Online learning systems are potentially powerful platforms to deliver effective ICT-based lessons for students. While there are many existing ‘learning management systems’, these systems are often massive collections of tools that aim to do everything, but often end up doing nothing particularly proficiently.
Teachers at Crescent Girls’ School have created Spectrum – a rapid learning content creator that allows teachers to rapidly create and deploy bite-size, impactful ‘learning experiences’ within minutes on web and mobile platforms. Spectrum enables deep learning in students, and is yet so straightforward and engaging to use by both students and teachers, that it can be used pervasively across subjects and consistently over time.
Carefully curated features within these ‘learning experiences’ such as the ability to support multi-modal resources, rapid-marking and time-based deployment functions allow teachers to deliver lessons using multiple pedagogies such as flipped learning and inquiry-based learning. Designed with the learner in mind, learning experiences in Spectrum also have gamification features such as points tracking, virtual awards and leaderboards that motivates learners to strive for better scores.
A further unique feature of Spectrum is the 21st Century Competencies Assessment Module. Based on a set of 21CC Student Assessment rubrics co-created by Crescent Girls’ School and Stanford Research Institute International (SRI International), this module empowers teachers to score and track their students’ attainment of competencies such as ‘collaboration’, ‘knowledge construction’, ‘global awareness’, ‘real-world problem solving’ etc. This powerful feature allows lessons designed using the school’s ‘21st Century Learning Design’ (21CLD) framework to be assessed for the purpose of providing clear and timely feedback to students to aid in their learning.
When used across different subjects over time, Spectrum turns into a rich data mine containing records of students’ responses and score attainment, allowing the progress of each student to be tracked for assessment and developmental purposes.
In this workshop, participants will experience the simplicity and capability of Spectrum first-hand as both students and teachers through a lesson demonstration. They will also work with other participants to design bite-size learning experiences and discover their potential as building blocks of rich 21st Century learning in students.
