Kim Thomas discusses the impact of paperless technologies on the classroom.
Ever since school pupils stopped using slates and pieces of chalk, paper has been an integral part of school life. Pupils take notes on paper, they write essays on paper, they draw diagrams on paper. The handouts they receive from teachers are on paper, and at the end of a school year, they write their examination scripts on paper.
But what happens when paperless technology is introduced into education? Does it just mean a reduction in the height of the paper mountains that afflict most schools? Or can it mean a transformation in teaching and learning?
A recent report by Becta, entitled Tablet PCs in Schools, cautiously suggests that one such paperless technology, the Tablet PC, could dramatically change the way children learn. As the report puts it, "Tablet PCs were being used in ways that supported, extended and transformed the curriculum.
The pace of lessons was improved, as was the richness and variety of the content examined."
The Tablet PC, which uses the Windows XP operating system, resembles a lightweight laptop. What makes it different is that users operate it with a digital pen rather than a mouse or keyboard (though some Tablets, known as 'convertibles', come with keyboards too). Students use the digital pen to write or draw, as they would with an ordinary pen. They can save their handwritten text as it is, or convert it to typed text. Teachers can use the pen to mark and annotate the work in a different colour. Students can search the saved files for particular words or phrases, just as they could with a laptop.
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The most successful schools were those that used the Tablets in conjunction with a wireless network or data projector to create a more collaborative learning environment.
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At the end of last year, there were 90 or so schools in England using Tablets. The Becta report looked at 12 of them, and found that in most cases the Tablets had had a significant impact. "There was a strong feeling amongst the schools, which was shared by the researchers, that there was definitely something different about Tablet PCs compared with laptops or desktops.
Children related to them differently - they seemed to bond with them in a very personal way," says Peter Twining, the Open University lecturer who managed the Becta research.
The most successful schools were those that used the Tablets in conjunction with a wireless network or data projector to create a more collaborative learning environment.
Children's individual notes, for example, could be shared by connecting their Tablet PC to a data projector in order, the report says, "to move towards a record that represented a class consensus."
Stephen Uden, Educational Relations Manager at Microsoft, agrees that Tablets are best used collaboratively, and cites a music lesson he observed in which pupils using specialist software were able to write scores directly onto their Tablets and then play the music back to the rest of the class.
Cornwallis Technology College in Kent has been using Tablet PCs since November 2002, mostly with Year 7 children. It now has 200 Tablets, with 290 more due to arrive in the autumn.
The Tablets have enabled students to personalise their learning, says Caroline Barber, first deputy at the school: "We've got some wonderful examples of students' work where they've got Flash animation, where they have inserted sound files into PowerPoint presentations, where they've produced electronic workbooks on topics." At the end of the first year, the academic performance of those pupils who had used Tablets was significantly higher than that of those who hadn't - a difference that was particularly marked for the lower ability students.
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...students are much more likely now to re-edit the work and persevere with it to improve it.
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The students themselves are much better at taking control of their own learning, says Caroline; when the teacher marks a piece of work and returns it with comments electronically, students are much more likely now to re-edit the work and persevere with it to improve it.
The success of the Tablets has enabled the school to rethink its approach to learning: currently, the science, English and humanities curricula are being redesigned so that pupils have longer learner periods of 100 minutes in which they work through a project-based curriculum.
Although technology is changing classroom learning, most pupils still expect to sit examinations using the traditional pen and reams of paper. Yet it doesn't have to be that way, according to software company PaperFree. PaperFree, which currently has 100,000 users in the UK, has made an impact in both the private and FE sectors with an e-portfolio software product that allows students on vocational courses to be assessed entirely without paper.
Instead of writing essays or sitting a written examination - which many vocational students dislike - the student hairdresser, engineer or carpenter is filmed both doing their job and answering questions about it with a video camera. The video and audio files are then held on a laptop along with other assessment information about the student. According to managing director Robert Smart, use of PaperFree has improved retention rates in vocational courses in FE from 63% to nearly 100%, and cut the length of time it takes to get an NVQ by two thirds.
The approach can also be used in schools.
Last year, some Year 11 pupils at St Augustine's School in Trowbridge took part in a successful pilot project using PaperFree. The pupils were following an alternative curriculum from the OCR examination board, which included a 'preparation for work' module. Normally, these pupils, having carried out work experience, would be expected to submit written work or sit a written test. Instead, they were visited in their workplace by careers coordinator Christine Hanlon, who asked them questions that they could then answer orally.
The answers were recorded either on video or audio tape, and later uploaded to a laptop. Christine was able to cross-reference her assessment of the student with the video or audio evidence. "If they'd been given a piece of paper and asked, 'What were the main points you had to observe with regards to health and safety?' they'd have struggled," says Christine. "But out in the work environment, I could say, 'I see there's a knife on the table. Tell me about the health and safety rules for handling the knife.'"
What the two technologies have in common is that they are student-centred rather than teacher- or assessor-centred. Students learn, and are examined, in a way that feels natural and comfortable to them. Truly personalised learning may still be a distant goal, but these technologies could represent an important first step in that direction.
Reproduced with kind permission of Kim Thomas and Nesta Futurelab