edublogs

Looking two times the distance back to forecast the future

"Hunt for Bin Laden: Experts Agree: Al Quaeda leader is Dead or Alive". Yossi Vardi's photoshopped CNN reportage was certainly amusing but was, above all, a completely accurate forecast. What forecasters mustn't do is try to eliminate the uncertaintly from our futures.

Paul Saffo, formerly of the Institute of the Future, shares some of his secrets and insights from his main job: forecasting the future.

The Information Revolution is over. This is the Media Revolution
Everything in the knowledge and information world is uncertain. The information revolution is done, gone, in the past. We are now gripped by a media revolution - media is information that goes deep down and makes a difference in our life. It's also a shift within this field, from mass media to a very strange new world of personal media. Indeed, it's what my new job is all about - making the convergence of media count and make amplification have a new, almost reversed sense.

Even the information devices of old are now media devices. 1998 saw the first ring tone sold, and 2005 it had become a $2b business, accounting for 10% of the music business. Cell phones are entertainment media devices that happen to be communication devices. They are not information devices.

As Jane McGonigal, still at the Institute of the Future, has repeated: you need to look back twice as far back to see what's ahead. It might not be repeated, but the future will rhyme with it. If we peer back to the 1950s we see huge experimentation in mass media, in ways the television could be used, developed, enhanced. Today's use of the web is probably not even a bump on the landscape compared to what we will use our discoveries today for tomorrow.

When television emerged in the 1930s, it took some 20 years until it began to take off. Time-sharing (through email) took time from its first developments in the late 70s to become accepted in the 90s. Technology takes time to take hold, but in recent history technology is taking less and less time to make an impact:
This means that email and internet apps are nowhere near the peak of their activity.

Never mistake a clear view as a short distance
The challenge for those trying to predict the future is that, at one stage on the uptake curve you're made to look foolish as no-one joins you in the adoption of the technology. After a while, you give up on that bandwagon and think about what is worth betting your efforts on next. Just as you give up on it everyone else starts to adopt. You therefore look foolish twice over. I've written off many a fashion faux pas on that S curve theory.

SecondLife is one such maligned technology - I've managed to hit the middle part of that S Curve about a dozen times in the past three years, and have kept on it; something's afoot in this space. Paul believes it has a smell of the 20 year S Curve in it. He mentions the Cisco SecondLife meetings that my now-Cisco colleague John has talked about before. Likewise, in the nineties publishers would have scoffed if you said that something like the MacBook Pro Nano would make reading books online or on a computer doable - and enjoyable.

The changing nature of innovation
The next big thing is not the semantic web - it's sensors and robots
1950s TV - Broadcast
1980s Time-sharing - Email
1990s Cient sharing - WWW
2000  P2P - Napster
2010  Sensors - Smartifacts

Sensors will lead to smartifacts, robots that can make life easier, more enjoyable, more connected... Think of the current indicators: Roomba, the first robots to kill a human in the war on terror in Yemen in 2002, Nabaztags, robots that drive cars more safely than us... The indicators are already in place, though I think we're probably missing it for the immediate ideas and opportunity that the web is offering in 2008.

We're moving from TV to the web, from the living room to everywhere, from watching and consuming to participating and creating, from few and large organisations to many and small individuals.

We are moving at a tumbling rate from the Consumer Economy where buying and selling rule, to, markedly in the past two weeks, an economy where there are new actors in a Creator Economy. Google makes the perfect example of the success of the Creator Economy. It costs $0 to subscribe to Google, the usage charges are $0 and every time we use it we make it better. That last part is the cost - our search string contributes to the richness of what, in days past, would have been the Manufacturer. The question is, do we care if the $ cost is zero and the [heart] cost is information?

One forecast is looking a dead cert: the future's looking like one heck of a ride.

Quinn's photo of Paul Saffo.

Paul Saffo speaking at the ebic Thought Leader conference, Berlin, at which I am later speaking on the futures panel.

Lehmann's Philly: the same, but different.

What is learning? For the past few nights I've been enjoying my time with Marcie and her boss, Chris Lehmann, Principle of the Science Leadership Academy, taking a look inside their school's way of thinking.

Learning and teaching is about what the students can do, not what the teacher is able to do. It's about what questions we can ask together, about being inquiry-driven, through questions which are authentic, to which we don't know the answers.

It's about being passionate and whatever we're learning has to matter. Chris' students were cutting sheet metal, part of a project to create a new type of biodiesel which would be more efficient than existing methods. The class applied for two patents this year, and two communities in Guatemala are developing the product to provide fuel for real.

It's got to be meta-cognitive, everyone's got to think about what they did, how they did it, what they could do better the next time. It's got to be technology-infused, technology which is ubiquitous, necessary and invisible. We've got to choose technologies not on the basis of what's new, but what is good for a given task. It's also about being on the same page as the community with whom you wish to interact.

What do certain tools do the best?
Lehmann's approximate and reasonably false taxonomy:

Research: RSS, delicious, Google, Wikipedoa
Collaborate: wiki, google docs, moodle
Create: blogging, drupal
Present: podcasting, uStream, Flickr, iTunesU
Network: Twitter, Skype, Facebook, email.

But tools don't teach
We need strong pedagogical frameworks to see the whole learning experience, onto which we can slot the right tool for the right job. It's categorically the wrong approach to come up with an idea for a "blog project", "a podcasting project", "a social networking project", in the same way as it's wrong to approach pedagogy from a starting point of "what pedagogical proof is there that social networking improves attainment". You start with the pedagogy and use an appropriate tool to fit the pedagogical bill.

In Chris' school, every member of staff and every bone of curriculum is hung on Understanding By Design, with all the teachers using and all the students understanding the same metalanguage of the oeuvre. By doing this, students are able to reverse engineer the work they have done within the pedagogical framework the teachers have used, in the same way as assessment for learning strategies aim to promote. They are able to learn about learning.

Planning
So, planning is undertaken along these five structures:

Desired results: where do you want to go
Learning objectives
Understandings: the big ideas - why are we teaching or learning this?
Essential Questions: The throughline - what do we keep coming back to throughout the inquiry?
Skills and Content: What is the stuff that we have to know to get to those big ideas?

Assessment
If, after a period of learning, you assess by giving out a test, you are not doing project-based learning. Tests and quizzes are but a dipstick, a quick snapshot of where everyone is at. The projects themselves, the projects that are the creation of the students themselves, are the main assessment tool. They are constant, they are ongoing.

What Chris is describing seems to me, albeit in other meta-language, to be what Scotland's Assessment for Learning and Assessment as Learning programmes are beginning to achieve throughout our small corner of the world. The ambition of his school's learning approach reflects the Curriculum for Excellence. I really shouldn't be so surprised that Chris is one of those here at NECC with whom I'm the most comfortable chewing the educational fat.

The net: it's all just a fad

It was one line in Clifford Stoll's TED Talk that made me wince in particular: take the computers out of schools. But having seen what he was 'predicting' in 1995 about the future of the web, I don't think I can take much he says as seriously as perhaps I should:

“Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic. Baloney”

“….Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.”

“Then there are those pushing computers into schools. We're told that multimedia will make schoolwork easy and fun….Who needs teachers when you've got computer-aided education? Bah.”

“Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping - just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?”

“What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee.”

Thirteen years on some of these phrases are still bandied about by the nay-sayers: human contact through social networking is viewed sceptically and people still mistaken the intentions of those integrating ICT into learning and teaching - it does not replace the teacher. Thankfully, though, we can quietly and happily giggle at this one scientist's attempts to predict our futures.

Thanks to BrandDNA for the initial kick into this post.

E-Scapes - taking eportfolios to the next (formative) level

Does your technology make learning better? Does it make assessment better? Does it make learning more enjoyable? These are the key questions asked by Professor Richard Kimbell from Goldsmiths when he's looking at technology, and he found a problem with all three in e-portfolios. They need to change.

Currently, performance portfolios are created as an end result of project work. With teachers who are increasingly aware and communicating what will gain a good grade, we end up with a project and therefore a portfolio which are not real, which are fiction, which have no real sense. It is, says Kimbell, one of the reasons girls do better than boys - girls have more patience and creativity for presenting the results in a well-finished manner.

Cue Project E-Scape: this project was about generating real-time performance portfolios and finding new ways of assessing them. Initially, the idea began on paper.

A change in pedagogy
The tasks are real: repackaging lightbulbs to make the packaging reusable and multifunctional. The results: the box should be hexagonal, with a taper for the narrow end of the bulb. If you get enough of them you would end up with a sphere to surround the lightbulb. You can cut the ends to create lettering or animals which are then projected around the wall. Their projects are entitled "Your name in lights" or "Jack-In-A-Box light". You can see an example of project in this video.

Students, in their projects, are handed a script by the teacher, which choreographs their activity but does not dictate it. It's a scaffold for some improv. These students end up working like engineers, with the teacher in a technician role: "you could do it this way, or that way, or this way. It's your call". Teachers hate it, seeing their role reduced in some way from the sage on the stage to very much the guide on the side.

The need to make assessment digital
The project became digital as a result of an argument, an argument between two students about where their project should go. If only the teacher could capture that discussion it would make such a difference to the final assessment, providing a way to fill a gap in the learning process which is rarely assessed, if at all.

E-Portfolios, though, have three core problems. Firstly, they are generally works of fiction, created in a sterile ICT suite or on a laptop in a students' bedroom, not in the workshop or art room where the action (and learning) was happening. Secondly, It's a secondhand activity, digitally constructed as an afterthought to the learning itself. Finally, what kids tell you they're learning is different from what they write down in a portfolio.

So, E-Scapes asked if they could capture, in a portfolio, the learning that was happening in typical, messy, complex classrooms. They answered with handheld learning devices and collaborative co-creation of ideas: ideas are created, swapped around and extended by team-mates. As work is done, step-by-step, the work is uploaded dynamically to the e-portfolio website. Each stage of the learning 'build' can be accessed in a browse mode, or examined in greater detail. It's real-time, so the teacher can see and hear everything, all of the time, act on the spot or react later. You can see more of the process in this video.

How can this be assessed?
One potential methodology is based upon the law of comparative judgement. Think about eye tests, where we are asked which spot is sharper, the one on the left or the one on the right? We've only got two options, so we answer which one is better, without considering or knowing why. Taking this further, the E-Scape team, with their especially hard-to-judge non-identical projects, is to use a comparative pairs methodology (pdf). On a very simplistic level, assessment from seven judges is carried out on pairs of projects at a time, each judge marking 17 pieces of work. The judges decide which one is better, and move onto the next pair for the first round.

In a second round, the 'core' of median performances are taken and worked on further to create a rank order of evenly spaced performances. Using the resulting curve of performance, grade boundaries can be created retrospectively to award a grade, and the margin of error between the highest and lowest opinion of judges can be seen as clear as a whistle. These large margins of error are down to judges disagreeing, so these portfolios need to be pulled out and looked at further. We can also look at the judges and how consensual each one is with the rest of the judging team (the principle of moderation, which Scottish schools already practice). Those who are too harsh or too 'easy' can stimulate discussion as to why a project might be more or less strong. So this formative assessment informs the judges and teachers.

The reliability coefficient of all this? 0.93% It's virtually faultless, and no assessment system anywhere else comes close to getting this realistic in its outcomes. The team are working now on the third phase pairs being selected automagically after each judgement has been made, making sure that the process is as efficient as possible.

If you want to take more away from this model, the innovation in teaching, learning and assessment, I cannot recommend highly enough the interim reports on the TERU website: Phase 1 and Phase 2. You might also want to watch this 30 minute programme on new e-assessment ideas, where the E-Scape project is featured, and follow Professor Kimbell in discussion on the assessment element of the project in this programme.

Pic: Moleskin PDA

Keynote: Harnessing The Leading Edge Of Technology

Thanks to the kind people at Core-Ed the video and slides of my last 'season' of talks on how all of us can lead education and technology change in our schools, Local Authorities and organisations have been put online for all to view. There's also a Google Video without the slides.

Every time I do a talk or seminar it's different; in the age of podcasts, vodcasts and conference blogging it's only a fool or a lazy researcher who says the same thing day in, day out. The main lines of this talk have been popular but two points were raised afterwards which are worth tackling. They are both related, one about the substance of what I showed in the talk and the other on the 'entertainment only' value of new technologies. I disagree (of course) with both, because I believe they're just wrong.

In this version of the talk I have unashamedly concentrated on the final products of learning, giving passing mention to the importance of the changes in process that leads to them. I was, if you like, appealing to the professionalism and attitudes of teachers to think about what the processes might have been, rather than just listing what changes took place.

The second relates as much to the way I present stuff as to the depth of change and transformation these new technologies offer. Yes, they are entertaining, and what's wrong with that? Yes they increase motivation for being rather fun to use. But they also transform the way we do things because they open collaborative and time-shifting opportunities in learning that have never, until now, been on offer.

I hope these points come through for most people, but any other ideas or feedback you have that hasn't already been mentioned would be greatly appreciated.

EuroCALL Virtual Conference: Web 2.0 and language learning

EuroCALL, the European organisation which strives to explore new ways of teaching and learning language through technology, are having their annual conference in Coleraine, University of Ulster, this week.

There is a great virtual strand with conference presentations, papers, abstracts, streaming audio and aggregations of related content, bringing together world class academic research which shows the potential of the live web for language teaching and learning.

Given the recent hoopla [a.k.a. bunch of tosh] by Gary Stager, slating the "Web 2.0" crowd and the technology for their lack of academic backbone, this conference couldn't be better timed. In my role over the past year as Research Practitioner of new technologies, the material from these conferences is priceless and, along with the other 100 or so research reports I've read and summarised over the past two years (inspired by my old boss, Prof Johnstone), they form a steady base from which we can say with confidence why more teachers should engage their students with new technologies. You might also want to see Stephen Downes' point-by-point take on the academic backbone I'm talking about.

If you want to see why languages in particular benefit from Web 2.0, Live Web or, as I prefer, 'new technologies', then the Coleraine Virtual Strand is a pretty good place to start.

Tip of the hat to Graham Davies.

Learning logs through Flickr

Since doing my action research on learning logs through blogs a few years back, I've been hearing great stories from more and more learners and teachers who feel their own practice has improved just by virtue of

• a) writing down explicitly what they think they've learned;
• b) gaining help from peers in comments; and
• c) re-reading progress further down the line and using the experience to see what they have learnt, and what needs more work.

TeacherDude this morning adds to the examples, but he's been finding Flickr useful as a visual learning log. It's true that his photography stream has been one of the few that I subscribe to, not just because he's producing good shots but because he's producing increasing better shots each week. See what he has to say about how his learning log is now helping him improve further.

Extreme Learning with NQTs in East Lothian video

A few weeks ago I posted about the things we felt and discovered as two groups of Newly Qualified Teachers grappled with planning an Extreme Learning project. I've cut a quick video, below, which shows some of the thoughts as the teachers tried to rate their own work in relation to others' and work out what made a project appear to work. It's clearly a tricky thing to do when the projects aren't so much better than one another, but just different. Do projects need a conclusion? Is it for the teacher to provide a conclusion, or is that the whole point for the learner? Does assessment need to be measurable, or is the output at the end of the project enough? Is the process as important as the outcome or more so? Interesting questions with, so far, mixed answers.

What I've started to see this past week, though, is how similar the aims of Extreme Learning and the critical skills work of Gullane appear to be. Is Extreme Learning, with its references to bringing in a certain number of curricular areas, a more 'secondary school' version of Critical Skills which is gaining ground fast in the primary sector?

Click To Play

"Leading from behind" to empower learners

A day with Stephen Heppell in East Lothian

09h04 - Gullane Primary School
[view pictures from this visit]
We drew up to the school to immediately noticed the wind turbine. And while this school might be self-powered with solar and wind energy, meeting Head Teacher Maureen Tremmel again reminded me that there is some very human energy driving this school forward. The main theme in this school for us: leading from behind. Maureen gives her staff a lot of slack to try out 'new' ways of working which might go against the current grain and her staff are not possessive of 'their' ideas and techniques. There is constant sharing of strategies, constant 'stealing' and adaptation of good teaching and learning. Some of the highlights:

Perceptions of what is important: We were immediately impressed by the solar energy and wind turbine; the kids less so. When asked about the readings of the solar panels and wind turbine a kid said: "That? I don't look at that. But if you lie down under the turbine it looks like it's going to fall on top of you". What seems one objective for us is often quite another for our youngsters.

Gaming for learning: The P7 P6 students have been using their own Nintendo DSes and Dr Kawashima Brain Training games (about seven out of 23 kids) for over a year now in their Friday morning 'Golden Time', to help improve their memory and their maths. When I asked whether they would share them for some of that Friday morning time every child immediately said 'yes'. Do we need to buy in gaming consoles for schools? Maybe not so much if we can empower kids just to do what feels natural.

Leading from behind leads to innovation: The school has several potential 'gurus' in digital media, active learning and critical skills work - but they have successfully resisted the temptation to keep their 'secrets' and that guru status. An impressive number of age groups, from first year elementary students through to those about to leave into High School, had created digital video and animation to illustrate their learning, even though this kind of work had perhaps sprung from one teacher's desire to innovate. We witnessed two classroom assistants working in the Infants Library with three primary six children filming three primary one children on their experiences of being the youngest ones in the school. The whole thing was organised by those very Primary Six students, too.

Critical skills and rich tasks: The P7 (11 year old) class we saw had an exceptional understanding of their own learning journey, where their skills and weaknesses lie and they showed an incredible confidence in planning tasks and allocating roles without the need for teacher intervention. Their classroom teacher, Kathy McGrane, has helped them train themselves up in the skillset that allows them to now do this while she simply facilitates learning with quite complex challenges and projects.

The current project, around creating an innovation business and product, involved business planning around a product of the students' own invention. Within the next few weeks we'll see a train window that can be changed to show the environment you wish to view, an organic water purification tool... A previous project had been on religion and there the kids had innovated in their homework by producing a Google Sketchup Mosque. That's a skill it would be good to see reappear on some of the current innovation project. I hope the young lad who made the mosque teaches his classmates how to use Sketchup to produce their prototypes.

Some über confident kids gave a presentation on the hoof about what critical skills has meant to them and, while clearly well-practised for the many visitors from other schools in the Authority, they had clearly learnt to present in an engaging and informative manner, self-organising and allocating their tasks.

What we were left wondering was how the kids and teachers might capture this so that the impact can be shared beyond those lucky enough to make the journey to their classroom physically. I'll be working with the school, thankfully, to capture some of this in our forthcoming new interactive service on Learning and Teaching Scotland's site. But, having seen how engaged the other classmates were by the video that the class had produced earlier in the year, I think that the answer lies in media production from the kids for their very own blog.

Gullane is an open source management, open plan school - even if the teachers do refer to "visitors at the 'door'" when there is clearly no door to be seen. In the same way as the teachers in the school have benefited from the open doors of their open plan school to share and learn from each other, it would be good to see some electronic open doors to share this amazing stuff even further. That said, it's not stopping an amazing number of people applying to work in this hive of creative activity.

Citizens of the future: From employers to Further Education

Further Education trains our country's young people in such a wide array of skills that it's always going to be hard to come up with the perfect example for the subject you teach or learn. However, in today's talk and follow-up roundtable on the Citizens for the Future I facilitated a discussion through the possibilities each individual lecturer, tutor, student or administrator could start building on.

In Friday's presentation to employers in the fastest moving parts of the tech, design and creative industries I started out by expressing the pressure that Further and Higher Education feel to provide employers with qualified staff. Today, I guess the message to FE/HE was that the pressure for rounded, competent individuals who can collaborate and communicate effectively is arguably greater than that of qualifications.

Summary of presentation notes
The main notes for the presentation can be found in Friday's Reboot conference entry, for "Citizens of the Future". These notes might help provide some reminders of the main tech and pedagogical points I made. For some basic pointers as to getting started with all this stuff on a purely tech note, some of the starter notes on tools we made with East Lothian Computing Studies teachers might provide a starter for ten. If you're thinking about how you could use social media to promote your organisation, your trade (if you're a student) or your course then I'd recommend following the copious links in one of my favourite posts: "Just Because You Can Blog Doesn't Mean You Should".

The Blogging Plumber and why entrepreneurs need to blog
At most of the gigs I go to an entrepreneur is normally the Last.fm type, seeking out his nine figure buyout from The G Y M. Today, our entrepreneurs were more likely to be the plumbers, joiners, electricians, hotel staff, chefs, tailors or programmers of tomorrow. Why, on earth, say some people, would a plumber need to blog? Well, the short answer is: "they don't".

The longer answer has something to do with competitive markets in every vocation, the notion of the lifelong learner leading to the lifelong self-employed individual. If you can get any headstart on your competitors then you're going to do better, and blogging is a low-impact, low-risk strategy for someone to potentially make a huge difference further down the line. It might not, of course, be blogging per se, but publishing anything about what makes you tick, what you do to make you better than the rest, is worth spending the iota of time required.

Just ask the Sprinkler Doc what difference blogging has made to his profits or how much more the horticulturalists in this Australian course have learned from their collaborative wiki (an editable webpage, this one produced on wikispaces [free for teachers]). You might also ask Thomas Mahon how his suit business has come on since he started blogging two years ago, or how on earth a tiny South African vineyard had its wine become the wine of Scottish educational bloggers, of Silicon Valley and increased its sales fivefold in two years.

If a plumber or electrician can do the most basic of learning logs as they work on apprenticeships then they are already laying the ground for a successful self-employed future, a literacy on what goes and what doesn't and a crash course on web marketing in the 21st century. It's not an entirely foreign skill since so many of th students taught by today's tutors and lecturers are being thrown off Bebo in their college courses each day. It's time to harness their passion and push it in a profitable direction.

Are you faking it?
The one thing about students is that they smell a fake a mile off. Most VLEs are, to be frank, the most unappealing, unsexy, unused (and therefore pretty useless) investments that can be made. Free (and much more appealing, socially interactive) learning environments can be created with tools such as eduSpaces, Moodle or Word Press MultiUser (the latter a blogging tool which has helped create individual learning environments for over a quarter of East Lothian teachers over at eduBuzz.org).

The thing is, the corporateness of most VLEs just seems 'fake' to most students. It's school trying not to be school. It's that walled concrete 1970s building trying to be innovative, open 24/7, but it's not a place I want to be when I can be in my online space (which is fuschia pink today and bright blue when Rangers play on Saturday). When things are fake (like David Cameron's ill at ease performances in front of the camera on his video weblog) then they get ridiculed or ignored (Cameron was ridiculed, and this performance garnered a lot more coverage than the legit website. Ouch.). Most VLEs, from the sound of today's chit chat, are ignored.

Social Media can bolster the VLE
While I'm not suggesting that colleges should go into the playgrounds of their students in Bebo, MSNSpaces or MySpace, I think these environments lend a lot to us in terms of what makes a community tick and want to spend a quarter of their daily 200 minutes a night online. My addiction to Facebook at the moment is mostly down to catching up with friends, contacts and friends of contacts I only ever met briefly face-to-face but from whom I can now learn when I want, where I want. Basically, it's about the people on it, not the PowerPoints or notes that I can find. Learn that lesson, and we can start to see how social media actually begins to bolster the VLE, giving it a role quite separate from the one our students are quite capable at working well in their own online social playgrounds.

Theory from game-making to start organising teaching and learning
I had great fun showing what lessons we could learn from playing - and seeing work as play - if only we could steal the time to have a think. The first thing was showing what a game was, that is, with things like Tim Rylands' work with Myst we're far from the days of playing Pong, a game kids now make for free with Scratch. I also showed off some of the Bournemouth Uni research into the use of Nintendo DS's Dr Kawashima's Brain Training to improve medics' numeracy skills - and played a disastrous stroop test (40 years old again :-(.

However, the leveling up of the player in games like these, the constant quizzing of oneself and desire to communicate with friends to find out the answers in games like Samorost, all of this offers clues as to how course design can be harnessed for positive change in teaching and learning. College courses are painfully broken down into their constituent parts - it's no wonder students are left questioning why they are doing something when the whole story can only be seen retrospectively at the end of study.

What the probing and questioning in Samorost or Myst shows us is how this 'bittiness' can be used to our advantage when we do have all these small modules and courses - turn them into levels, where cheat sheets can be created by students who are there first for those who are slower. You can choose to use the cheatsheet for fewer marks or carry on struggling through until you get it yourself. The process of teaching (for the stronger students) takes some to their zone of proximal development, while learning by doing keeps those weaker students engaged.

Just an idea ;-).

Don't integrate. Evolve
And this is it. These are all just ideas until someone tries them out. We are already seeing oodles of innovation all over the country around some of these ideas. I know no-one who's attempting them all and that's just as it should be. If we spend less time on each one, just 'integrating' it into our teaching and learning, then we will see more and more old things taught with new toys.

What we have to do is choose one or two of these ideas and run with it as long as it takes, failing a little, sharing how and why so that our collective intelligence helps everyone. Eventually we'll not have integrated technology, we'll have done something far more powerful. We'll have evolved our teaching and learning to a new level.