 Education. It's the shared answer to so many of society's most urgent questions. How do we expand the horizons of our children? Multiply their dreams. Enlarge the scope of their opportunities in a way that builds a brighter future. How do we help them meet the broad range of global challenges they'll face in the decades ahead? Equip them with 21st century skills needed to succeed in today's competitive digital economy. Education is the answer to so many questions, but providing it raises so many others. Like how do we best harness the power of technology to improve the reach and effectiveness of education efforts worldwide? How do we orchestrate the professional development of tens of millions of educators around the planet? How can students, teachers, governments and industry all work together to develop truly sustainable change in our global education models? How can we create vibrant, productive learning environments that will enrich the lives of every student on Earth? We know education is the answer, which means there's really only one question that matters. How do we make it happen? And with that question in mind, please welcome our participants for this panel. Education transformation, content that matters. Antoine Toussé, Senior Vice President for Corporate Development, Amplify Access. Scott Kinney, Senior Vice President, Discovery Education. Terry Nealon, Co-Founder and CEO, Fishtree. Tony Brandenburg, International Consultant, Tuistea. And panel moderator, John Galvin, Vice President and General Manager, Intel World Ahead Program. Good afternoon. So, Excellencies, Ministers, Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you very much for joining us. We want to talk to you about the transformation in education, specifically about content, 21st century learning skills, what you can do to up-level your education competitiveness within each of your countries, and the role that ICT is going to play in that. We want to be able to talk to you about the transformation itself, about the students in your schools, what's important to them is not just the technology that's being delivered, but the engaging content that teachers can actually make available to them. And I don't want this to be about technology. I actually want it to be about the transformation of education itself and how technology really becomes an enabler of that. And that it's not just about content itself, but it really is about the engagement with the student and how we think rich digital content makes that happen. It's about the professional development of your teachers and ensuring that they're comfortable with the content and the technology coming into their classrooms. And of course, it's about the connectivity and ensuring that they have the ability to get the content that they need. I've actually been fascinated over the past couple of days how often content has actually come up. Yesterday in the forum opening conversation, ITU Secretary General Torey said that it's about local content and creating local content for education. We heard John Barksas outline the drivers of ICT in a sense, the history from coverage to SMS to handsets, and now that it's about local content and the role that it'll play to drive capacity. And then again, we heard from Secretary General Torey, creating content is where creativity comes in, in addition to content capacity building and education to drive education growth. So with that, a brief introduction of myself, and then I'm going to give each of our panelists an opportunity to introduce themselves. We in the World Head Team have focused on education and how we can help accelerate that transformation of education. That starts with us ensuring that we have hardware designs that we actually think will deliver a better education experience. Now Android tablets and of course, classmate PCs before that. We've worked on a complete solution stack where we can help you enable a great education experience within your classrooms. And that's everything from theft deterrent to ensure that you feel secure with the hardware to classroom management for the teachers. So they feel comfortable with all the devices and the content within the classroom. But more and more, it's about the applications that are available on those devices so that when your students are using them, they feel like it really is an education experience rather than a technical experience or that this is just another computing device. And to our topic today, we're focusing more and more on content and how do we enable rich digital content, whether that's your local content providers or it's us working with the big publishers at a multinational level and ensuring that they're getting content out to you that you can also use. John Davies mentioned this morning in the opening panel that we recently did an acquisition of a company called No, K&O. And that will allow us to help publishers get to digital content much faster as well as to be able to provide a platform for that content delivery. And then finally, and one of the topics that our panelists are going to touch on today is the blueprints to a successful education deployment where it goes beyond content into assessment and analytics, but again it really comes back to the teachers. And how do we prepare the teachers for this transformation so that they become an active role in it and they're not intimidated by it, but instead they embrace it. So the overall flow that we're going to follow is again a brief introduction from each of our panelists. I'm then going to kick off a couple of questions to get the discussion started specifically around content, about the curation of content, local content as well as really personalized content. And we'll open it up to any questions you might have at that point. We're then going to talk about connectivity and the importance of connectivity for education. And then our final topic will be around professional development and some of the things that each of them are doing in the professional development area. And again we'll open it up for any questions or comments that you have and then we'll wrap it up for the day. So with that, excuse me, Terry do you want to kick us off? I'm probably the one company that you haven't heard of, a company called Fish Tree. We started about two years ago and on the back of I suppose what you might call a certain amount of frustration on behalf of myself and my co-founder and CTO. We worked in the content business for one of the biggest education publishers in the world, great publisher, great business. But we felt it was a huge challenge specifically around the delivery of content, the management of content and the access of content. And we felt that the opportunity to adapt instruction, what we call adaptive instruction to really personalize for every learner was there. We didn't fully know what we were going to build but we did know that we didn't see it in the market. So we set about doing our research and come up with a concept called, we call it learning relationship management. And we call it learning relationship management because we didn't want to think about product, we didn't want to think about technology, we wanted to think about the relationships between a teacher, a parent, a student, an administrator. And looking at that we come up with four trends that we felt were important. The first trend was, which is critical really now more than ever around social media. So the real benefits of peer-to-peer learning for students, learning from students, teachers learning best practice from other teachers. So the sharing and managing resources are very important. But that connectivity between two individuals as they're learning or teaching is absolutely critical. And research tells us that one of the key areas of learning is actually feedback, not just for the student but also for the teacher. The second area is around mobile devices. So the whole idea now, which I think is just fascinating, that we can deliver some more class content to every single student on the planet. That is huge in terms of getting people access to content that's going to help them deliver on better learning outcomes. The third area was curation of content. So in many countries 50% or more of the content that's being used by teachers is not coming from a single source. It's not coming from a publisher. It's coming from YouTube. It's coming from Wikipedia. It's coming from teacher-generated content. So it's very important in whatever we built that we could factor in all of those content sources and bring them in in a very easy way and make it easy for teachers to be able to manage and access. And the fourth area was around personalization. Around the whole adaptive assessment area, adaptive instruction, that we take more data and the more data we get access to, the better instructional experience we can give to each and every teacher and student. We built the platform. It has four components. It's learning management, collaboration, curation and personalization. Taking all the buzzwords aside, essentially what it does is allow a teacher to save an awful lot of time in accessing the best resources that they can get their hands on, understanding every single learner in the class and almost with the click of a button access content from millions of resources, any mode of content and adapt that to every learner in the classroom. That's the kind of goal we started out with. That's what we believe we delivered. We launched it at the beginning of this year and now we're active in US, China and Korea. We're working with other publishers. We're working with telecommunications companies who are interested in building like a smart learning environment for their schools and offering a value add to the education system. So we're still relatively young. We're still up and coming. But our hope is now that we've scaled the product challenge, the next challenge is scale globally and start working with more and more partners around the world. Thank you. My name's Tony Brandenburg. I work for ISTI out of the United States, but as you can tell from my accent I'm an Australian. I'm a teacher and very proud to be a teacher and I bring that to the work that I do. My contribution for today is really more around the fact that what I believe about teachers and how teachers work and the content that teachers need. So the wealth of the education system is the teacher. And occasionally we get distracted and think that the wealth of the education is just our students or just the technology or our classrooms. But the reality is that for us to be able to sustain an education system we really need to work and be supportive of what I would think to be creative teachers. Content for me is extremely important, but I tend to balance that with how we do professional development for teachers. The 21st century skills that we talk about of collaboration, being creative and also things like other C-words like coding are all becoming important. But it's really interesting for me in that a lot of the research that we've seen very recently over a period of time as well is that many teachers will teach in the way that they are taught or the way that they were taught. And I think that everybody in this room could think back to a teacher some way. Some of those memories would be very pleasant and some of those might not be as pleasant, but you can remember a teacher. And if you think that teachers teach the way that they were taught then it's an interesting dilemma that we face now is because the teachers that are in our schools, if they teach the way that they were taught they're really not going to be teaching with technology. So we need to be able to provide strategies and at a higher level policy to be able to support teachers to learn, to develop their own knowledge so that they can teach in a 21st century environment. At the moment I'll stop, but I'll leave you with the thought that I think that one of the things that is the challenge for us and it's a challenge around the world is yes for the teachers to be able to use the content but the challenge is how do we encourage teachers to change their mindset and to use that technology. Teachers are prepared to have a go but many of them don't have the mindset and the pedagogy to be able to do that. That's great. Thank you very much. Scott. Thank you. So good afternoon. My name is Scott Kinney. I'm with Discovery Education. We are part of the Discovery Communications family so you might better know us by some of our TV networks. Has anyone ever heard of the Discovery Channel? Anybody? All right. So the Discovery Channel was found on a belief 26 years ago that it could not only entertain viewers but it really could educate viewers. It could inspire viewers. It could engage viewers. So Discovery Education is a natural extension of that. Our mission and our goal is how do we engage students in the classroom? And the reality is right now there's a better way for us to deliver an education instructional materials than we do today. We know that students learn differently than they ever had before. In fact we know that folks everywhere learn differently from each other. So if you think about your own learning when you were at school and you think about the work that Fleming did in the early ages of education he talked a lot about the different ways or the different types of learners that we have in our classrooms. So there are people that are visual learners or people that are auditory learners or people that are kinesthetic or use their hands to learn. And there are people that absorb information through text. And so I feel like I have to ask a question at this point of the folks in the room. If you had to put yourself in one of those buckets how many people in the room feel like they're visual learners? So show of hands, visual learners. Thank you for participating. So all right, very good. How about auditory learners? Learn best through here. So one, I'm one, so there's two of us in the room. Read right, read best through text. And then how about kinesthetic, hands on, manipulate things. So if you ask this question to groups of people what's interesting is usually the least is the auditory learner. And if you ask school systems across the world how do people most deliver instructional content? Number one is lecture. Number two is through static print materials. There's a fundamental disconnect in the way that we deliver instructional materials and the way that our students in classrooms learn. And I think that is the power of digital content. In essence, we know that we can deliver content that meets the needs of all types of learners. So we'll talk about personalization. We'll talk about adaptive. We'll talk about content. At the end of the day, we know that we can deliver content to meet the visual learners, the read write learners, the kinesthetic learners. And we can do that all through digital. I think that's what gets me excited about having this conversation today as we dive deeper into it. That's great. Thank you. Antoine? My name is Antoine Tesse. SPP of Corporate Development for a company called Amplify. It's a division of News Corp. I'll start with a quick introduction as to how and when News Corp got into education. It's through an acquisition of a company about three years ago named Wireless Generation, which started as far back as 2001, actually, with data assessments and analytics. Out of this business, we've expanded the company into a couple of other divisions, one which is focused on content production called Amplify Learning. And the other one which I think we will touch on later on today is about providing access to this content and as well as a variety of curated content called Amplify Access. So that's the brief history of Amplify and going back to what I'm excited about from this discussion today is really not only the personalization of content from the way we learn, but also all the different modalities that new technologies enable, such as self-directed learning versus learning in big groups, the traditional stage on the stage model, and I think that's going to be a very interesting topic for us today. Okay, excellent. So let's kick it off. We've heard a lot, again, about localized content, the importance of curated content. Antoine, I'm just going to put it back to you. You know, as we actually look at the problem of localized, curated, yet still making sure that it's aligned with curriculum, I mean, how do you balance that at Amplify? How do you navigate that, I would say? Beyond Amplify, I think the main issue is at a couple of different levels. There's the discovery of content. There is the curation of finding content that is correctly aligned with the variety of local standards in the U.S. For example, the Common Core Standards. And there is essentially the feedback loop from students using that content. And does this actually work? Does this deliver any different educational outcome? Does it improve learning? And does this fit essentially the students' learning behavior? So the way we tackle this at Amplify is by essentially curating some of this content from a variety of providers on the access side, as well as creating our own content where we think there's a big opportunity actually around Common Core Line Standards. Okay. And Common Core, for those of you who aren't aware, within the U.S. is around literacy and math and standards that have been established across all of the states. Terry, you talked about your first trend, I would say, as being social media. What's the influence, would you say, of social media on content? So there's a few angles there. First of all, I think the most important aspect is the trust that can be built around content through social media. So the justification that a piece of content works because it's been endorsed by other teachers is powerful. How effective that is, you can question later on. But what social media is doing right now is allowing communities to start generating content, start becoming a source of content, but validating a lot of that content as well, which I think, from a teaching perspective, is a huge time saver. So you have access to great sources of content that very often you don't have to pay for, that have been judged by your peers, which gives you a certain amount of content and saves you a lot of time, or confidence that saves you a lot of time. From a student's perspective, it's gone off the charts. I mean, it really is, it's an eye-opening experience when you look at the amount of content that's been sourced by students but there's probably less of a structure around that content. What I call user-generated content, then you would hope for. And I think the platforms, you know, that companies like ourselves are building are trying to put our arms around all of the sources of content. So you have premium content, you've got open educational resources, you've got real-time content, you've got teacher-generated content. All of these sources are being brought together to align to something, like there's a learning objective. Let's start with the learning objective and then figure out, be it from millions of resources and 10 resources, what is relevant to this teaching of the learning objective. One of the indicators that we take as we recommend content is how powerful is the social community in using that content. We have to look at other indicators as well, like assessment. We generate assessment from that content. But social media has opened up a lot of possibilities. The final sort of area, and I think it's very important as well as a stakeholder, the most underserved stakeholder in education is actually the parent. And this is offering a lot of opportunities to engage with the parent in a different way. Social media opens up the conversations with parents now that, in all honesty, parents are not asking traditional education companies, how do I teach this particular subject. They're going to mommy blogs, they're going to Facebook, they're going to different environments to justify the next course or the next step that they're going to take. And social media has opened up that opportunity for different business models around tutoring. So how good is a particular tutor? Well, you can find out now how good a tutoring service is, how good a piece of content is, how good is this content before I purchase it. Social media helps you sort of second guess a lot of that and move a lot quicker. Okay. Scott, in our discussion a couple of weeks ago, you made a comment that 20% of the content that being used in the classrooms is supplemental. As you look at, you know, this and within the context of social, I mean, what role do you see and maybe if you can bring it back to the audience in terms of some of the things that they might be dealing with for supplemental content. How do you see that coming together? So I think, you know, when you look at supplemental content, it goes back to the very question that we started with, which is how does it align to standards? How does it support teaching and learning? So the idea, I think, for me is when you look at when you look at the standards and across the world, really, the majority of standards don't tell you how to teach. The standards provide you that guidepost of this is where your students need to be at a certain grade level, a certain age level, and supplemental content allows you to enrich the instructional experience. Digital content should inherently provide you instructional advantages or you shouldn't be doing it, right? The kind of cliche of don't use technologies for technology's sake holds true especially in the classroom. And so the question then is how do you do something from an educational perspective that you couldn't otherwise do? Differentiation is a prime example of that. So how do I differentiate instruction? Could teachers for decades differentiate instruction? Absolutely. Could a teacher go to the library and pull an audio clip and a video and a VHS tape and some manipulatives? They could. Did people do it? A few people who did, but there's efficiencies that are lost in that process and so you might have one teacher out of a hundred who actually go through that process and that's what digital brings you. So even from a supplemental perspective and certainly our focus and discovery is both that supplemental area but also that primary core instructional material but even from that supplemental experience how do you get smarter about the classroom instruction you're already doing? So is it differentiation? Is it the use of formative assessment to make better decisions about the content that you're going to do? So if I know Tony doesn't understand photosynthesis I can act on that immediately because I have the tools and technology then to make instructional content. Tony claims he does understand. No, I saw that. Yeah, so I'll leave it at that. Okay. Tony, your point of view? I think probably what I'd like to do would be one of the projects that ISTI is doing at the moment and that might explain what I think. We have a significant contract in the Gulf States in the Middle East with the Arab Bureau for Education and what we're doing there is that we're working with teachers but in a coaching model. So basically coaching a group of teachers to coach others. So what we're finding or what we've found in our initial planning for this is that whatever we do has to be sustainable and it has to be sustainable over a number of years because there's no point in us working with the ministries of any of the Gulf States without a commitment for a long period of time. Because if we are able to commit for that long period of time then you are able to build the sustainable change that is needed. And then when we come back to the ideas around content and personalized learning and all the areas that we want to touch base with is you're not touching base with them just once. You're there, you're providing information, you're following it up, you're redoing it, you're supporting the teachers as they go along. So my comment there John is very much around that whatever we do here it's a sustainable project over a period of time. Yeah, I appreciate that and actually in the last panel discussion sustainability came up as well and so it's actually I think it's a critical point. In terms of the idea of content though I think we can actually break it up into I'll say three pieces just based on some of the responses that I've heard from you. We have publisher content or curriculum content and the path to how do we get to digital. We have supplemental content and as Scott as you said that's always existed, it's now how are we essentially enabling that much more easily through a digital path. And then we also have the social elements of content being shared and I think what we can actually add to that Terry is that's not new either right content has always been shared we now have essentially an easier path to do it. If we bring it back to some of the situations that we've heard about earlier today where it's still nascent these are in some cases technology going into school for the first time it's labs it's teachers that still essentially are becoming familiar with the technology itself as well as with the content what are some of the basics that we should be talking about of how the content essentially how do we go social in a simple environment and start sharing more easily. Yes. I think to get the teachers on board with a lot of this it has to be made very, very, very easy and I keep going back to when we started the company first we wanted to come up with a way that the teachers can source any source of content publisher content user generated content open education resources with the click of a button and what I mean by that is choose your standard and help the system automate that in some way because I think that the amount of time that's spent on curation of content is it's too much right it's too much for a teacher and I think the social aspect of it is helping to move that along and the reason I said that is I think it's easier to adopt for teachers if they get that comfort because it's judged by the peers so the social aspect allows them to get the comfort that their peers are recommended in this content. So I think within the closed environment teachers are very comfortable as we found within the classes or schools that a grade 7 teacher is relatively comfortable sharing content with other grade 7 teachers of math once it goes outside of that because your name is almost on the lesson plan for example there's probably less of comfort and that start to change but that does take a little bit of time so I think you know from our perspective and again it's gone back to the broader question of how do you implement something like this make it easy as possible for a teacher to access the content to be able to curate and align the content and then display the content so on the device it literally has to be this is what I'm teaching this is the objective and here's the content that I need to show up it needs to be that simple it needs to be taken away as a problem because the amount of time they spend on curation needs to be taken away the administration taken away focus on the teaching and I think the social aspect allows us to... I like that idea that has to be easy and it reminds me actually Antoine we were having a conversation a week or so ago where you stated as the YouTube versus Hollywood scenario to build on one aspect that we haven't really discussed is the student behavior most students are their day looks like they check Facebook first thing in the morning they go on YouTube, they watch videos they're used to using all these technologies and when you mention that education technology is relatively new, yes it is in the school environment but it's pretty well ingrained, it's deeply ingrained within the students behavior every single day and the power of technology actually and the way for younger teachers who are just under the teaching force or who's just started working as teachers that they know how to use these tools they grew up with these tools for the most part they're very familiar with them and all these platforms actually give them the opportunity to create and curate their own lessons plans very easily create their own content and share it with their class, their students their schools and eventually rise up to the country or potentially globally Salman Khan is one example obviously with Khan Academy he started recording himself and sharing these videos initially to relatively small audience and then this took a life on its own or started growing very very fast so I think one of the interesting evolutions of content and how content gets consumed is whether traditional publishing remains the way to be taught or the way to teach and because they're always aligned specifically to specific standards or are we going to see essentially master teachers who start sharing their content, what they produced and this starts displacing the traditional content publishers and that's been what's happened to the music industry over the past 10 years the barriers to entry to share your music on a global basis have become much simpler so that was my analogy between Hollywood versus user-generated content I appreciate you going into detail for everyone here I think it becomes interesting because it provides a different spin on localized content it's now localized content students are actually very comfortable with technology we heard that earlier today in a panel that if you put down 15 tablets in front of students they're going to pick them up and they're going to engage and they'll start using them right away you do that same thing with teachers and potentially five of them pick them up and we'll start doing it because they're comfortable with it but that is a different model that's a different model than we're used to where now students potentially start creating content and sharing it with each other versus what might be the traditional content and it's also now an acceptance that they are using their own devices within the classrooms versus maybe putting them away and using their textbooks Tony do you have any experience with what you've done in that area? I was just going to mention that one of the things that we did in Australia recently was that we created a social media site for teachers and what government wanted was a Facebook Twitter LinkedIn but protected so that it was for Australian teachers and one of the things that we saw very quickly was that the conversations between teachers became a resource for others so that because we had built search into it so the conversation that a teacher in Brisbane had with a teacher in Perth around mathematics and grade three and teaching was then searchable and other teachers were able to not only find the conversation and learn from it but then join in so I think that's just really supporting the argument and what we've heard and what we've seen all the way that there is all the different types of content one of the powerful content content is the self-generated content okay that's great before we shift over to personalization of content and some of the things that are happening in that space got anything that you would add to the discussion on? just kind of a general reaction to some of the contests I think one of the most of the content discussion in my mind is that your digital content strategy shouldn't start with thinking about what is the digital content it should really start with what are your instructional goals and objectives and this is what a lot of school systems across the world struggle with is everybody wants to buy 30,000 iPads and put some digital content on it but in reality the first thing you need to ask yourself is what is the difference between the teacher and the students to look like in the next three to five years and it is a challenge because that's a process and so working backwards from that you can then start to fill in the holes of then what is your digital content strategy to Tony's point what is your professional development strategy what is your community engagement strategy look like and all those things need to be answered and certainly access is another issue that you have to deal with so at the very end the content discussion comes or at the very beginning of that content discussion should always be the question what is at the end of this process what does it look like again that student to teacher interaction in the classroom yeah that's great thank you but we're here to talk about content I know sorry about that and I still like content okay so I'm going to make a little bit of a transition digital content is great that's our topic we're going to talk about it we're actually going to talk about a lot of other things too the engaging content really is better but I think it's really about personalized content and we've already mentioned that a couple of times so far how do you actually deliver the right content to that student based on what you know about them and what you have learned about how they consume content or how they best learn to your earlier point Scott so if we pick that up and we say that and I'm actually going to go to a fish tree quote that a personalized learning experience is one that is tailored to the individual can you say a little bit more about that yeah the challenge that we found with personalization wasn't content it was the implementation of it how do you scale one to one instruction so how do you say to a teacher one of you is 30 of them how do you use that in the classroom so we started out from the content perspective thinking about we have an objective we have all of these sources of content how do I now personalize that to every learning in the classroom but make it very easy for the teacher to do that it's the blooms two sigma problem we we struggle with that for a long time because most approaches to personalization have been around I'll use assessment and other points of information to be able to move your students up and down the curriculum the problem is if you've got 30 different learning paths it's nearly impossible for most teachers in the world to be able to deal with that so our view on personalization we have to take a different philosophy we have to take any mode of content any source of content for any subject map it up to any curriculum and then deliver that to the class based on the profile of the class but then allow the students to get more personalized resources based on what we call the learning DNA so this is back to the the learning DNA concept that we come up with was a whole kind of picture or all the information that we had on the student on their learning style their interest the time of day they like to learn when they like to learn their interest from a social perspective and we bring all of those data points and all those signals together and we use that to influence what we then recommend or personalize for each and every student and we felt that was a much more achievable way of being able to deliver on one-to-one instruction in terms of content we took from all the various sources of content and now within a system we feel that we can now with the click of a button allow a teacher to build extremely rich lesson plans for a class and then around that supplemental to that give every student the opportunity to get further personalized resources to deal with the same learning objective you can still move teachers students forward if you wish so I think the important thing from our perspective is how the system understood content in the first place so what kinds of content are relevant well you have to know who you're curating for when you're curating and that's our view on personalization so we build up a profile and then we deliver based on that profile to the learning DNA as I described it okay Antoine you essentially deliver something similar to that yes and no there are some slight differences but I'd like to build on your point about their learning DNA there's one thing that I find fascinating is if you think about how Facebook managed to essentially create an understanding of all the relationships all the friendships basically what they call the social graph all these relationships of you your family your friends what you like your interest etc one of the things I think is the expansion of that learning DNA you referred to could be also referred to as the learning graph which is understanding at a very deep level what a student knows what his competencies are for math, for science or you know English or any language and how do you actually tailor the instruction not only based on the content you provide but also on how you deliver this content the modality that was saying earlier some students react or learn faster based on self directed instruction some others tend to like the stage on the stage approach with the traditional teacher teaching to a class of 30 or so students some others like small group projects I think that's really the power of this learning graph approach or this learning DNA that you're developing yeah I agree but it also comes back to the teacher yeah and Tony in your opening comments you actually you know highlighted the teacher above the content how do you make teachers comfortable with more of that approach of not just a personalized learning approach but feeling comfortable with what technology can actually enable and I think as you said in your opening comments it's really you know moving to that view of 21st century learning skills as part of that this is the difficult question I think in that 21st century skills and 21st century learning actually implies that teachers have to change their pedagogy and the way that they teach and understand how their students learn because these students have mobile phones they have access to wireless they can find information quite quickly where previous 10 years ago the sage on the stage was the deliverer of all the information that's changed it's different mobile technology has really encouraged teachers to change their pedagogy and in that change of pedagogy the personalized learning the one to one the laptop programs what we're seeing the bring your own device to school program so where the schools are saying look we really don't care now you can bring a laptop you can bring a tablet you can bring your mobile phone whatever we develop our programs on the knowledge that you want to know that you want to create and so I think I think the struggle I think the issue for us as teachers and I think the issue for governments is to be able to provide the professional development for teachers to be able to change their pedagogy and the way that they think so that personalized learning becomes a far more powerful teaching tool that can be a little threatening though very much Scott in your platform how does the the learning graph is that what you called it learning graph does a learning graph fit in in terms of how teachers might accept something like that do you have experience in that space we tend to focus a lot on professional development and I actually I'm very hopeful I think when we work with school systems to make a move from a print environment to a digital environment we typically look at a three to five year strategy and that strategy is not only content strategy but a lot of our business quite frankly is professional development we work with school systems and teachers to build capacity within their systems we don't look at it as a two day workshop it's literally a three to five year professional development strategy and quite honestly it works and you have a mix of you know there's this old thought that more experienced teachers will be more resistant to technology frankly we find some of the more experienced teachers to be more accepting because they make those instructional connections much faster and so they see what the tools can bring them and how that fits into their instructional practice certainly teachers that are just coming out of college are very tech savvy so sometimes we find that we have to make those instructional connections more explicit for them and so we talk a lot about how we meet students needs through differentiating through providing different supports through treating students like they're individuals and how do we adapt to them in a classroom environment we often don't talk about that when we talk about training teachers we often think of professional development as 30 teachers and they all get the same thing and we all lecture to them and tell them how they're going to do things differently and the reality is that we have to also use great instructional practices we're working with teachers over that time period so I think the biggest thing that we see is that when school systems commit to a systematic implementation plan around going digital people have this ease that they understand there will be support there and as long as you can outline that for folks you can almost see a wash come over teachers of a relaxation where they find out oh it's not this two day workshop but it's you're going to be here for three years with us there's a gradual release that we understand what it looks like in our classroom you know at some point you're going to provide professional development to us in a classroom environment not just a workshop environment so once you can articulate that you don't have the same resistance so we've seen a lot of success to us the biggest key around successful implementation of digital content is clearly professional development it's not the only one but if you could pick one and you had to say what will make this successful there's to that instructional goal that you've articulated I want to pause for just a sec do we have any questions comments from the audience before we dig in deeper on professional development yes there's microphones coming your way hello my name is Tariq I work with an app development company we actually did the app for this event here at ITU and we're approached Mr. Brandenburg what you mentioned earlier and also why I wanted to come and listen to this conversation this afternoon predominantly we work with events and event organizers but over the last year and a half or so we've seen more of a communications platform approach and we've been approached by companies looking for platforms they can use and more recently universities as well as lower education or elementary schools coming to us with the idea that they want to be able to create a community where they can share content, create content etc. and what I'm wondering from you at the panel do you think that you see an evolution of the learning experience for students transforming into more of this community private social platform so to speak whereby you can also not just teachers sharing content and benefiting from this but also having students learning on these platforms and being able through customization to see the interaction of the student themselves with that content to really decide is it good content or not is that something that you see happening over the next few years in the United States but also in developing countries Tony do you want to take that? Shall I start? It's easy yes absolutely no doubt no doubt at all there are governments around the world that are looking at it as I said the Australian government embarked on that their results are pretty outstanding they're limited dialogue at this stage so they're not sure if it's going to include students because the feedback from teachers is very much that the teachers want a space what they moved on they initially started with a social media site and it was all about conversation but it quickly became a networking site so that you could join groups within the social media site there's a group of 450-500 teachers that are interested in art in elementary school and their conversations are really powerful so it's still growing and developing but from my perspective and my experience the answer to your question is absolutely Antoine did you have a comment? yes I want to give you an example from a slightly different sector but are you familiar with a company called Yammer? you know the vertical specific social networks designed for specific companies and one of the big benefits of having these kinds of communities in the work environment is actually retention, information sharing collaboration and these are very important scales retention obviously is a very important aspect for schools so that students do not drop out and teachers also do not drop out if you look at the age range in the US it's actually a binomial distribution we have very young teachers who tend to drop off and could do something else and then come back into the teaching course so the retention aspect is very strong as well as teaching 21st century skills such as group work, collaboration etc which are you can learn very easily through these these kinds of social networks I think that's definitely a benefit from the work you're doing it's growing and I guess as a follow up question would be it's one thing to talk about it but in order to deploy and actually execute on the ground you have to have obviously as you said schools want to run out and buy 30,000 tablets that's not the answer necessarily and so I'm wondering how do you if we can see that that's the trajectory that education is on and content delivery is on how then on the ground level are we going to be able to actually deploy so from our perspective when we were building out the platform when we looked at the whole area of collaboration we looked specifically about how much communication do you want to happen between the students and between the teachers we came to the conclusion based on all the conversations we had, primary and secondary research that the first thing you see in our system when you log in as a student is a stream of the content that's being used by your peers in your classroom and you can move between your classroom to look at the selection of content that your peers are looking at and we were a bit doubtful as to whether we were going to release that initially but what we found that it actually encouraged not quite forced but put it out there a conversation around the content that's being used in the system of how effective that content is when you look at the soft ratings look at the conversations around it we ensured that it was proctored by the teacher so the teacher controls all of the conversations around those classes themselves so you have that communication with students what content are you using I've just finished my assignment he's just finished his assignment he's a grade A student, I'm a grade C student just out of interest what content are you using that kind of stuff then on the student-teacher communication two-way communication with the student and the teacher where the communication between the two of those stakeholders is tied to the learning objective what I mean by that is this is what I'm learning the conversation which adds context to that lesson between me and the teacher also ties into that as well so you can look at the history of those conversations and then on the teacher-to-teacher level you can also look at sharing in the same way as you do with a student learning from other teachers the bottom line for us how are we going to save time for the teacher to focus on teaching because that's the biggest driver of learning outcomes right and what we found that communication between students increased engagement it gave us a lot more information how effective the content was it resulted in a lot more generation of content by the students themselves so that conversation was a very powerful one for us and in terms of is it operation on the ground yes curriculum very similar stuff to what you guys are talking about based in the US I had a question maybe directed towards you and to anyone else is you talked about the parallel between the music industry or the video or film industry to the YouTubes and Napsters and how it changed now I used to give the same parallel and the same example a long while back I realized that you cannot do that because those industries experience critical mass in user generated content because the content was universal and the nature of educational content is highly local and even if we are talking about local content creation and we have different it's like talking about lots of content being created lots of music being created in different languages but they are not being discovered or distributed at the scale that music is discovered and distributed the critical mass nature of it allowed that to happen we are trying to address that too but what do you think what are the best practices, what have we learned about this what can be done to bring better discovery and distribution in local content creation and if you agree with your comments about music being radically different because if you look at one of the most streamed videos last year on YouTube for example was the see Gangnam Style the Korean singer that became a global hit nor the traditional music industry model from 15 years ago chances are this would have not happened it would have never left South Korea and would have been a massive hit over there however because of these global platforms now you do actually get the opportunity to enjoy some content created in one specific country and not understand the language I don't speak Korean but I did enjoy the video I thought it was pretty fun again I agree partially that some local content will be relevant in some other places but there is still some fundamental map is a global scale set that everybody needs to have and I think the ability to create as evidenced by Khan Academy for example the ability to which is getting translated into a whole bunch of different languages I think the content is good enough the quality is superior actually more than good enough I think this has a real potential to grow outside from its home country basically and global well and I think science and math scale pretty well but I think it also in the conversations that at least I've had with publishers it's how do you reach the tipping point and when they see that they're getting near that tipping point it's not just the actual cost of going digital it's now actually the explosion of digital where they just think purely in digital which is I don't have to actually take this text and move it from a text to a PDF to digital or rich digital and they're actually now going to create in digital and I think that's what we're actually looking for and I think that's the path that we're on in terms of the discussion and the power of potentially social media where students can create content, teachers can create content or governments or school systems can create the content that they want to and distribute and they can actually do it relatively cost effectively and I would say to pick up on that point one of the things that digital does inherently give you the ability to do is customize quickly, I mean one of the when we enter into a market if you will, I mean take the US for example there are 50 states and they're all every state standards different and then so when we created a digital textbook solution years ago you would literally have this bulk of content, so discoveries in over 200 countries worldwide, we broadcast in 40 some languages so we have a lot of content to draw from partner with 100 publishers across the world so you have that bucket to pull from but the nice thing about that is once you have the content you have the ability to quickly innovate around one of the local standards so if you go into Australia you look at the national curriculum so one of the nice things about digital is you're not trying to fit the old paradigm of the traditional textbook market you're actually looking at it a little bit differently you're trying to innovate a kind of leg so as long as you have access to the localized content then you do have an advantage as far as personalization goes just to add to that I think in your defense you are touching on something that's very important about education you are dealing with a multi local a multi domestic market you don't have really in a typical sense a global education market so the challenges going forward it is changing content has more legs than I had before it's definitely more portable but I think because it's been the domain has been managed by a few key players in each market as a result of the changes over the last 10 years they are now having to think differently about how they produce their own content so is this going to have legs in a market outside of the US do I have the rights for it I think what you touch on is true I think it's changing and it's changing much for the better I'm not familiar with what you guys do I'm vaguely familiar I think and I touched on it when we started speccing what we were going to build for Fishtre and the key thing for us to make it global to get over those challenges that you are talking about it's not just the curriculum it's not just the standard, it's culture it's language, it's a lot of things going on and it will not be fully perfect in each market so something has to be done, that's why we focused on working on alliances but in the Fishtre system what we made sure of was based on the standard that I select be it 3 million, 10 million 100 million pieces of content we need to be able to pull from that content and align it pretty much automatically with that standard no matter what country you go into it is getting a lot better but it is still a challenge the portability of content I think any other questions? Hi I'm Sam as I go around and I talk to people from different countries I always see them jumping to I'm going to go digital I'm going to give the kids a tablet PDF files gone you guys are generations ahead and obviously many countries have gone through those experiences what can you share with those of us who today are considering a plain tablet solution with just the PDF file is that even an option should they try to leave a tablet to jump in? it goes back to what is your instructional goal and I shouldn't say this because you have to answer that question but I can't imagine you're going to solve it by taking a textbook scanning the pages and putting it on an iPad or whatever the device is I think the beauty of technology and digital content kind of that mix is it allows us to do things structurally that we couldn't do before things that we talked about earlier so from my perspective I would say you have to clearly articulate what those instructional goals are and the beauty of digital content is that you have I think three organizations up here who are either aggregating or creating content who don't come from that traditional publishing sense so it's not the traditional publisher who's going digital and so you're able to look at it from how do I create a digital learning environment that uses the tools and resources that we have available to us today so how do you build in personalization, how do you build informative assessment that allows you to prescribe content how do you build in differentiation how do you do it in a way that's seamless for the educator so that to Tony's point earlier it's not a burden on them and they can easily use these tools so I would say just re-look at it look at your educational goals and objectives again look what's out there because there might be other solutions and a lot of times people just don't realize what people are doing I mean one of the things that we at least I spend a lot of time doing is looking at how are people implementing digital content in this transition to digital Can I add anywhere, anytime we're finding that students have a stronger expectation of access to the internet so you saw John hold a product before, you know, one that a student can throw into the bag that can, they spill cordial over it or it bounces or whatever is a product that is going to be attractive because then they can use it when they want to use it I think there is some research and I can't quote it to you but that talks about how when a student is given a device it's nearly 24-7 and then they realize that device is there for a purpose and a need so the amount of time they spend on it drops and that they then, when they're doing projects or they're looking at their own personalized learning program or whatever they go to a book they go to other students they go to their device they use it whatever way they want but they keep coming back to they want to use it when they want to use it not between 9.30 and 10.30 because that's when it's set to be used okay, any other responses to Sam's question? okay one of the things that actually came out in the early question or the first question was results what type of results are you seeing as we move to not just digital content but personalization of content is it working? anyone can jump in I think it's too early to tell I can't think of very strong evidence that says content has a direct impact on raising educational outcomes yet I think it's showing some promising signs especially around engagement students students spending more time studying I think is a good indicator but it has not I don't think you can categorically say yet that is definitely translated into higher educational outcomes I've seen a few there's a few people that work in the learning and personalization space they would have data on the improvement of outcomes I have a huge issue with those kinds of reports but the simple reason that we found that if you put a tablet in the hands of the student and we're trying to prove that they are really engaged with history well you know what they really like the tablet and there's all these other things going on and you think well there's a lot of moving parts here but we've looked at a few different ways of doing that we publish our research probably the end of January around the policy we've been doing in China, Korea and the US primarily and some other international markets but I think overall the qualitative feedback that we've gotten back there is an increase in engagement there is definitely a time saving for the teacher the initial fear is bigger than I thought the implementation is the single biggest challenge we have to success here but the single biggest driver of learning outcomes is going to be professional development as I mentioned by scholar earlier on all the stuff that we kind of knew to a degree is there's a few affirmations there we're learning a lot about the interactivity with the student we're learning a lot about how the teacher needs to be able to deal with this different learning environment of 30 kids with a different device and that sort of stress and the pressure that puts on the teacher so I think there's a lot more data coming out I'm very wary and you know companies like us have to come out with good data points but I am very wary when somebody says I had a 20% increase in my literacy or my maths report I just don't buy it there are different ways of measuring that but I think I'm more interested in the feedback the ongoing feedback that we have getting close to people about our roadmap helping them feed on what are the next steps for us are there any improvements in our training that kind of stuff to me is important putting a number on the improvement I think it's very difficult to believe those so in a sense we can say that in fact our success metrics maybe have to change I'll take the opposite side on this one I think when it's done right it's unquestionable and I think the example that a lot of people use in the US is more as well national superintendent a year five years digital transition five years ago we'll no longer buy textbooks they have one classroom set of AP textbooks because for the AP exam completely digital it's been a cultural shift and every metric that you can look at has been successful graduation rates from the 50% to the 90% third in academic achievement in the state of North Carolina out of 115 schools 100 out of 115 and per pupil expenditure they've reallocated resource towards content and hardware as opposed to traditional textbooks a maniacal focus on professional development I think when you look at I understand I still hate to dismiss research because I think it's still important it's still what superintendents are going to look like or educational leaders are going to look like but if you look at the examples of where people have focused on a true implementation plan moving digital professional development it does work I do think there are places I have not seen it fail when people look at a three to five year strategy and support it the right way with the right content the right access so on and so forth just a quick response I do think it works otherwise we wouldn't be doing what we're doing but the question mark I have is over some of the data points around it but it goes back and you just made the kind of point where I was going on that it's not just about the content how effective is the content how effective is the device it's the whole implementation the entire story then you can start judging the research but you can say it's because we put a device because we put great content because it's the whole experience it's the whole process you go through and it's a long process it's not something that you can just turn pretty much overnight so I completely agree with what you're saying it's more to the some of the finer data points around that because of the content or because of whatever that I have a bit of a struggle with it's not like we should disagree about something I was hoping for a rubato it's not just about the I mean just isolating content I don't think, I think it's really hard to measure content in absolute terms in terms of changing educational outcomes without considering the big picture Tony you want to jump in on this one this conversation will always lead me to some comments around assessment and I thought you'd probably want me to hold those you can go into it for about 22 minutes actually as long as we test for the content that we do and what we teach then it's fine what I'm seeing is and I have a concern about this and there are my own thoughts around this is that we've got to be very careful that we test because we're in the 21st century and we test for what we really want to know and understand about the learning that the children are doing and that we don't test what we tested 20 years ago and that's still a dilemma because governments need to be able to compare we have pizza results we have all sorts of results and they have a place and they have a purpose but as we move into a 21st century world of making sure that our students can think for that world that they are part of that world we need to find ways to be able to evaluate and assess what they're doing as well as what I would call the traditional modes of assessment I'm going to take a leap into professional development and we might come back to assessment through that discussion so we start touching on professional development earlier I think you all have agreed that it starts there and I think there's also agreement of some of the difficulty with professional development as we look at professional development and I think actually Scott in your earlier comment you said that it's not always clear right it's not always the stereotypical older more experienced teacher that's going to reject it it's not always the new college grad that's going to accept it because they're more comfortable with technology if we all agree that it starts with professional development and that really becomes a critical element to the success with this transformation in education what do we do differently because we've been doing professional development for years I mean at least three of you are focused on professional development very seriously we are as was mentioned earlier in the day Microsoft has trained 12 million teachers we've trained 12 million teachers what more do we need to do so that we actually see the acceptance the movement and then I'll bring it back to the point that you were just making Tony we then even start changing our assessments to start measuring towards that I think it's from our perspective it's the articulation of the plan and the ongoing support and so you look at different models and I'll just give you one example and so whether you work with large school systems or states or countries you have to first articulate what is that strategy to provide and build capacity within that system and what is that gradual release and that gradual release can take place over years and so you want to make sure that people feel like they're supported but at some point the organization in the system understands that this is something that they're going to own I'll give you one example of part of our professional development strategy just as kind of an example that we thought we should do this a little bit differently often times you get teachers the old style of professional development you put a trainer in front of the room you have 30 teachers in front of you just like our classrooms often times you lecture and they do a full day workshop well there are some places where that's that's okay that type of professional development as part of a much bigger plan could be okay just like a lecture in a classroom for 15 minutes might be okay but it's different all the time there are times where you bring groups together there are times where you do individual work times where you do group work so one of the things that we often saw as an issue was teachers had a really hard time going from that environment to their classroom with their kids and their curriculum and so one of the things that we designed was a push in model where our professional development specials literally take their curriculum and the resources and tools that they have other teachers watching that environment we do have conversations with the teachers beforehand we debrief afterwards but that simple idea creates a structure where people can make that connection from oh this is what it looks like with my kids and my curriculum because how many times have we heard well that's great but it's not going to work for me and so you can demystify that through a simple technique that allows you to have a much bigger implementation plan to build the skills but then also demonstrate that application as well in the classroom setting from my perspective don't teach teachers the skills stuff I think that's one of the mistakes that we make you don't have to teach teachers the word process or you don't have to teach teachers how to create a pivot table what you have to do is exactly what you would do in a classroom which is given the skills to be able to find out how to create a pivot table if you go to Google and type how do I create a pivot table it will give you the answer so from my perspective and what we're seeing in professional development it's not the skills based professional development as much as the same that is happening in our classroom which is how to think how to find information and how to interpret the data that they find Antoine you focus on professional development as well there are different types of professional development designed to achieve different objectives the main thing to consider is the same way we're discussing how to personalize content for students designing a professional development program also needs to incorporate or take into account what teachers already know and what they actually need to learn in order to be successful in implementing a specific technology in a classroom or implementing a one-to-one initiative I think that's really taking into account the skill set essentially of the teachers I definitely agree with what has been said already I met with a district last week and specifically brought this up because it's a criticism of us in the industry I think on the implementation side the industry needs to offer its gain there's a lot of PD going on for the teachers there's a lot of different stuff going on and two things struck me the first one was she kept coming back saying you need to help me with the plan and I said well that's fine but I don't want to communicate with the teachers enough when we've established what the plan is which means that they don't understand the full and real reason that you're doing it the first place so they might not understand the real value of the training and that is coming up with a value proposition why are we doing this in the first place what is the job to be done and I think if you can really work with whoever it is on the district or the schools help them understand that there is a reason that you're doing this what the next reading program or math program is going to do it's actually to help you be more effective in the classroom to drive better outcomes and guess what you might even save a bit of time you might get your weekends back there's all these kinds of messages you need to go back to the teacher it really isn't really that we need to brush up on it's probably the biggest criticism I would have of the industry and it goes back to the second point which is the industry's never been good at alliances and the other thing I was thinking well if it's not that good and I'm not that good at it but I got a great product why am I doing the PD so why do it why not give it to somebody that can actually do it better than I can and I think that's something that us as education institutions need to think about we don't need to do everything ourselves there are organizations out there that understand the communications plan that needs to be built around professional development that understand there's a broader view on how you implement these things and the service and the follow through it's not just about going out and then turning the key at the end of the two weeks and then walking away it's actually the follow through with the use of different materials the support material that come in different formats giving them access to a learning environment that two years down the road when they might be able to engage through social media that have a specific challenge around classroom management how do I deal with that you know and make that quick and accessible to the teacher they don't need to spend a lot of time they're not afraid to ask questions and all adds part to the broader story I think around PD but I think that actually leads to an interesting point because I don't know that we always talk about a sustained approach to professional development for the teachers it's more how do we get them ready for the technology coming into their classrooms rather than how do we ensure that they have all the tools and know how to access them I mean are there do you see others who are doing that well or is that still a gap as well I think it's a gap you know I think on the whole most companies have their customer's interests at heart I do think in all honesty it can be a bit of an afterthought right this promise is made there's some of the follow through doesn't happen to the extent that it should but I think you know overall it has improved I think now that you've got more you've got different types of companies in the industry now so technology companies you've got publishing companies you've got training companies and there's a lot more I think talent in that area as well that's now in the industry but I still think it's a gap I think it's something that needs to be improved on the one thing you mentioned just to call out and I mentioned it before but the articulation of the plan to the teacher I mean it's so critical because when they know that you're going to be with them through this transition there is that that peace of mind that they have whereas we do stuff to teachers all the time there are new initiatives and new programs and new things that we ask to be implemented so if you can clearly articulate that plan I think that's so critical and I would over communicative I would absolutely follow through until people are sick of the heritage but they need to know why you're doing it in the first place and what the benefit is for them there has to be a value proposition yep makes sense again I'm going to pause as we close any questions or comments specific things that we should touch on any closing comments from the panel or panelists I have a question I would love to ask sure of the folks in the room how many people are currently undergoing some sort of digital content deployment and how many people are so let's ask that first how many people are currently deploying digital content in their settings or systems how many people are considering it so the rest excellent thank you alright so a quick summary then we really brought panelists in to talk about content and I think what we heard from all of our panelists is that it's really not about the content it's about the transformation it starts with having clear goals and understanding what success looks like clearly communicating those goals and then putting a solid plan in place to get there professional development really being a key part of that and then it really is about embracing a new approach to education and using the technology to get there and the content becomes part of that and digital content we think actually provides far more flexible way to be able to achieve all of your education goals even at a local level anything that you would add to that summary or anything I got wrong alright I want to thank you each for traveling in to participate in the session today I want to thank the audience for your final session of the day of joining us for this so thank you all very much