By: Jeff Dunn

You’re going to want to turn on your printer and fire up a PDF viewer. This is just that good. It’s called the Padagogy Wheel and it offers a fantastically useful perspecitve on how to figure out which iPad apps work with Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy. Created by Allan Carrington, this thing is a monster and deserves some focused attention. So I’d make a personal plea to save the hi-res image (below) or print out the PDF (available here) and then spend your long weekend closely examining this thing.

The Padagogy Wheel takes an expanded approach Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy and offers 62 iPad apps that fit into the organized chaos that is Bloom’s. On Allan’s blog (check it out, it’s great!) he explains that not every app is perfect and that there’s always room to improve. So I’d recommend you check out his blog and offer up your comments, questions, etc. as he ha spent a pantload of time on this thing and I just know you’d enjoy learning about this if you haven’t already.

What do you think of some of the apps and where they’re placed on the wheel? Are there some missing? Personally, I think a lot of the apps could live in multiple parts of the wheel (like Twitter, for example, could live in ‘Analyse’ as well as ‘Apply’) and that this thing could be even bigger than the 62 apps you see below. Another interesting note is that ‘Remember’ and ‘Understand’ are combined. In any case, this wheel is flat-out awesome and I don’t usually get this excited about visual guides. This one is just different and my digital hat goes off to Allan for his hard work. Hope you enjoy it as much as I have!

http://www.edudemic.com/integrate-ipads-into-blooms-digital-taxonomy-with-this-padagogy-wheel/ 

Learn more about apps here: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/1050586?hl=en

Google Docs is a great online application to get your students creating, collaborating, and sharing documents, spreadsheets, forms, presentations, drawings, and tables.

Glogster EDU is an awesome application to create an interactive poster full of multimedia such as sound, pictures, video, creative text, links and much more.  You can even embed all of these types of multimedia on one poster which is really cool. If you create an account as an educator, you can grant access to your students.

Conduit Mobile allows anyone to create quality mobile apps once and deploy on all platforms.  Develop, publish, promote, and monetize your app. No coding required!  By cutting the technical workload, they allow publishers to focus on the content, delivering apps quickly, simply, and across all mobile devices. What's more, it's all absolutely free.

Animoto Education is one of the best video editing and digital storytelling apps out there.  If you create an account as an educator, you can grant access to your students.

Youtube Editor is an easy-to-use video editor that allows you to trim video clips, add music, add effects, add text and much more, all online.  You can even pull multiple YouTube videos together to make one YouTube video.

Prezi takes your presentations to the next level.  The effects and transitions are extremely visually appealing and it is very easy to use.  Introduce this new style of presenting and your students will thank you!

Popplet is an outstanding graphic organizer app that allows you create mind-maps full of multimedia such as pictures, video, text, etc.  This also serves as a great brainstorming platform for students.


Pixlr allows you to create your own drawings, edit your own pictures, or edit pictures downloaded from the internet.  Pixlr is an online app that is very similar to Paint, but its readily accessible because its online.

Aviary is a very sophisticated audio editor for a free online application.  Create a podcast, a public service announcement, a commercial, or a radio talk show with this awesome app!

TikiToki allows you to create an interactive timeline full of multimedia!  The colors are vibrant, its easy to use and the possibilities are endless!

Many Eyes is a powerful graph creator provided by IBM.  This online app allows you to either search graphs and charts that have already been uploaded, create your own graph from data that is in the database, or create a graph by uploading your own data.  This is a great way to make infographics and other neat visualizations.

Digital Storyteller is a digital storytelling app developed by the University of Virginia.  This app allows you to easily create your own digital story by uploading multimedia, entering text and recording your own voice.  The design of this app makes it very easy to use and you can create your own digital story in minutes.

Myebook is a free app that allows you to create, store, and share your own ebooks.  The ebooks are also interactive by allowing you to grab the corner of each page and physically turn it backward or forward to navigate throughout the ebook.

MapMaker is an awesome app provided by National Geographic that enables you to create your own maps using an interactive world map.  You can navigate, mark, draw, measure, link and share your maps.  You can browse by regions to explore, or you can browse by themes such as climate, population and culture, or politics and economics.

Google SketchUp allow students to practice designing and engineering in their own "digital" backyard.  The possibilities are endless by creating architecture such as houses, buildings, etc.  Upload your creation to the online warehouse, or browse and download creations from the warehouse right into your own backyard.

To view my favorite ways for students to publish their projects to keep in their e-Portfolio, visit my blog: 12 Free Online Apps to Get Your Students Publishing. 

To see how these applications play a part in Project-Based Learning, visit my blog post:My Top Free Online Tools and Resources for PBL

http://www.thelandscapeoflearning.com/2012/01/14-free-online-apps-to-get-your.html

It’s only one statistic, but anyone who has spent any time with a student or pupil between, say 11 and 21, will recognize the number as, if anything, rather low – but this infographic from Schools.com, reckons that school pupils check their digital devices once every ten minutes or so.

It’s way more than that in our house.

The extrapolation from that is that – if these kids are so dependent on digital devices, then don’t fight it, exploit it. The theory goes, that if these kids can’t put down their mobiles and iPads, then make them consume their textbooks on those same devices, make them write their essays on laptops or tablets (82% already do). Make them do their research via Google (81% do), and allow them to take note on their laptops too (70% do).

So, the story goes, make their education entirely digital. There’s sense in that – let them use the tools that they are familiar with, and the formats they are likely to use in the future. But does it assume too much about the quality of the content? Have the curricula been fully digitized and with sufficient quality and care? And what happens at exam time? All that digital preparation can end in a very analogue testing process. Would that badly hit the success rates, and harm possible future success? 
Check out the infographic here: http://dailygenius.com/digital-dependence-inevitably-lead-digital-education/?crlt.pid=camp.kbeEC9V839IW

That framework, as Canadian educational researcher Michael Fullan and others argue, requires us to combine three trends that have emerged independently in education over the last forty years and which desperately need each other – technology, a new pedagogy, and systemic reform; and then to measure everything in terms of its efficacy – whether the learning activity really does enable us to achieve greater outcomes and a better return on our investment.

So, let’s start by agreeing how important it is that we meet this challenge.

In the 20th century we expected school systems to sort people – those who would go to university and those who wouldn’t; those who would do professional jobs; and those who would fill the semi-skilled and unskilled jobs for which minimal learning, more foundational skills, was required. In the 21st century, this isn’t good enough – morally, socially or economically. All young people need to be able to learn, to create and to do – to know important things and to be able to apply what they know in ways that are engaging and solve real-life problems.

And what’s striking from all the research into the highest performing school systems – in Singapore and Shanghai, for example – is that they do have high expectations for all their students. No excuses, no rationale for failure, but detailed strategies and plans to ensure all young people succeed.

What makes this more important than ever is that we are now in a second machine age, in which we all need to use our minds, our mental and our emotional intelligence, far more effectively. And the economic and social stakes are very high indeed. In the world’s richest country, the United States, we know that the median hourly wage of workers who can make complex inferences and evaluate subtle truths in written texts is 60 percent higher than the workers who can, at best, read relatively short texts to locate a single piece of information. And, in the world’s poorest countries, the stakes are even more fundamental – a child born to a mother who can read is 50 percent more likely to live beyond the age of five.

So, our first point is that all young people now need the thinking skills, such as how you apply literacy, numeracy and scientific knowledge. They all need intrapersonal skills, like determination, a sense of responsibility and self-worth. And they also all need the interpersonalskills – to communicate, work collaboratively, and problem solve.

This leads directly to our second point, which we all know: technology is disrupting, to use the phrase of the moment, pretty much every other activity and industry. It is transforming the way children and young people play, access information, communicate with each other and learn – and yet so far it has largely failed to transform most schools or universities or most teaching and learning in many classrooms and lecture halls. We are failing to engage many young people. Research by academics at the MIT Media Lab, for example, suggests that students’ brain activity is nearly non-existent during lectures. As professor Eric Mazur of Harvard University’s Physics department puts it, “students are more asleep in lectures than they are in bed!”  Studies from many countries show that less than 40 percent of upper secondary students are intellectually engaged at school.

And we are also failing to apply technology – consistently or at anything like sufficient scale – to improve learning outcomes. John Hattie, professor of education and director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute found, in his meta analysis, a lower than average impact of technology on learning outcomes, relative to other teaching and learning strategies. Larry Cuban, too, has documented that technology has had little impact on learning outcomes over the last fifty years – as have a growing number of other studies.

Why is this the case? Perhaps it is because, as Andreas Schliecher of the OECD, puts it: “Technology can leverage great teaching; technology can’t displace poor teaching”

The research tells us that teachers are making basic uses of technology – to find information, practice routine skills, turn in homework; they are not – yet – using it to really analyse data or information, to collaborate with peers, to use simulations, animations and the like. At least, it is not yet happening systematically or at real scale.

Now, my Dad was a teacher, and then a head teacher, all his professional life. I never once heard him use the phrase ‘personalised learning’. And if he was alive today, and I started to lecture him on the power of big data to transform learning outcomes, then I know he would look at me with some surprise and no little skepticism. But he did talk about how, in a class of thirty kids, a teacher has to find ways to engage with each of them in their own way and on their terms. Or how, in a school of hundreds of kids, it was often very hard to see the patterns – or make the connections – as to why some classes were powering ahead in some subjects or even in mastering and applying some concepts and skills but were struggling with others. And how, as the head teacher, he owed it to every child in the school, to every teacher, to draw those patterns and make those connections. He also talked about how local education authorities find it really hard to help schools to share data and expertise, best practice and insights, in ways that enabled them to do what you would take for granted in pretty much any other sphere of life: replicating excellence at scale.

I’m sure many of you would recognise the same trends. The good news, of course – our third point – is that technology is now helping us to do all these things.

In classrooms as far apart as Denmark, Canada, England, Australia, Colombia and California and many other places, teachers are deploying technology to overcome the boredom of their students and their own professional frustration. They are developing a new pedagogy, which combines learning outcomes such as literacy and numeracy with less well defined outcomes such as problem-solving, collaboration, creativity, thinking in different ways, building effective relationships and teams. As Andreas Schliecher was arguing to me earlier this week, applying technology to really hone – often over some years and always with great rigour – and then share widely the very best pedagogic approaches is something all high performing school systems around the world do really well.

And, as I know from Pearson’s own experiences, in supporting the digital learning of 70 million users around the world, we do now have the ability to make a profound impact on practice at the student, institutional, and system-wide level in education. Whether that is, for example automating the marking of homework; reducing the time, friction and cost of teaching; supporting community colleges in America to make very significant learning gains in algebra and physics and many other subjects; or teaching a generation of young Chinese professionals – the masters of “silent English” as they are often known, with top marks in grammar and vocabulary – the speaking and listening skills they need to prosper in their careers.

What’s common in all these cases – and I would bet from each of your own experiences – is that technology and big data is effective when it combines with the new pedagogies – the very best teaching practices – and is applied to drive systemic change at real scale.

So our fourth point is we need an agreed and widely applied framework that combines these three trends to deliver, around the world, far greater learning outcomes at no greater cost. As you all know, this is not as easy as it sounds. Technology entrepreneurs will find it much easier to develop digital innovations than to grapple with pedagogical considerations. Likewise, educators may grasp the new pedagogy but often struggle to design, or specify, next generation products that are irresistibly engaging and intuitive to use for digital natives. And global technology and services companies often find schools and colleges to be difficult and ‘messy’ environments in which to deploy. As the largest learning company in the world, we, like all of you, grapple with these problems every day.

Today, we primarily provide inputs into the process of education, such as a textbook, an assessment, a learning technology or platform, a course, a qualification, a high-stakes test or professional development for teachers. We put all of those ‘inputs’ in the hands of an educational leader, an experienced teacher or an enthusiastic student, and off they go. We are rarely able to predict or measure the learning outcomes that this investment of time and resource will produce. We need to change that – and, indeed, over the last decade, powered by technology, we have started to change that, with very encouraging results. But we now need to do that, in a much more systematic way, across our whole company.

So we are making some big changes right across Pearson. Every action, every decision, every process, every investment we now make is driven by an Efficacy Framework that requires us to be able to answer four key questions: What learning outcome do you aim to achieve? What evidence – what data – will you collect to measure progress? Do you have a clear plan that gives us confidence you can implement effectively? And, as we’ll always be working in partnership with other stakeholders, do we, collectively, have the capacity to deliver the desired outcome?

We stress that we are on the path to efficacy – and that our guide is incomplete. But we are committed to provide audited learning outcomes data for all our products and services by 2018. And we look forward to working with all of you to achieve our goals.

This brings me to our final point – that shared sense of purpose. As the authors of a new book put it, this second machine age does have its limitations:

“We have yet to see a truly creative computer, or an innovative or entrepreneurial one. Nor have we seen a piece of digital gear that could unite people behind a common cause, or comfort a sick child, care for a frail or injured person…or repair a bridge or a furnace.”

It is learning that gives humans the capacity to do all these things. And the brightest future of education lies in enabling teachers to do far more effectively and on a far greater scale what the best of them have always done – being an agent of change and progression. Over the years, there’s been much glib talk about how technology would “flip” the classroom, transforming the teachers’ role from being the “sage on the stage” to the “guide on the side.” The data and the research tell us different. Technology is just a tool; a very powerful one, but a tool all the same. And it is at its most powerful in the hands of a teacher and her or his students, enabling them to learn from each other and do much more effectively what the best of them do each day and always have done – lighting that spark, making that connection, that unlocks a world of opportunity for their students.

And so if we can combine disruptive technology, new pedagogy and systemic change effectively, we really can aspire to achieve far greater learning outcomes – yes, even to double them – to the benefit of far more of our fellow citizens, all around the world. It does require all of us to rally around a common purpose* – but I can’t think of a better one, or one that is more widely shared than this: Applying technology to help far more of our fellow citizens to make progress in their lives through learning.