Thursday 18 July 2019

PebblePad MiniBash 2019

On 11 July, I attended my first PebblePad MiniBash hosted in Birmingham.  Here's some findings in sketchy note form.


  • Caught up with my friend Sarah Copeland (pre-conference table chats) - agreed to take idea of drawing up a workflow after consultations on PebblePad, for what both students and staff will do with PebblePad etc.  To construct, but also deconstruct the processes to make it clearer on what both need to do
  • When something goes wrong in using PebblePad - getting people to understand why it happens so they can avoid it
  • Chat with Toni Lavender - recovering issue (was explained and demonstrated later on)
    • When opening a Workbook on different tabs it creates a recovery and users could end up using wrong one
    • Auto-save currently occurs every 10-20 mins, but long term will make it auto-save every 3 seconds but only on the changes made not the entire doc.  Stops PebblePad server being overloaded.  Short term, changing language and the prompts.  Could potentially make the recovery version read only.
  • Who is Doing What with PebblePad - a new area on PebblePad website showcasing the types of uses of PebblePad, not just case studies.  A bit like a blog where everyone can contribute and share practice and connect with other
  • Dr Lydia Arnold - Harper Adams
    • PebblePad Workbook
    • Increases digital skills through using a Workbook and creativity in assessment in a Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning.  It helps tutors practise and model their digital skills they can use with their own students
    • Analogy that works - Asset Store is a filing cabinet.  Resource Store is a teacher draw of activities
    • Staff can be doing stuff face-to-face, so if expected to do online, it might not work as well.  The purpose was to facilitate feedback not corrective feedback and expected behaviours
  • Claire Tindale and Donna Hay - University of Durham
    • PebblePad Workbook
    • Analysed job profiles and identified core skills
    • Used as  Personal Development Workbook
    • Used to create career pathways
    • Identifies skills gaps
    • Supports appraisal processes
  • Duncan Cross and Jane Lovatt - University of Bolton
    • Workbook used a bit like NTU's PGCAP
  • Sarah Copeland
    • Not assume tech users understand PebblePad - they need to own their understanding first before they can use effectively.
  • Sarah Chesney
    • High Impact Practices, helps consider student success, satisfaction and retention:
      • First year seminars and experiences
      • Common intellectual experiences
      • Service learning, community-based learning
      • Diversity/global learning
      • Collaborative assignments and projects
      • Undergraduate research
      • Capstone courses and projects
      • Learning communities
      • Internships
      • Writing-intensive courses
      • ePortfolio as 11th high impact practices
    • Benefits for students:
      • Effortful
      • Build substantive relationships with tutors and peers
      • Provides rich feedback
      • Engage across differences - people and contexts
      • Apply and test what they are learning in new situations
      • Opportunities to reflect on the people they are becoming
      • Allow public demonstration of competence
      • Performance expectations appropriately set - stretch and challenge
  • Kabir Ganguly, Ceila Greenway and Frederick O'Loughlin - University of Birmingham
    • Implementation of personal academic tutoring
    • Benefits of tutoring
    • Reflection - helps student focus on their priorities
    • Embedded PebblePad language throughout the university
  • Richard Skyrme and Rhian Maggs - The Education Workforce Council (EWC)
    • The professional learning passport
    • Recording and reflecting on professional learning journeys of  teachers, support staff and youth workers involved in work-based learning
  • Rachel Challen
  • Richard Dando - PebblePad
    •  
  • Alison Poot on behalf of University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia
    • Workbooks used to support blended learning and flipped approaches, not just for assessment
    • Preparing students through a Workbook with embedded videos - no lectures
    • Support in-classroom activities
    • Weekly checklists etc
  • Student presentation: Evie Poole - University of Worcester
    • Used for midwifery - evidence and professionalism
    • Used PebblePad to facilitate her placement experience, including reflections, images, academic writing
    • Hard work was done in collecting pieces of work
    • Can be used as a resource to reach out to the nursing community
      • Gained feedback on it
    • PebblePocket was used a lot to collect, mainly offline to curate later on
    • They found it very encouraging getting comments there and then on work, not just at the end as they will find it demoralising if they hadn't had the right signposting
    • Both want to continue to use PebblePad to support their lifelong learning, get Almuni account and use in their jobs to evidence CPD etc.
    • Both found the reflective Templates useful to prompt them to think about what they learned
  • Student presentation: Ed Hewes - University of Derby
    • Used to make connections with material he uploads
    • Supports feedback loop - assess, modify, plan, amend
    • Students making more of a stand that they want to use tools like PebblePad and need tutors to support them with this approach
    • Again PebblePocket was used to collect evidence
    • Increased his digital capabilities as he was using a variety of digital and multimedia inputs
    • WAGOLL (What A Good One Looks Like) - need examples to help people engage with PebblePad
    • He makes PebblePad work for him within, i.e. Collections within Collections etc within the structure of the Workbook they have been given
  • Toni Lavender - PebblePad
    • "Do what we do but do it better"
    • Pebble+ updates:
      • Competency mapping: map and track evidence against defined standards
      • Collaboration: locking takes place at the element level
      • Workbooks and Portfolios: matching functionality
      • Dashboard: hub of all useful information
      • Quizzes: inbuilt and LTI tool consumer support
    • ATLAS updates:
      • Reporting: comprehensive, fast reporting across the whole system
      • Annotation: provide feedback inline
      • Peer assessment: peers have same tools as assessors
      • Feedback centre: PebblePad tells you about feedback, grades and notifications
      • Collaborative spaces: Workspaces with or without assessment
    • Platform updates:
      • Autosave: no recovered Assets, saving events
      • Framework change: improved performance, more robust, efficient
      • Improving scalability: improved peak performance, consistent experience
      • API 2.1: enhanced account management, learning analytics
      • Automation: all manual processes
  • Sarah Copeland bought a copy of #LTbookFE.  As requested, I left her 'edtech' related line "Always ask what is the purpose of using learning technology and underpin with a pedagogical scaffold/design".

Summarising some key takeaways

  • Me - PebblePad is purposeful as it gets you to think what it is you want to achieve and use the things that you need.  I will purposefully experiment with PebblePad to support my own professional development and structure and gather evidence for my appraisal
  • Seeing the thorough structures for Postgraduate Certificate/PGCAP and personal tutoring related programmes:
      • Good examples shown, modelling good practice.  We know it can do this, but was good to see well-thought structures that are pedagogically underpinned
      • Dual uses for using PebblePad as assessment to the course but also an avenue to 'sell' the potential uses to academics - if designed and underpinned with with sound pedagogy.  Not just to be used as an upload and send function, but the making connections with content, structuring it, making sense and showcasing it - could be used for potential TILT groups and much needed NTU case studies
      • Communicate above to relevant individuals to develop current practice of our own PGCAP
    • Encourage more uses for blended and flipped learning, not just for assessment
  • PebblePad used to support training needs analysis and appraisal process.  Identify knowledge and skills gaps and determine career pathways.  In my opinion, our current HR system is not as effective as it can be, not only lacks quite a lot basic features but PebblePad will make this a much nicer process
  • Student presentations on how they were using PebblePad.  Not what is great about it etc, but I honed in on the specifics:
    • Some things I like to spread at NTU:
      • Submitting more multimedia evidence which will drive up digital capabilities in the process. A big question following this though, are all academics comfortable in supporting their students in this?
      • Encourage and embed more offline use of PebblePocket to later refine or work into something else.  Enabling and encouraging it in programmes. Encourages and supports lifelong learning ambitions
  • Demonstrations of imminent updates coming to PebblePad, mainly ATLAS.  This will impact on us in terms of updating/creating guidance and making staff aware of these changes and any effects this may have on them and their students.  No dates confirmed yet, but can't be far off as the demos showed the changes
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