 We see three representatives from our sponsors today who are all supporting the conference in a number of ways. And I think we are quite fortunate because a lot of companies do please come down, there's a lot of seats down the front, make your way down towards us. But a lot of companies that support our conference, not just help us keep the costs of attendance as low as we can, but also get involved in a whole other way in the delivery of the event and in our community. So this year we thought we'll give each of our sponsors a two-minute opportunity to just tell you a little bit more about them. And I hope that before I introduce the first one in a moment, Robbie, for me too, you can put your hands together and give them a really warm welcome. So your two and a half minutes starts now. Do come up and say hello. Thanks, Marine. So my name's Robbie Weigers. I'm the commercial director for a company called Looney. And for the next, we're on about a minute and a half now, I'm going to talk to you about a product of ours called Me Too. So Me Too is our simple, single-minded solution for vibrant, engaged, excited meetings and classrooms that can be set up in minutes. With Me Too, we wanted to create the sharpest possible tool for real-time polling and moderated chat. Me Too can be accessed on any device and is transforming meetings and learning worldwide. Four points I want you to remember today. The first is, and I'm sure it would all agree, that more engaged students results in better learning outcomes, the challenge being how to create that environment within the classroom. Now we're not the only polling and messaging solution out there, however, Me Too is unique because it's powerful integration, it's Office 365 support, simplicity and ease of use. It's not just the teachers that like Me Too, students love it too. In fact, we're conducting some research about the impact of Me Too in the classroom and later this year, we'll be publishing a white paper on that subject. Last point, it's free for you guys. So if you're interested, come and find us in the exhibition booth, number three I believe, and get your free account. And look, don't just take my word for it. Since our launch in January, 300 institutions have signed up for Me Too and the Me Too community is growing daily. Thank you. Thank you very much, Robbie, and one thing I want to say is that we're excited because we're using this up tomorrow at the AGM for the first time in 23 years. We'll be voting digitally, so we'll be able to give you a first hand testimonial after that. But onwards, and if you've picked up a conference bag today, then you'll already be familiar with Ref Me, but please give a big round of applause for Jock from Ref Me who's our next sponsor. Good afternoon, conference, and thank you for lending me years for at least the next two minutes. It's not an unfamiliar tale when you hear about a student that struggles with the idea of how to format references, and Tom Hatton was a dyslexic undergraduate student at Oxford Brooks and was spending more time doing that than he was doing his research, and he's learning, and he's writing of his dissertation, and he had a conversation with his subject librarian and said, hey, there must be something out there that can help me do this, because I'm sinking an awful lot of time into my commas and full stops, and I'm scratching my head because I haven't figured it out, and it was an unsatisfactory conversation because he said, well, yeah, there are reference software tools out there, but actually, the learning curve such that the time you figured out, you probably could have learned how to format your references yourself, and I think that's probably a fairly common tale in the undergraduate world, and so most students would obviously cobble the reference list together, submit it, go to the pub and never think about citations again, but Tom's slightly different, and of course, as all 21st century students do, he launched an app where you could actually scan an ISBN barcode and create a reference in the click of a button, basically. It got very quick traction in this very beta app, which led him to realise that there was something, he was on to something that actually ease of use was really important in terms of creating the citations and the references, and we launched a fully cloud-based platform on web and on mobile, and 18 months later, we have a million and a half users, one in four students in the universities in the UK have used RefMe, and its success is solely down to two things. One, it's ease of use, it's got a self-learning curve of minutes, but two, it's accurate as well. It's not a simple, cheap citation generator that you might throw into Google and say, give me a Harvard reference and hope for the best. My call to action for you as delegates is, if you haven't discovered RefMe, do come by and have a look at what we're doing. It really is quite unique in the space. It's a really great way that we believe will help improve the student experience in the long term, and because we've got such organic wide adoption in the UK higher education sector, we've got an interesting citation data set that we're looking into with some of our partners. So we're at Stand6. Here are some of our 11 UK universities have adopted as confirmed already. We've got another four or five in the pipeline for the new academic year. So come by, don't miss out, and see how we can change yours and your students' lives. Thank you. All right, and last but not least, please put your hands together from Andrew, who is from co-sector. And this year, they're helping us celebrate 10 years of the Learning Technologist of the Year Award. So Andrew, come on in. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Andrew. My last name is actually Hercules. So if you want to come by and see me, it really is Hercules. So remember me for that if anything, if nothing else. But I work at co-sector, which is the University of London. We used to be known as ULCC. So some of you might know us as ULCC. We've recently had a rebrand, so we're now known as co-sector. We provide a managed and flexible learning, virtual learning environment, excuse me, for 90 institutions across the UK, including 30 HE institutions. We are here essentially to not only let you know about what we offer in terms of a managed VLE, but also because we actually have been taking quite a substantial amount of time in research and development of our VLE solution. And we now have a white paper that is free to download that actually talks about what students, what learning technologists, what lectures are looking for in a VLE. And we think that it's really important because we see that there's going to be a correlation sort of between a good VLE, a very positive student experience, higher NSS scores, and also higher scores with the TEF as well. We are in booth number 11, I believe, so you can pop by. We have persona cards where you can actually see what we've sort of already started to develop the student personas that we've built. We've built HE personas. We've built learning technologists personas as well. We also have a prototype where you can actually see the changes that we've already started to make in our VLE when it comes to sort of the landing page, the dashboard, if you will, when students first sign on. So please come by and see it. You can also come by. If you give us your email address, we'll send you our white paper for free. It's got our insights that we've found so far. And we're always looking for participants in our research. So if you'd like to be involved, whether it's, you know, I attend an interview, send out a survey, we'd love to hear from you. So that is it. Thank you very much for listening to me up here. And yes, please do come by and see me at booth number 11. Thank you very much. Have a great afternoon. Thank you. Thank you for staying so long. It's my absolute pleasure now to introduce Leah Commissar, who's going to give our final keynote. Leah is a program manager at Welcome, and she leads on the Education and Neuroscience strand. Now we have a project in that strand, so I have to be very careful what I say about her. But her work's really inspiring, and she's going to give a really interesting talk for you now. So please join me in welcoming Leah to the stage. Hi, good afternoon. My name is Leah Commissar, and I work at the Welcome Trust. And this afternoon, I like to talk to you about education and neuroscience, the general field and how it's progressing, but also about the work that we've been doing in that field and how it links to education technology and the work that lots of you are involved in. So quickly for those of you that don't know the Welcome Trust, it's a global biomedical charity with the aim of trying to improve health. And it does this primarily by funding biomedical research, but also funding research in social science and humanities, by doing policy work, and by doing lots of engagement work. And also there's an education team, which is where I sit. And the education team where I work, our main mission is to try and improve science education in the UK, so that we have the scientists of the future to do the research to improve health. And because we think having a scientific literate population means that they'll make better informed, if not better health choices. So I'm just going to talk through briefly what has neuroscience got to do with education? What impact is neuroscience having on education currently? A bit about the work that we've been doing in the neuroscience and education initiative that Nick's involved in. And then thinking a little bit about what the future is for this field. So what has neuroscience got to do with education? Well, if education is about learning something, be it a skill or some content subject, and neuroscience is to do with the study of the brain and in part how we learn, then you would think that these two fields are quite linked or should be, but historically they haven't been. And so lots of people have been talking about building a bridge between these two sectors. And there are lots of journal articles that have been written over the past 10, 20, maybe 40 years, with titles such as A Bridge Too Far, then it was a prime time to build a bridge, then it was a two-way path as possible, building the bridge from both ends. So lots of bridge talking, but not many people have been building the bridge. There's been lots of discussion about the difficulties of building it, but nobody's been really getting going with it. And this is kind of understandable. Neuroscience is a new-ish field. It's only probably within the last 10, 20 years that it's progressed enough that it might, that the research is such that we can start to take insight from it and apply it to education. And this is really exciting. There's huge potential and it's really understandable why teachers, why policy makers, why technology developers want to start taking these insights from neuroscience and applying them. But my word of warning or caution is, don't jump too quickly. Make sure that you look at the research, make sure that you do the research, make sure that you're doing some evaluation, so that we're not implementing things too quickly that we don't know if they're going to be positive or have a positive impact on classroom practice or learning in universities. So the other thing I must say, just before I continue, is that I'm not saying in any way that neuroscience is the field that's going to solve all classroom or university, all learning problems. It's just a new-ish field and hopefully one that we can use alongside psychology, alongside educational research and alongside teachers' tacit knowledge to really build powerful learning experiences for young people. So what impact is neuroscience having on education? So before I talk any more, and to kind of wake you up a little bit, I thought I'd find out what impact neuroscience has been having on your understanding about learning. So I'm going to present three statements and what I would like you to do is simply raise your hand afterwards as to whether, if you think it's true. So the first statement, we mostly only use ten percent of our brain. Hands up if you think that's true. I'll show you some stats. I'll tell you which paper this comes from in a minute. So this are the percentage of teachers and these are school teachers who also agree with this statement about 50 percent in five countries. This isn't true. In fact this is a common neuromyth. Sitting there right now, your brain is very active, it's keeping your heart beating, it's keeping your breathing, it's keeping you upright, it's maybe helping you to concentrate on what I'm saying, maybe your mind wandering, maybe you're thinking about what you're having for dinner, but anyway, besides that most of your brain is active. Okay, second one, individuals learn better when they receive information in their preferred learning style. So visually seeing it, auditory, hearing it, kinesthetic, by moving and doing things. Hands up if you believe it's true. Quite a few hands around the audits. Here's some stats again from some teachers you can see very high all in the 90s, 93% in the UK. This is not true. It is true that you have a preference. You might prefer to learn the material in a particular way. You might think, oh yes I'm a visual learner, I like to learn things visually. That's fine, but the research at the moment suggests that you don't learn information any better if it's delivered in that mode, and actually the best way to learn something and get that learning embedded is to use multiple modes, so learning the same material visually, hearing about it, doing something with it. Third one, differences in hemispheric dominance, i.e. the left brain, right brain that we often hear about, can help to explain individual differences amongst learners. Hands up if you think it's true. Fewer hands this time, maybe there's a pattern emerging, I don't know. So again, really high in the UK, lots of teachers believing this. Again, this one's not true. So anything claiming to better integrate your right and left brain, probably best avoided. Your brain's made up of I think the latest estimates about 86 billion neurons or nerve cells that each connected to hundreds or thousands of others. Simple activities are going to be using both sides of your brain. There's no evidence to suggest that some people are logical and other people are creative, but this is very common, as you can see amongst teachers and I think amongst lots of other education professionals. So those stats that I just showed, in case you're interested, comes from a paper by Paul Havid Jones in 2004, sorry 2014, which got lots of social media interest and it became open access for a short while. I'm not sure that it is now and it goes through some more of those neuro myths and things like about how many glasses of water you've got to drink, other ways your brain shrinks or the impact of fish oils perhaps on your learning. So it's one to check out and there's quite a few other papers looking at neuro myths if you're interested. So just quickly, where do they come from? Are they a problem and what should we do about them? So where do they come from? Usually they originate in science, but it's science that gets misal over interpreted in some way and they find their way into common culture or into the education sector and they stick around basically. The ones that are really persistent, it's often because they're either easy to understand or they fit kind of what you see around you or they're pushed by kind of organisations or companies that are trying to sell a product or they're just easy to implement. So the vac thing, visual auditory kinesthetic kind of seems right, it fits kind of what you feel about your own learning and it's fairly simple to implement in a sense. So are they a problem? Well I think this depends on the neuro myth. So believing that you only use 10% of your brain, I don't know if that's a huge problem, it's not accurate, is it going to change your behaviour? Probably not, but the one about say visual auditory and kinesthetic learning and learning styles I think could be a problem and I'll give you an example from personal experience. So I started teaching in the in a school just outside of London about 10 years ago and at the time it was common practice and in many schools to get students to fill in a sheet and they had to write about how they like to learn, did they like to look at pictures, did they like to read things and at the end of it it gave them a score and it gave them a score on what kind of learner they were, were they predominantly a visual learner and as the teacher I was given a spreadsheet in a handout saying this many students in this class are visual learners and this many are auditory learners and was kind of encouraged to try and make sure that my learning fitted the styles of the students in the class. Now you could have teachers spending a lot spending a lot of time and wasted effort trying to tailor learning to those individual students and and that's a problem obviously teachers quite busy anyway but more of a problem was that students started labelling themselves so I'd have students saying miss I'm not doing this activity because I'm a visual learner and and what they're doing is limiting themselves they need to be learning visually auditory kinesthetically and that's the best way to embed the learning and so what to do about them well I think that we need to help people to ask the right questions and to ask for evidence and to be more discerning and we have to support people to do that and and there's some interesting work going on in this space which I'll come back to at the end so back to my question what was my question what impact is neuroscience having on education at the moment is there's it is having some impact impact in a way with lots of neuro myths there's lots of research going on at a small scale in animal models or in small groups of people in the lab and which in the future will have impact on education I'm sure and slowly now there's more research going on at a larger scale and in classrooms which is taking insight from neuroscience and starting it to really apply it to the classroom situation which is what we've been doing and which I will tell you a little bit more about so we launched the education and neuroscience initiative in 2014 with the Education Endowment Foundation who are the what works centre for education in the UK and we did it for two reasons one because we could see there was lots of promise coming from neuroscience and really exciting potentials for things to improve learning and we wanted to start testing it at scale in classrooms to find out if it was beneficial and secondly because we knew there was lots of pseudo science or neuro myths out there and we wanted to start debunking them so we have two main aims one to start building the research and the evidence of what worked and secondly to help support educators about what we do and don't know and the level of the evidence maybe there's a small study that shows something but can we say that's true for all students so we opened a funding round and all the projects had to have some pilot evidence some evidence of promise that they had positive impact and they all had to be scalable and affordable so that if they worked that they could be rolled out and beneficial to all students we didn't want to test anything that would be too expensive or too difficult to implement and all the projects that we funded used independent evaluators I'm just looking at Nick because she's one of them and the methodology that EF uses is quite interesting so you have the project team which in this case was neuroscientists but in other cases might be education developers or charities and they're paired with another academic team who are the evaluators and they work together to work out a robust evaluation methodology the evaluators collect some of the primary outcomes and they also the first people to report on those outcomes so ensuring that the research is not ever overstating what it finds and ensuring that the results are kind of fairly and accurately reported where people might have a vested interest for example so I'll just tell you there are six projects that we funded they're all taking place in around 40 to 100 schools around the UK most of them have started now and I'll just tell you briefly about some of them so fit to study is looking at what happens in P lessons at school so there's really promising evidence from the research that physical activity has impact on your ability to learn and retain information both long and short and long term but a lot of the research it hasn't been done on school children or in a school environment so they're looking at changing what goes on in P lessons testing students outcomes short and long term and also doing an MRI study so that if positive impacts are found they can also start to see what is going on in the brain and how exercise is changing what's going on there team sleep we know that sleep is incredibly important for learning students don't really get taught about this they get taught about sex they get taught about diet and exercise but no one ever talks about their sleep or the importance of it or how to get good sleep so we're testing a sleep education program and then looking at teenagers sleep and also their academic outcomes to see if it has a positive impact these two projects I'll just go back these two in secondary school these are both in primary school with quite young children and they are both using adaptive technologies the bottom one graph again rhyme to teach a new way of teaching young children to read using rhyme analogy and the top one is training inhibition in young students before maths and science lessons and so to help them when they encounter counterintuitive sub concepts the next one about engaging the wreck the brains reward system and this is being led by Paul Howard Jones and this is taking ideas from the gaming world so gaming is people get very engaged with it and part of what is found is that it's because of this uncertain reward so 50 you know sometimes getting something sometimes not getting something and in the school system reward is very consistent everything is about consistency you get something right you get a point and instead what they're saying is is if you have this uncertain reward i.e. get something right and you can choose to game your point you might get double you might get nothing is it ramps up dopamine in the reward center in your brain it's a very teachable moment if you can go through the answers and why they're right and wrong during that period then you might get enhanced learning so they're testing that and the last one space learning is looking at the length of time between learning periods so learning the same material multiple times with different spaces between them and looking at how long you can retain that information for excuse me so these projects are all taking place over the next four or five years in UK schools and I thought I would just mention the Education Endowment Foundation who we're paired with in case you haven't come across them they're running hundreds of big scale randomized control trials in schools all across the UK they have a very useful toolkit and looking at different interventions and how strong the evidence is for them and their cost effectiveness and they've recently quite recently I believe done a whole set of projects looking at digital technologies they've got a literature review on it and some some trials going on so that was the research now how are we supporting teachers well and we feel like it's important to support teachers because we want to empower them with good quality information so they can make informed choices about the things that they're doing in the classroom and one thing that we did last year was using this platform I'm a scientist get me out here which is usually used for students to go on and chat to scientists and we used a different version of it where we had neuroscientists and psychologists on online and any teachers could come on and ask them questions about late learning of the brain and you can go on you can see the questions are asked we have a lot of engagement about 7000 people were on there reading huge numbers of papers because this is an area that lots of educators are very interested in and in terms of supporting teachers we've got more work that's going to be coming out so what's the space and digital promise as an organization which you may all have heard of before and I'm not really in your sector so maybe this is why I haven't but they're doing some really interesting work and so I just thought it was worth highlighting one thing that they've developed is a research map which you can see on the screen and it's all interactive and it's opening up research to teachers to education developers to policymakers so that they can start to be more informed about the decisions they're making in developing technologies or their classroom practice by using the research and it's a fully interactive map it's great you click on it expands it shows you different research areas it gives you access to easy access to all the open access research and so I thought I'd mention that the second thing that they're doing of many is that they have realized that as schools and education systems become are moving towards becoming more evidence in fact evidence informed that people are starting to ask developers for evidence and for research and so they've got a competition open at the moment which is asking developers to submit what research and evidence they've used to do for their development of their product and so getting a really good example and to show to the world and I believe there's some kind of price and the final thing is tools for schools to help them evaluate the research provided by develop developers so if a developer says this is going to enhance your learning is the research to show it schools aren't all teachers aren't always best place to do that and this tool helps and to evaluate whether that research is quality and so education neuroscience in the future and this is a really new and expanding field mind, brain and education and trends in education, neuroscience and education are two journals that have been around for a little while and two more have just popped up in the last year or so and in case you want to find out more there's a literature review that the Education Endowment Foundation funded and it goes through lots of different areas of research relevant to neuroscience and education and it tells you the confidence of that research and how close it is to being implemented in the classroom. A couple of other places if you're interested to find out more the Centre for Educational Neuroscience recently wrote a blog called NeuroHIT or Neuromyth and that goes through 12 of these Neuromyths in a bit more detail and using the research and explaining in a lot of cases how it's not quite a cut and dry answer and at the end they say whether it's a Neuromyth or a NeuroHIT but it goes through the research really carefully and there are just two other books in case you're interested which I would highly recommend. So education neuroscience in the future there's lots of promising areas which are things such as recognising that adolescents are a very unique group of learners and that we might need to deal with them in a specific way research around reward, attention, motivation, understanding neuroplasticity and how we can all continue to learn throughout life and the benefits of doing that. The impacts of stress and anxiety and how that affects our learning. There's a lot of research looking at maths learning for example but also language and science strategies about how we might better foster creativity, early screening for learning disorders and how other things which we might not associate with neuroscience such as exercise sleep, caffeine, consumption might also affect our brains and our learning. I'm thinking about how actually this might be something that should be embedded in professional development of educators in the future so that even if when they do their training it might be different to 20 years later when they're still teaching not giving them just all the knowledge but the ability to access some of that research and understand it or at least ask questions when the new fad comes into schools so that they're not following things that haven't been substantiated. So just to sum up in terms of issues I think we need to be patient. It does take time. Research takes time and we've got to be careful not to over interpret things and the translation of this knowledge is really just beginning but everybody can be part of the process and kind of evaluating and making sure that you're robustly testing everything that you're doing. Opportunities, there's great potential, there's loads of potential but we need multi-disciplinary teams working on this. We need educators, we need neuroscientists, we need psychologists, we need educational technologists so that we get robust trials and that we get the information that we need to support learning as quickly as possible. And I think education technology sector has got great potential to do this if we can collect lots of data in real time and start working out what's working for students and not. We need to get rid of some of these neuro myths so that they're not damaging learning of students who think that they're a visual learner perhaps. And eventually we might have some findings which might lead to policy change and be evidence informed. So I'll just leave you with this quote and say thank you. Is that you're having to take some questions? There'll be helpers with mics. If you could just say who you are and where you're from if you ask your questions and raise your hand clearly so our helpers can hear. Hello down there. Hi. Hi, I'm Andrew Smith from the Open University. Thank you about learning styles. I hate learning styles. I hate people drumming it into our poor children learning styles of how toe to toe fights with teachers and teacher trainers about learning styles. So it's just a thank you but I think there's another important observation. It's not just stopping teachers. It's stopping those that are teaching the teachers because it's still appearing in different sort of teacher training programs out there. Yeah, you would not have a learning style auditory if you're deaf. You would not have a visual learning style if you're blind but we use all of them and sorry I'm passionate about it. No, it's great. If welcome trust can get it into the educators that teach our teachers as well that would be a fantastic thing. Yeah, I totally agree with you and it's also quite right in any kind of professional development that even goes on throughout life. I often have colleagues coming to me and saying oh I've just been on this course. Look what they asked me to do and I'm like brilliant. Did you say something? No, great. Yeah, are there any other questions? Got one down here in front of me. Hi, I've mentioned this earlier but my six-year-old came home from school at the end of last term telling me that they'd all been labeled left brain or right brain. What I immediately printed out Paul's paper and was going to go gung-ho into school and was advised against this by my more sensible husband. But what can we do to do something about this when it's still... We'll be a husband. Well said that man. I suppose I worry that if you go in and score the paper that that might be a bit high level. I used to be a teacher. I'm not disrespecting teachers in any way but they also might not have the time to read it. But I think that everybody needs to wear possible you know try and stand up for what we do know which is a little bit about neuroscience at the moment. And so going to school speak to that teacher it's probably happening in the other classes if there are more classes. Yeah every little helps I guess but it is everywhere. There was an interesting hashtag a while ago I don't know if it's still going which was back off which I quite enjoyed. I thought it was quite good. So if you see anything to do with the back hashtag back off might still be running you could have a go at that. Maybe we could start one up for left brain right brain but it's quite extreme. I don't know what they're hoping to achieve by labeling students so early on but it's quite dangerous and worrying I think. Yeah yeah. I advocate for that too maybe just you. Any other questions. Nils Willis from Manchester one question a debate I've had with a female colleague of mine was that actually for example in science learning there is actually a difference between male and female brains. My argument is probably not as much as we believe but my female colleague believes it is. What's the current evidence for that? Yeah so if I the centre the blog that I mentioned from the centre of educational neuroscience has got a really interesting article on that and I think it's basically suggested there's not that much difference between male and female brains but a lot of the differences occur by the way that males and females are treated so there's lots of differences the expectations on females for example to be not as good at maths or where it's more psychology I guess but where people are told you know girls are not as good at maths then underperforming tests and things like that so it's quite hard to tease it apart sometimes because we just live in a society where there are these gender differences and expectations still but I would probably suggest that yeah there's there's not so much difference as some people believe. Any other questions or one more? Yeah so we've dispelled the you know the learning styles to the left right what are the myths are there out there that that research we need to look at so we can dispel them later? About drinking water your brain doesn't shrink if you don't if you don't drink I think it's six or eight cups fish oils there's not very good evidence around fish oils improving your learning trying to think what else is on the Center of Educational Neuroscience website things about brain training I think a lot of the brain training type things you get better at a particular thing that you're training your brain on but it doesn't necessarily transfer to more general things so if it's telling you that you're going to improve the age of your brain not so much. Can I, what about 10,000 hours? Myth or truth? Well I don't know if anyone's done their research on that probably if you spend 10,000 hours on something you do get better at it the person behind you is shaking his head he's not so sure I don't know what he's had a failure with and does personal experience so true okay I think that's it for questions so thank you very much thank you thank you very much Lea that was absolutely brilliant and I just wanted to finish off today everybody is free to go in just a second