What techniques do you use to gauge understanding from your students? How do you really know if they understand what you’ve taught? Obviously marking work is very informative, but wouldn’t it be better to have a clearer understanding as you're teaching? Whilst self-assessment methods such as thumbs up can be effective, they also suffer two main problems; peer pressure and the fact that students can be misguided in their level of understanding. Through the use of student response systems it is possible to gain a greater depth of understanding of how our students’ are really doing and what their next steps are. Now, with mobile devices becoming more commonplace in the classroom, it’s an ideal time to explore this technology. What is it? Until not too long ago, student response systems were limited, requiring expensive dedicated handsets that only allowed bas...

If you went to school around the same time as me, you may have been lucky enough to play, I mean learn, with the amazing bigtrak robot. I can clearly remember this trundling across the carpet as we used its control panel to issue instructions. Happy days. It’s fantastic that students nowadays are doing so much coding. Free programs like Scratch make it so easy for children to learn core concepts, such as selection, repetition and the use of variables, but if we don’t also provide opportunities for students to work with external hardware, they’re missing out. Whilst BeeBots, ProBots, Roamers and, indeed the bigtrak present lots of opportunities for students to code, I’m most excited by the increasing opportunities that devices like the Crumble Controller provide. If you haven’t yet read my blog about why I feel this is a great device, take a l...