Brains on the tablet

I hope you’re not eating, with the question I’m about to ask. What do you think of when you hear “Brains on the table”? Probably something unappealing, I imagine. It was a peculiar thing for me to hear in my first week of a new job over three years ago...

When Ahmed (our director and a senior researcher at Newcastle University) gave me a research paper with this title, I’m 97% (no: 100%) sure that he wasn’t trying to put me off the office biscuits. He was actually introducing me to research that spanned back many years, all about the benefits of students externalising their thoughts.

The paper I’m talking about is this one, by David Leat, now a consultant to our company, and Adam Nichols. They explore how, with the use of a paper tool called Mysteries, they were able to see pupils’ “cognitive processes”. Hence their brains being on the table!

Other ways of saying it:

• making students’ thinking visible
• providing a window into students’ minds
• externalisation of thoughts

The key benefit is that by understanding how students think, many things can be identified; such as what they’re doing well and what they’re struggling with. Plus how and why.

Mysteries were first developed by David and the Thinking Through Geography group. Small groups would be given lots of snippets of text, and sometimes images, that usually had a narrative thread to them. One main, open question about the snippets would be asked. Students typically read through the snippets first, then organised them into different piles, before laying them out in a chain to build understanding and form an answer. As well as hearing groups’ discussions, teachers could then also view their final layouts, which were a vision of how students had arrived at their conclusion. David explains “it quickly became apparent that there was something very interesting going on as students manipulated the little snippets of paper”.

Brains on the tablet

During Ahmed’s PhD, he came to work with David, and saw the potential of Mysteries. He gave it a digital transformation and the idea blossomed into what you may now know as Digital Mysteries, the iPad apps that have had over 350,000 downloads across 60 countries. These were developed in coordination with many different teachers, firstly for the UK curriculum then worldwide, and because of their popularity, we wanted to give people the chance to create their own! This is where Thinking Kit www.thinking-kit.com comes in - tasks can now be tailored exactly to your students’ needs, or even created by the students themselves.

When activities are completed by students on iPads, we call it ‘brains on the tablet’, and it’s an excellent source for formative assessment. As David and Ahmed say in their article, published in the Creative Teaching & Learning journal (email natalie@reflectivethinking.com if you’d like a free copy of the piece), formative assessment “is grounded in talk about thinking and ideas - therefore, any serious discussion generated by the mystery or during the reflection phase, is formative, as it helps shape ideas and scaffold the sense making process”.

  Read more on Moseley et al.’s work here.

Things provided in the app:

• a structure for collaborative learning. It flips between individual and group work throughout, meaning regular discussion triggers and openly expressed thoughts, as well as concentration time.
• tools to emphasise cognitive skills, such as ‘named groups’ to visibly categorise information, ‘sticky tapes’ to show connections and ‘notes’ to express ideas/opinions.
• an interactive playback of the session to go over alone, as a group or even as a class.

As this screenshot shows, all students must tap their name to agree they’ve read the instructions.

As a result of all of the above, the teacher can then:

• see the current ‘state of play’ but also history (e.g. ‘deleted’ notes and groups).
• tweak the difficulty of future tasks by removing slips or altering the question.
• integrate the activity with other lesson planning so that those who finish early can move onto something else.
• easily transition between a chat with an individual, a group or the whole class.
• extend the outcome beyond a session (students can print off, email, and reflect upon, an automatically generated PDF report).

Thinking Kit also allows students to do the creating too. Activities could be based on something they’ve learned about in class, a topic they’re yet to be introduced to (so they have to carry out research - see students’ work on migration here), fieldwork or something they simply have passion for and want to help others learn about. In a previous blog post, we talked about how students of Broadwood Primary School created their own iPad activities on various topics; from Batman, to The Twits, to Minecraft! All the while, they developed key digital skills that some had never experienced before.

To see what types of activities we mean, explore our developer page on the App Store. We have many free pre-prepared activities and the Thinking Kit App is completely free. To create your own, or to get students to, have a 30 day free trial (no card details required) at www.thinking-kit.com.

Getting kids thinking

The theme of this month's (September 2015) issue of UKED Magazine is 'Getting kids thinking'. Our Director, Dr. Ahmed Kharrufa, wrote a piece, which is on page five.

The article, 'Appreciating the value of skills: Evaluation beyond subject-specific knowledge', looks at how we can evaluate, measure and reflect on important skills rather than only students' level of knowledge on a topic.

To read the piece, please click here.

5 ways to make the most out of Digital Mysteries

Since Digital Mysteries for iPad launched in November 2014, we’ve been developing more and more apps and now have 37 live on the App Store! We are regularly uploading more so keep an eye out.

Much to our excitement, downloads have come from far and wide – the UK of course, where we are based, but also USA, Australia, Canada, China and far too many countries to list!

After speaking to many teachers who use the mysteries, there can be differences in how and why they are used. Some teachers prefer to download the app then have a quick run through and then use it with their class. Others prefer to really explore everything the app has to offer, try different things and customise it, then, and only then, do they use it with the students.

So to make the most of what our Digital Mysteries apps have to offer, we’ve created this ‘Top 5’ list of things you might not know are available:

1. Dedicated collaboration: Although our descriptions discuss how the apps are designed for working in pairs/small groups, as well as many of our tweets and emails, this is not always the way people use them. This is probably because when a teacher downloads an app, they are on their own and each individual app has a specific focus, e.g. Shakespeare, so they focus on the content, ease of use, the process and what students could possibly learn. While working individually on Digital Mysteries is absolutely fine, and can bring lots of benefits, it brings a multitude of extra benefits when worked on in pairs (or a three). It is excellent for developing collaboration skills, discussion, communication and higher level thinking. The apps are made so that more than one touch is allowed at a time, so students work together on ONE iPad – an added bonus being that you actually only need half the amount of iPads (see ‘Doubling the availability of your iPads’).
   
   How to: When you’ve tapped ‘Begin New Mystery Session’, toggle the number of users there is using the arrows. Names are entered and they have separate buttons to press in-session. They must tap on their own name to agree certain things throughout the session, e.g. that they’ve read an introduction, agree with the name choice for a group or that they’ve decided on their answer.
   
   


2. Reports: When students have finished a session and wrote their answer in, a PDF report is automatically generated. Upon completion, you aren’t automatically taken to the PDF, as it may not be the right time to look at it, or it may be something the teacher would print/share rather than the students.
   
   How to: To view a session report, just go to View Reports in the main menu and tap on the one you want to see. From there, you can print, email or share.
   
   


3. Differentiation: Most of our apps have three difficulty levels to them. It varies from app to app what difference this makes, but it usually means the higher the difficulty level, the more slips of information are provided to students (which may have abstract or more advanced content on them). There are also sometimes differences in the hints given to students when they have difficulty moving on from the Grouping Stage or Sequencing Stage.
   
   How to: To change your difficulty level, go to Settings from the main menu and toggle between levels in the top right hand corner.
   
   


4. Number of stages: If you didn’t know already, most Digital Mysteries apps have three stages in ‘solving’ them. The default is usually 1. Reading, 2. Grouping and 3. Sequencing (followed by entering an answer and playback). However, if you would rather students have access to all of the tools from the beginning and have the process unsegmented (before answer and playback), you can. If you like the idea of students simply reading all the slips, then moving to the stage where they create and group them all, choose Two Stage.
   
   How to: To set a different amount of stages, just go to Settings, and toggle between the amount of stages in the top left corner. (One Stage is all tools at once, with no segmentation of reading, grouping then sequencing. Two Stage is reading then grouping).
   
   


5. Session playback: Schools we’ve spoken to about Digital Mysteries tend to love this feature. Students also find it engaging too; it is brilliant to watch as they show other groups what they’ve been doing. Session playback, also known as the Reflection Stage, occurs automatically after students write in their answer. This means that most people know about it. You could also:

• Bookmark: Sit with each group and discuss some key moments with students. Within the actual session, students can ‘bookmark’ certain points in time - these are then pinpointed on the playback timeline so you/they can easily go back to them.
• Improve: Ask students to think about what they would do differently as they reflect; it’s not just like a video playback, so they/you can pause it and play around with what’s on the screen!
• Quick glance: Have a look at our guide, ‘Interpreting What’s on the Screen’ – it’s a rundown of what the different icons mean at a glance.
• Go back to it next week: While the Reflection Stage automatically occurs immediately after students enter an answer, you can also go to ‘Session Playback’ from the main menu at any time afterwards, and just tap on the one you want to view. This is great to recap and see how much students remembered.
• Reflect as a class: Try connecting one of the iPads to a projector and reflecting on the session as a class (Using the Session Playback)
  
  
  
  

Thanks very much for reading this post on Digital Mysteries – there are many ways to use it (both, as a teacher and a student). We could have added various other things but this is a short summary of those which you may have missed. We would love to know how you use Digital Mysteries or if you have any tips for other users. Comment here or email info@reflectivethinking.com

There is also a video here which runs through a typical session, and you can visit our resources page and FAQ for more things not mentioned here, or contact us if you have a question.

Externalization: Making thinking visible

During collaborative group work, some of the main processes in the acquisition of knowledge are the construction, transmission, and comprehension of explanations. These activities result when trying to explain some concepts or when resolving conflicts about certain understandings/beliefs. This is because during such activities, some assumptions that are usually implicit, have to be made explicit. Furthermore, during the process, missing knowledge is identified and is subsequently filled by deductive and/or inductive learning mechanisms. These activities do not normally occur during individual learning.

Accordingly, technologies (or even technology-free activities) that are designed to foster collaborative learning, need to focus on increasing the probability of such useful group activities to occur. The more students' thinking is made visible to others (visually or verbally), the more likely it is that it will be followed by discussions aiming at explanations/conflict resolution.

This process of making thinking visible is usually termed externalization of thinking. Encouraging externalization can involve making very simple changes to the activity design. For example, instead of asking students to just put items in groups, ask them to specifically name these groups and write down the name of the group. Instead of asking the students to find a relation between items, ask them to be explicit about the type of the relation: whether it is a causal, temporal, or special relation for example. Asking for this bit of extra information means that students have to be more explicit about their thinking. The more explicit they are, the more chances that there will be a need for providing an explanation, or solving a disagreement in the group.

A screenshot from a mystery - students have named their groups, e.g. 'Attractions of the New World'.