 Maen nhw Ilein Scanlan. As you heard I work in the Institute of Educational Technology here and I am going to take you back to school for a bit but I'm not going to stay in school or in the school classroom because the thing that I'm interested in and the question that I'm going to try to deal with in this short talk is well what happens when you introduce technology to the classroom, how does it change science learning, does it, Peter told us, it always does. Well exactly how and is that a good thing. So here's a couple of very photogenic students from a local school, Oak Grove. This is an example of students who were studying GCSE geography. We approached them as part of a research project directed by myself in Night Sharples who you'll hear from later. And we were interested in what would happen if some fairly conventional available technology, not down the line technology such as small computers, mobile technology they're holding in their hand sensors to pick up things from the environment. We were interested in what happens when you change the possibilities for science learning and these geography students they're not in the classroom anymore. The activities were changed because the project that we started on this personal inquiry project was directed at trying to understand how introduction of those sorts of technologies would change the links between the ways that people learn informal settings in informal settings. So you saw the students there, they're out of the classroom, they're collecting real data on things that they're interested in and I'll show you a little clip of video later on so you can see something about what they were able to do. But it's not just activities in the classroom that can be changed. We've had another project in the Institute. It's funded also externally by a research council called Out There In Here. What we were interested in that project was so what happens when you introduce technology to field work settings? Does it make it possible for students to engage in a different way with their connection to the environment? And I think what I'm trying to talk to you about in this very brief presentation is the way that educational settings can really change by the introduction of technology. So here's a little bit of video to give you a feel. I think the key thing for us is to help students to become enthusiastic about inquiry learning and science. We're going to be continuing our microclimate surveys today. You choose where you think the best place to put a new picnic batch in the school grounds would be. Students are used to engaging with others through technology. They use social networking sites, they use Wikipedia. This activity guide takes them through the different steps through planning their investigation, then gives them another webpage where they can input the data. Because they're able to share data with others in their class, they're able to compare some of their data with class averages. So they really have a sense of how you need to interrogate data that you collect. We're aiming to use these experiences to help us design a customisable toolkit to support evidence-based inquiry learning. We can design something that will be useful to many more teachers than the ones we've already been able to involve. So what you've got the jingle, sorry, so what you saw there was a little bit of a feel for how using technology got the young people out of the classroom, got them into interesting situations where they could start to see the join between the science that they learned in the classroom and the science that they learned by interacting with their environment outside. It's just one of a number of examples of research projects that we do in the Institute of Educational Technology, personal inquiry. I've described that one on the bottom left of the screen out there in here. What we did there was introduce the notion of people inside a control centre and people outside at a field site. We did this project associated with Open University students, so it was a way that students with disabilities could participate in field work in interesting ways enabled by the technology. Another example of the sorts of things that we're engaged in, Peter mentioned lots of different ways that technology could be used, but we've more recently been looking in quite a lot of detail at the potential that mobile technology has for changing the environment for adult learners, but also for learners in particular groups. This month a project called Mazel Toff that has a connection to the MK Smart initiative is working with recent immigrants to Milton Keynes and allowing them to use mobile technology to get assistance with language learning, travel information, all sorts of ways in which we can help to improve the inclusion of immigrants in society. Mobile and inquiry are two of the things I've picked out for you to think about in the way that technology can change science. So bug, isn't it? I think if I get the name right, it's a unanimous leaf notcher moth. Why is it interesting? It was one that was discovered by a young girl of about nine years old. It was very unusual, hadn't been spotted in this country before, so it's a native of Asia apparently. That discovery was made by people using the platform that has been invented by the Opium University in collaboration between the science faculty and the Institute of Educational Technology. It's a way that you can share your observations about nature. It's a way that you can do informal learning. How we've taken that forward in the university is we've tried to explore the ways in which the use of technology, the use of inquiry learning and the connection between formal learning and informal learning can all come together in a platform, the Open Science Laboratory, first of all co-funded by the Wilson Foundation and carried forward in a variety of different ways within that platform we do two sorts of things. We use technology to give our own students access to different ways of developing their scientific understanding through experiments. We give them remote access to laboratories. We give them ways of using virtual instruments. We give them the opportunity to do online field investigations and the iSport platform can be used to do a quite coordinated investigation of a locality as part of a course. I think most excitingly for me there's a way of developing this lab in the future that would provide the backing for citizen science investigations. That's where people get involved in doing science learning for its own sake. They can use it to develop their own learning, but they can also contribute into the real science in the real world. In the institute we have a number of PhD students involved in projects around citizen science and I think Mike in his talk after me is going to develop the theme of citizen science a bit further. That's what the platform looks like. You see iSport is one of the key experiments within it and a development from our original personal enquiry project. The enquire project is also within this open science laboratory. Okay, that's the past. What's actually happening? This is where I'm going to take Peter on. He said we can't change assessment by the use of technology. That's what he said, I think. We are currently involved, Mike and I, in a project led by our colleague Ann Adams from the Institute of Educational Technology. Her idea in this European funded project was to investigate another way in which technology can change science learning. Her approach is to develop this rather complicated diagram which describes the process of learning where you can harness the creativity of children and young people. What do they do? They create videos about tricky topics and threshold concepts that they don't understand. They work on that collaboratively. They share those products with others, including their teachers. We are seeing, we are right in the middle of this project just now, but we are seeing the potential for quite a lot of good activity. Peter says paper in pencil is going to be king. I don't think so. I think there's enough evidence out there from research but also from some practice I think in schools to think of innovative ways to evaluate and assess group work and particularly group work aided by technology. So I look forward to talking to you about that later on.