 Thank you very much. So the REX project or the Research Expertise Exchange is a response to a change in the way that the teaching profession has been organized in the country. In essence in the last few years policy changes and just practice changes within the way teaching works has required teachers to become teacher researchers. That's basically adding a whole dimension of research to a profession in which there hasn't been a long history or a background. The REX is in essence a scaffold or an infrastructure to support the teachers in essence that to that transition to the research practitioner model starting with their undergraduate work but maintaining and through into their careers. So in essence one of the things that we're looking to do is to build a bridge as we call it our digital bridge between practice the domain of academic practice and the domain of teaching practice of professional activity and to take two worlds that have traditionally been rather isolated from one another and bring them into closer communication through the provision of in essence an online social network. So we started off with a series of planning workshops that were primarily based around the needs of the higher education sector and the initial teacher education courses and providers as they had transitioned to including research methods and research dissertations within programs that had up until very recently not included such activities and we also conducted a series of focus groups with stakeholders that were people who are in service teachers practicing teachers pre-service or student teachers and ITE professionals and our first response or sort of shift in the way that the project was from when it was proposed was in having to broaden our notion of the kinds of research that recs would support. Initially our focus was on the new research projects that have been introduced into these undergraduate programs as well as formal research methods modules but what we realized was a large amount of the research that teachers engage in schools and also that students engage in as they go through their undergraduate studies is less formal it's more research engagement and critical review of literature and so on. So and is also more directed to specific questions that arise in the classroom so what we have done is the infrastructure in fact remains the same as we'll see but the way it's been deployed and the kinds of modules within undergraduate programs where it has been deployed is much broader than our initial proposal. The bulk of the technology development is the development of a set of resources that are generic in how they operate but are basically being deployed specifically within the domain of teaching practice and teaching initial teacher education. We developed a social network based on the open source word press and body press system. It works more or less as every other social you can sort of it looks familiar as soon as you look at it and once people log in it works in a very familiar fashion. We developed a set of collaboration tools which are in essence a means by which the small groups of individuals can speak privately amongst themselves so whereas the social network is essentially a public conversation people can create private groups and speak amongst themselves, share resources, have shared calendars and the other kinds of things that you might need in order to run a project. In order to support the enrichment of the culture of research amongst teachers and to support students through their own research activity we developed a set of educational research resources which I'll talk about a little bit more in a minute and in another change to the initial proposal that was based on immediate feedback from students. We had to shift to identifying and developing the mobile app. In essence as soon as we brought the social network to the students and started showing it to them they sort of yes this is all very nice but where's the app. It wasn't part of our initial plan but we have the Google app or the Android app is now available in the Google store and the iPhone app will be ready in about a week or two. We'll see. So a host of the content that is developed in support of the project, a large part of our initial content development was actually based on information support materials. For the REX project the exchange is the exchange between the users, the professional teachers who can bring their expertise and their experience to help the experience of the students. The students who have time and indeed are under pressure to engage in certain kinds of research activity and higher education professionals who can bring a certain amount of research experience and knowledge of research methods that might not be as prevalent in the in-practice profession. So the people are the content, the network is the content. But what we want to make sure is that when people come to the site they can use it. We use a very generic design so it looks and acts like Facebook or Twitter but also we developed a series of podcasts and video screen casts and so on and support materials to allow users to use the site. But we've also developed a set of resources that are about supporting and encouraging people through a research project. And this was done through the conduct of interviews with actual teachers who had completed research whether as part of their BED or our MN programs that was all in formal study in these initial set of interviews. And on these interviews are broken down into short videos of less than four minutes each for eight different stages of a research project and then associated with each video are a set of curated or created resources that are targeted to help a researcher through that particular stage of the research project. For those of you who have the sort of the, it's a bit of an Irish reference but it's basically sort of operation transformation for student research. A large amount of our time though was spent going out there and making sure that the teachers who were going to be the hardest to get hold of were got hold of and the users brought onto the site. So we started with presentations to the schools of education and faculty within the partner institutions, Mary Macalick College, University of Limerick and National University of Ireland Galway. But we went further afield then to do exhibitions and presentations to, for example, the National Institute for Studies and Education, the Teaching Council's Research Engagement Group who are the national accrediting bodies research engagement sort of drivers for teachers in practice. FAILTA is a large festival of excellence in learning and teaching and education. We spend a day exhibiting there and regional teaching centres have annual research days. Two of those happened in the autumn so we were able to get hold of both of them. Kildare and Dublin Regional Teacher Centre and the Waterford, Kilkenny, Carlow and also the Professional Development Service for teachers their annual research day was just before Christmas. So the uptake and enthusiasm for the program from these events was very positive. And we've also engaged in some social media campaigns using hashtags such as rec support or ask it on recsways to let people know that recs exists and also to make it clear what the kind of thing that it can be used for. Within the institutions then for both staff and students we have a series of user support materials which I've already mentioned. We developed a set of supervisor training sessions so that supervisors can supervise groups of students online while the students are in school placement on off campus. And again just to sort of enrich that notion of collaborative researching which is vital to the way that recs works. It's about changing research for being seen as something that an isolated individual might do by candlelight as it were and making it a collaborative activity by default in a series of student training workshops. So has this worked? Do we have members? Well as of this morning, so this is the last scramble to update these numbers just before we start the presentation here, we have a total of 604 active members on the site. We don't have a required identification of professional background as part of the profile. We're trying to basically collect as limited information as possible for privacy and just sort of good health reasons. But of those 604 we have 331 students, 62 registered teachers, 66 higher education professionals. Is there any hope of national impact amongst the teaching professional on the basis of this? Well you might expect. Our logins might come from the places where the partner institutions are based but over the past several months we've had logins and user registrations from across pretty much the entire country. Now you may be sort of critically thinking, well Maric did you just send your students home with the weekend and tell them to log in from home? And we didn't tell them to do that explicitly but do our affiliations, our members only affiliated with the partner institutions? Well you might expect, as you might expect, we have users from the three partners but within the higher education sector we also have a number of users from across the range of institutions. We've spoke explicitly to the teaching council and professional development service for teachers so we're kind of not surprised to get those on board but we also have users from a wide range of professional bodies and of course this only works if the teachers come. So this is just a sort of a sampling of the kinds of primary schools and secondary schools that teachers have identified themselves as being affiliated with. So in terms of active project on REX and again these numbers are accurate as of this morning. There's sort of a range of different types of projects so you can see the pre-service teacher that's our student teachers, 50 active projects that students who have formed their own groups and are collaborating now rather than working individually. The sort of most interesting ones though are these three at the bottom where we have groups that involve someone from the higher education sector as well as someone from the in practice registered teacher sector. So we have that digital bridge, we've at least proof of concept and we have a base up on which we can grow and evolve from that. So for some aspects of the the way in which it's been deployed in undergraduate teaching as well as some evaluation of the project we'll hand over to Marie Ryan. Okay so I suppose some of those projects that Mary mentioned there some of those actually sort of grew organically from members meeting each other on the site but actually the majority of them resulted from a concerted effort from across the three institutions to actually embed REX into our initial teacher education programs and to try and exploit the potential of REX to transform teaching, learning and assessment. And we've done this sort of in two key ways. I suppose the first way is in relation to the dissertation modules and Mary spoke about that so I'm not going to go into too much detail in that but we have online supervision going on and we also have collaborative groups set up for students to engage in thematic projects and around thematic issues. But I suppose what we're really most excited about is the case studies that we've engaged in across the institutions which actually are designed to build that bridge. So these have been led by each of the partners and each of the leaders within each institution and we've looked across a range of subjects. I'm going to talk it through an example of what this concept is about. So it begins with basically designating research teams within modules. So module leaders identify a number of research topics and they designate research teams. The students then set up collaborative groups using the RECS platform. So that's very straightforward so far. But I suppose the big thing and the test of concept is the and the piece that we're bringing together is they need to identify a practitioner partner i.e a teacher who is also interested in that topic. So this is the test of concept and here's proof of concept because this is a group who actually were investigating cyberbullying, went on, found a teacher who indicated yeah I'm really interested in cyberbullying and invited them to join the project and there they are they were about proof of concept. So that was a very exciting moment when that message came through. I suppose the big thing then is do they collaborate and I think this is a lovely example of a teacher sharing their own experience of it's actually individual reward systems in the classroom and how that has worked for her the challenges that she's experienced and the questions she has. So the idea is that the group works with the teacher to formulate a question to actually define a question that they answer then ultimately either in a together sort of working on it together or maybe that the students would take a lead role in that but the big thing is that really we're talking about an authentic piece of assessment here. They're not just student assessment for the sake they're not just research and something for an exam there's a real purpose here they're answering a real life question and the students are hugely motivated and engaged by this process. So okay so we're working really hard and we're engaging in a lot of evaluation as part of that process as well and we've engaged in a range of different data gathering processes. The first thing that we did and one of the first things that we did was administer the student system usability survey which is a very widespread evaluation tool of websites and actually when we looked at it we saw that Rick was doing really good he was doing good it was it's not best imaginable yet but you know we still have a next phase of development forthcoming so we're hoping to improve that we will be best imaginable eventually but we're not there yet. We also have I suppose recognized that through a gathering the feedback through gathering feedback there are a number of barriers we wanted to figure out why aren't people actually engaging to a greater degree we're happy with how things are going but how can we make it better what's actually stopping people. We were delighted to find the biggest thing was actually the app the app for the iPhone like that was came up over and over and over again when we actually did that survey on example of over 40 users but we had that in line as Marek said a few tweaks to the site in terms of functionality was also an issue but I suppose looking at it as a team and looking at the bigger picture the biggest thing that was sort of concerning us was that we originally set out that this would be sort of a meeting place that people would bump into each other of similar interests essentially as well I'm going to use the analogy of going to a disco we're bringing everybody to the disco we want people to sort of meet up and what the difficulty was they came to the disco but there wasn't much dancing going on so there was a bit of lack of activity at certain times and that was sort of down in many regards to the nature of the academic semester because you know when everybody goes home for Christmas the music shuts down and people sort of are leaving so that's a bit of a difficulty we needed to delve a little bit more into this and to analyse this and what we actually found was we asked people about their levels of comfort in terms of posting to rex we found that the people who were most comfortable out on the dance floor were higher education professionals not surprising about that and then when we dealt even further deep into that what we sort of found was people sort of felt okay i'm not sure i know the dance moves here you know i'm not really sure how do i know what i'm supposed to be speaking about other people sort of felt yeah okay the music is a little bit formal it's all waltzes here and sometimes you need a bit of abba you know so that we can all sort of join in so that was a bit of a difficulty for some people there and as well as that i suppose people felt you know god those people who are out there they all seem to know each other you know they're all from maria you're from you and i'm not so sure i feel comfortable out there dancing with with with those people and so so we needed to look at that as well so we're thinking about that with plans for that which i'll talk to you about in a second but there's good things too and there's feedback has been hugely positive in terms of networking potential in particular of rex and those people who have found each other all those active groups that you saw have loved the fact that they have found each other that they're finding ways to engage and interact with others another big thing that came back from students is that they've got a safe space now to actually engage collaboratively and projects without as this person says all the distractions and rubbish on facebook they can keep focused and have that safe space for interaction and people are enjoying sharing the knowledge so there's a lot of really good things but we i know i'll just keep going with this one and these and the networking collaboration user engagement and technically those are the things that we need to continue to work on so i suppose we've identified that we are doing really well in some areas and we need to build on other areas what worked first was the sort of structured approaches to bringing people together what didn't work so well was the bumping into each other but our model that we presented isn't really going to work in the long term because it's going to have a threshold level because we're going to have too many students and not enough teachers and higher ed professionals if there are other issues you can probably address in the future okay just throw up the last line okay but this is just this one yeah there we go that yeah yeah no worries yeah perfect