Month: August 2020

Time to stop adjusting grades/grade boundaries?

If using an algorithm to adjust marks is unfair, as it has been deemed to be this year, then surely this practice must cease going forward.

The last few weeks have been filled with issues surrounding exam results.   One of these was being how the A-Level results were adjusted from centre assessed grades based on a statistical algorithm.   This was deemed to be unfair as it penalised some students or groups of students more than others.    The lack of equity was clearly evident due to the ability for schools to compare their centre assessed grades with the finally awarded grades.   It was therefore evident how the statistical adjustment, carried out in the interests of keeping results generally in line with previous year’s results, impacted on individual students.  The faces and lives of individual students could be attached to the grade adjustments.  This was deemed unacceptable.

My worry here is that this statistical adjustment has always gone on.   Normally students would sit exams with their resulting score undergoing adjustment in the form of changes in the grade boundaries.   Again, this was done in the interests of keeping results generally in line with previous years results and again some groups of students would likely be penalised more than others.    The grade boundaries changed due to the exam being deemed generally easier/harder.   The focus on the difficulty of the exam meant that seldom did we associate resulting grade changes with individual students; we don’t generally attach faces to this change, yet some students would have received lesser grades than had the adjustment not been carried out, the same as happened this year.    This seemed acceptable, and has been the way things have been done for decades, but I don’t see how this is any fairer that what happened this year.  

Maybe following this years issues, we need to take another look at how we assess/measure students learning and achievement including the associated processes.

Microsoft Innovative Educator Expert (MIEE)

I recently received an email from Microsoft confirming my acceptance as a Microsoft Innovative Educator Expert (MIEE) for what will now be my fifth successive year.    Over that time, I have found the MIEE community to have gone from strength to strength and to have grown what it has to offer to those who are accepted into the MIEE cohort each year.   This has greatly helped me as an individual and in turn, I believe, has greatly helped my school.

Probably one of the biggest benefits of involvement in the MIEE programme is the community that it provides you access to.    The MIEE community are very eager to share their ideas and resources making use of a MIEE Microsoft Team (below) as well as all the usual social media channels to share.

This has given me access to a wealth of resources including video help guides, tip and tricks resources and displays for around school, to name but a few.    This has saved me a massive amount of time and provided me an almost constant flow of professional development materials which I could use and/or pass onto colleagues throughout the school.   It is also a great place to reach out to for support or answers to questions; Many a query raised with me by staff in school has been answered with support from the MIEE community.   This community has also provided me a blueprint for the kind of internal EdTech community I think we should each seek to build within our schools and across schools within our local areas.

Another benefit of the MIEE programme is access to information and occasionally demonstrations of new functionality which Microsoft are planning to introduce.   This has been particularly interesting in relation to seeing how Microsoft Teams has developed, seeing for example the plans for user changeable backgrounds for meetings before this was introduced to the public.    This little extra insight has helped in planning and preparing within the school for the introduction of new features to Microsoft products.

The MIEE community has also allowed me the opportunity to get involved in a couple of TweetMeets this year.   These twitter-based events last about 1 hour and focus on a given educational topic.   These have been a great opportunity to interact with educators from across the world and get their thoughts and views which in turn has helped widen my perspective.   This global perspective is another significant advantage of the MIEE community as the community itself is built up of educators from across the globe working in different contexts both within their individual schools but nationally in the different counties.   As such I have been able to seek out a diverse range of opinions and ideas which has helped me in decision making within my own context and school.

The majority of my interactions with MIEEs has very much been virtual in nature, via twitter, via Teams, etc, however there have also been opportunities to meet others face to face.   During last year, through the MIEE community, I became aware of and then took part in a Microsoft Bootcamp where I had the opportunity to meet with a work with a number for staff from the Further and Higher Education sector.   This was very useful for me as the context was slightly different than my own independent school context and therefore provided me plenty of opportunities to compare and contrast what we are doing with what colleges and universities are doing.    In Jan 2020 there was also a meetup at the BETT conference in London including a trip to the Microsoft store in London; Sadly, on this occasion I missed this event due to other commitments.

I also need to mention other opportunities such as the MIE Expert Strava group which was just started the other day;   This has allowed a number of MIEExperts who are interested in fitness/wellbeing and in particular in running to share their efforts.  I have found this highly motivational and am on target to complete 25km of running this week with the groups help, assuming tomorrows run goes ahead and is completed as planned.

Overall, I have very much enjoyed being a member of the MIEE community.    I suspect the value you take from it is related to the effort you put in, in being involved and contributing to discussion, sharing resources and ideas, etc.  I myself have found myself getting more involved each year.    I personally look forward to continuing my involvement in 2020/21 and to leveraging the MIEE community in helping and supporting myself personally and professionally, plus my school and its community.   For those considering whether to apply for 2021/22 I would certainly recommend it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Embedding in SharePoint Online

SharePoint Online can easily replace conventional school VLEs thereby saving schools money.    It may be that SharePoint doesn’t have some of the education specific functionality that dedicated school VLEs have, however there are easy work arounds for this or it is simply a question of whether the often high per student licensing cost is worth it for functionality which is often limited in its use.

One of the particular things I like with SharePoint Online is the ability to easily embed content from other educational tools such as Wakelet or Flipgrid.

The key to doing this is the Embed Webpart, which is available when editing a page.

Simple add this to a page and then past in the appropriate Embed code from the site into the relevant embedcode box which appears on the right of the screen.

Please note, if you are unable to embed from a given site/service it may be necessary to allow the embedding for this site/service or to ask you IT admin to do this for you.   This involves going into Site Settings and then HTML Field Security.

Here you will find a list of the domain names/web addresses which are enabled for your sharepoint site and therefore can be embedded.  To add additional sites simply add the web address.  E.g. to allow Wakelet we simply add http://www.wakelet.com to the list.

Alternatively you could change the setting to all contributors from any domain however this is a less secure approach and therefore isn’t recommended.

For me SharePoint online may not be filled with specific educational related functionality however it is quick and easy to use, is very scalable, allows embedding of common educational tools such as wakelet and lacks the high additional cost of traditional VLEs.  I think this therefore makes it an ideal tool to consider for use in schools.