 I'm representing this group of mathematicians and engineers who have been working for the last year, so on this project which is about creating resources for formative assessment, assessment for learning for mathematics for first years. So the partner institutions are Maneuth, DCU, Athlone IT and Dundalk IT and these are the people involved. As well as the academic staff we have Christine who's our programmer and has done a huge amount of work and she'll show you what she's done in a minute and Katrina who's a research student in maths education. So what's the project about? Our aim has been to try and develop ways of improving or helping students improve their own understanding of mathematics and we decided to go about this in two streams really. We wanted to look at creating an audience response system for in-class use that would be more suitable for mathematics than the kind of clickers that are out there already and we also wanted to use technology to help develop interactive tasks and other resources for students. So we're thinking about formative assessment. The definition of formative assessment we're using is from Black and William and I'll just read it out there. It says that they say formative assessment encompasses all those activities undertaken by teachers and or by the students which provide information to be used as feedback to modify the teaching and learning activities in which they're engaged and that's what we're really interested in. It's about information. It's about giving information to students, giving information to staff and how you use that information to change the way you teach or change the way you learn or decide where you have gaps. So Black and William have done a lot of work on this and we found their strategies for formative assessment quite useful. So they give these five strategies for things that you might think about if you're trying to do formative assessment. So they say that these things like engineering effective classroom discussion, questions and learning tasks that elicit evidence of learning, providing feedback that move learners forward, clarifying and sharing learning intentions and criteria for success and activating students as owners of their own learning and as instructional resources for one another. And we've tried to look at these criteria and strategies and incorporate them into what we do. So our audience response system we feel really fits with one quite well, engineering effective classroom discussion and then providing feedback to those people in the class that hopefully will move the learners forward. Other things like the interactive tasks that we've developed using things like GeoGebra and MATLAB, we feel they're quite naturally fit into giving good questions that will elicit evidence and then providing the feedback is crucial and hopefully that will help the teachers and learners to move forward. Things like our screencast project where we have students working on a difficult problem using technology to solve it and then making a screencast to explain this to their peers. We see this fits in quite well with five, letting students be owners of their own learning and helping each other. We also felt that we could do all of these things without using technology and we wanted to see how technology would really help us to add something extra and we felt what we wanted to do and think we said this a while ago is we wanted to give the students the opportunity to act like mathematicians would. So how do mathematicians use technology and there's this, a borough vine has laid out some of the ways that mathematicians use this just to play around with things, to get an intuition to try things out instead of trying to do loads of calculations to try things out, do things really fast, see if things work or don't work, make conjectures, draw things, graph things and this is the way we wanted to use the technology to let students do this so that they could build their own intuition and understanding. That's what we hope. So what have we done so far? Well last summer and last spring we conducted a survey of staff and students to find out what was there already, what things were really useful, what did people really want and we picked out some areas from that and the analysis of that data, Katrina has done a really good job with that and we have presented that at a different forum. We employed Christine as our programmer and Katrina as a research student. We have created a lot of the resources already that's still ongoing. We've trialled quite a lot of them especially in the last semester and the trials are going on this semester too. We've created a resource page on the National Forum's own website where we hope we'll be able to share with the community. We haven't put a lot on that yet because we really want to refine our resources before we put them out there and that's what we're doing at the moment. So the kinds of things we've done, these are some of the interactive tasks and resources that we've been working on. We showed you some of these at the meeting last summer. We're not going to go through those now because we wanted to focus really on the audience response system to show you what that's like because last summer we didn't have any of that. This just quickly is an example of a conjecturing task that you might give to first year students instead of telling students that in order to find the graph of an inverse function reflected in the line y equals x you could let them figure that out for themselves by just letting them input different functions, observe the graphs and seeing if they could find the connection. So this is a simple conjecturing task and it's the way we hope that our resources are helping students. So the apps, the uni-doodle apps, these are, Christine's going to show you these now, but they're to be used in class to gather responses from students. Students can input not just ABC answers but graphs or little calculations or whatever and then the lecture can either choose to put them up on the screen and talk about whichever ones are appropriate or can show all of the answers and see the kind of distribution in the class. So I'll hand over to Christine, I think. These, unfortunately the system here doesn't allow her to show you the stuff directly on screen, but she'll do her best. Hi, I'm Christine. I am doing a technical side of this like answer, uni-doodle apps. Just a bit of background for anyone who doesn't know what an audience response system is. If you've ever seen who wants to be a millionaire, you've witnessed one in action. It's asked the audience question. So teachers have been using these for years and years and the pros and cons of them are well established, they've been studied. And basically it's meant for teachers to direct their learning based on whether or not students have demonstrated an understanding of what they've just been taught. So clickers are great, but for engineering and maths they're quite limited in that it doesn't allow for free form input. You can't test students on their knowledge of graphing or the way things should turn out. And then also clickers require students to purchase a device or rent it at the start of the year. So we wanted them to be able to use their own phones, which no student ever forgets ever. So I want to demonstrate this and unfortunately I can't show everyone, but these are screenshots of how it would look. There are two components. There's the lecture app, which is uni-doodle teach, and the student app, which is uni-doodle. The student app is available on the Play Store and the iOS Store. It's in use in classrooms now. And I'm mostly going to talk about the lecture apps. So I'm going to show you. The lecture generated the app was being offered. You don't see it here, but there are... I might have been a maths lecturer and I might have taught people... I might have taught people that the graph of y is equal to x squared looks like this. And I might ask people to draw the graph of y is equal to minus x squared. So a kind of common pitfall here is, depending on parentheses, students might get this incredibly wrong or they might get it right. Actually, if you get lots of responses... So a student app, they can draw on top, they can send their answer or whatever they want. So a correct answer would be that and then goes back. And then the lecture app can see how many responses have come back. They can post the question and then they can spread responses. And ideally they'd be sharing this on a projector. So that students get the benefit of seeing what their appearance is. And it's all anonymous, so they're not worried about getting it wrong or any questions. So what they would see... The middle screen up there, that just shows you the spread of responses. And then that allows the lecturers to go... Lots of people make this common mistake. You know, years are going to be going on. Or years are going to be going on. I think you need to put the system in just one moment. We've also got the multi-choice option, which is multi-colour one. So we've reversed the number of responses in the classroom. That's basically a... I'll show you, but it's been used to... We're gathering the data a little bit at the minute. We haven't got the way to get it, but we're just going to... That's very well done. Thanks, Chrissy. So this is being used in engineering modules in Manuth and also in DCU at the moment. And it's being trialled and evaluated this semester. So the impact of our whole project, as we said, these kind of resources will be made available to the community in Ireland. And we want to upload things to our resource page, but also to make the audience response system available. And we have been working in our own institutions in the four institutions. We've given workshops to people from different areas, like I know in Manuth that the Economics Department, the Chemistry Department, the Physics Department are all interested in working with Christine and developing the app for their... using the apps in their subjects. So it's not just mathematics, but it's lots of other areas to see the benefit of it. We've also plans to disseminate, especially this summer, in conferences around Europe, actually. So we have two conferences in Ireland that we're going to go to. The second one there, I think, is really important, because it's the people who are involved on the ground with teaching mathematics in universities. And we want to show them what we've done and hope that they'll give us some advice and maybe use our resources as well. These are the conferences that we've been accepted to this summer. These are international ones. And I want to pick out the last one, because this is the International Congress of Math Education. It happens every four years. And we submitted a paper, and when we got the reviews, they asked us to submit a much longer paper and give a longer talk. And they had some really nice comments, so I just thought I'd share those with you. Evaluation, I guess, I don't have a huge amount of time to talk about this, but let me just say that we're trying to evaluate everything in two different ways, qualitatively and quantitatively. So we have surveys and focus groups with students in all of the things that we're doing. And also, we want to match that with looking at usage rates and the effects on grades. So far, the results, we had one semester last year, just finished in December, where we had been trialling things like the online lessons and the interactive tasks. And we found that students were positive about these things in general. There were some problems, and I think this feedback is really useful to us. A lot of the open-ended tasks, the students often didn't see what they really needed to do or where they needed to go, and so we're refining those at the moment. With the Khan Academy sort of sections of courses, we found that the students who used these did improve their grades on pre and post tests, but again, that the usage was really linked to whether it was built into CA or not, and we're working with ways of thinking about how to change that this semester. A lot of the analysis of the data is still ongoing because we just finished in December with that amount of those pilots, so we need to start working more on the data. Where we are in general, while our audience response system is ready, the apps are already except for the iOS version of the lecture app, which is nearly ready and will be ready at the end of March, and they're being trialled, as we said, in the two institutions. The interactive tasks and resources, we have created lots of resources. We want to refine those and create new ones based on the results of our trials, and we need to continue with the data analysis from those. And dissemination, we have created a resource page. We want to use that to share resources, and we want to continue to talk to people in other institutions and to publish our findings. So that's it. Thanks. I'd like to ask Michelle to lead the question, please.