of such technology by the educator.

Convergence and e-learning

The spectre of covergence in the use of Web 2,0 technologies across hardware and software platforms appears to becoming more achievable every day. Will this truly create a flexible and dynamic e-learning platform for anytime, anywhere learners of all ages?

To find some answers at this stage may be premature. As ever, the driver for such convergence is, in fact, the technological advances within the current batch of mobile devices on the market - such as the latest generation of portable devices whether these are mobile phones, PDAs or audio/video players.

Over the past few months there has been an increase in the number of ways that convergence is becoming apparent. Take, for example, the phenomenon of podcasting that combines the use of RSS to signpost the location of related audio or video podcasts published on the internet. RSS is portable and is not only the mechanism for signposting the location of podcasts, but also the driver that is increasingly ported into different streams for media distribution.

With the right technology, hardware and software configurations, you can select and listen/watch a podcast via:

• your PC or laptop
• your RSS reader or "podcatcher"
  
• your portable media player
  
• your PDA
• your mobile phone

Assuming you have access to the technology, the most popular are the "free" options but a range of mobile phone services are now beginning to offer the opportunity to promote podcasts and use the funding models and associated revenue streams that generate the cash flow within the mobile telecommunications service industry. Whilst this approach may be of particular interest to business communities, it is not an option that would attract support amongst within the educational world.

It will be intersting to see whether this convergence trend in podcasting succeeds. With luck, technological convergence may lead to "free to access" solutions that can be widely used within education and make the prospect of personalisation a reality in due course!