Hello everyone, Ross here at Teacher Toolkit. Thank you for joining me. You're in for a treat today. I am joined by some fascinating people and some brilliant minds talking about the future of assessment here in England. So just to make sure you're in the right place, you'll have signed up through Pupil Progress for the future of assessment with my good self and esteemed guests just to make sure you know what you're doing in terms of receiving the content on the other side. You can watch this live and participate with us. So whatever platform that you're logged into, whether it's YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter, you can leave a live comment and we'll display your questions on the screen as we go through. So just to see that I am not alone, I can see quite a few of you already logged in. You can leave a comment now. So this is your one chance for me to give your town, city, or village a shout out to the World Wide Web. So say hello, let me know where you're watching from and I'll make one or two comments shortly. So we're gonna discuss big questions in a short period of time. So first one we're gonna look at is student individuality and standardized testing some kind of alternative ideas. Other topics also include making the data meaningful, using data to uncover gaps, how to make data actionable and technology and assessment given the current explosion with artificial intelligence. So what I'm gonna do shortly is bring in our guests but I'm just gonna start to do a few shout outs. So this is what it's gonna look like. So I can say hello to Sharon from Peterborough. I was passing your way the other day on my way down to Cambridge actually. So thank you for joining us. Allie from Qatar. So a true international event. I've got our fellow West Yorkshire Zoe here in Halifax, I'm trying not to show my Yorkshire bias here having left London after 30 years. Zara in the UAE, we've got lots and lots of people. So let's just say hello here from London, Salah in Morocco and Lisa in Bolton. So really everyone, so keep them coming and particularly your questions that I can pose to our guests. I'll do one more. We have Manjita from Nepal, fantastic. So thank you everybody. Thank you for joining us. The next 40 minutes, we're gonna go through lots of big questions. So what I'm gonna do is bring in our guests one at a time to begin with. I'm gonna start with ladies first. So I'm gonna ask Nadine Bernard to come and join me first. Nadine is a head teacher and executive coach and Nadine is the founder of us to buy her in heads. Nadine, how are you? I am well, thank you. Thank you for inviting me. It's great to be here. No, thank you. I don't often like to spotlight. Yeah, it's been, you know, we haven't caught up for a couple of years. Have we since we last met at the event it's been amazing to see some of the amazing work that you do. Tell us quickly about aspiring heads. Yeah, so aspiring heads is a community interest company here to tackle racial inequality in education. And we've been working with a number of aspiring leaders to support them on their journey. And if anyone wants to find out more, please visit our website. Great, and it's very busy. So thank you, Nadine, for joining us. I'll come back to you with some questions in a moment. I'm gonna head over now and ask Bobby to join me now. Bobby is, well, he is a celebrity. So let's not just pretend. Now, Bobby's one of my doctoral mates. Bobby, how are you? I'm really good. Thank you. Funny enough, in my secondary school, they're not allowed to use the C word. Right, okay. They can say, Mr. Siegel has profile if I'm feeling particularly excited on a really exciting show. They can say, Mr. Siegel has reasonable or substantial profile, but that's what they're allowed to say. Right, okay. That's a good way to do it. So reasonable profile, I quite like. And for people that need to know, Bobby is a big West Ham fan. So if you're not familiar with West Ham, they are, they're a good, they're about an okay season, haven't they, to be fair, haven't they?  So that's, again, a maths teacher, a prime number. Always trying to find. Yeah, we're gonna ask mathematical quizzes as we go through. And obviously we'll pick your brains for lots of assessment information too. So Bobby, thank you for joining me. I'll come back to you in a second. I'm gonna head over to Brett now. So Brett, former PE teacher and founder of Pupil Progress. But Brett, how are you? Yeah, very well, thanks. Excited, given the guests we've got. That's a 30 second synopsis. What's Pupil Progress? So Pupil Progress is a track and a monitoring software. So it allows teachers to actually calculate the grade exactly as the exam board does. So teachers have got a real time picture of what they need to work on and why. Most importantly informs their teaching and learning, informs their planning and their strategic action. Now, and I'll push you a little bit further. Pupil Progress was founded as a result you're trying to resolve your own PE needs, wasn't it? Yeah, correct. So I was a former teacher as a teacher for just short of 12 years. I was an assistant principal as well. Just a really tough task in actually trying to ascertain where students are given the pressures, you know what we're going to hopefully discuss today is given the pressures of students meeting and reaching their minimum target grades, how are they actually performing in real time for me to know what I need to do. That was a system that I created in school and as a result, other schools wanted to use it. And then that encouraged me and gave me the confidence to come out of teaching to get it into more schools, more subject areas and more qualifications. And I believe what we talked about, 633 schools now, so quite a substantial number. Yeah, we've got quite a lot of schools using us. Majority in England and the UK, but we've got some international schools that have started to use us now as well because people are, you know, going to teach out in the UAE and other countries. So it's a particularly exciting time, I've got to be honest. Well, I'll be keen to pick your brains on, I guess that all that data you manage for schools that are kind of macro level, you'll have some fascinating insights. Thank you, Brett, I'll be back with you shortly. I'm going to bring in Matt Tide. So Matt's a former PE teacher and a student-facing counselling expert. I hope that's a fair description, Matt. Matt, how are you? Nice to meet you. I'm well, thanks, Ross. Welcome to Devon. Yeah, and give us a little synopsis for your day-to-day life. Well, I go professionally, I'm a dad of three, so I wouldn't want to go into that too deeply. OK. Professionally, apparently, I'm a humanistic psychotherapist. Right. As a former PE teacher of 20 years' experience, I try and take all the long words out of everything that I do, and I like to have a chat with Matt. OK, I love it. I do counselling in schools, workplaces, yeah, and just the clients from 8 to 80 on a number of topics, but with the education background, it's quite nice to do some stuff in schools. Yeah, so I guess you'll have a lot of fascinating things to tell us about, you know, how students perceive their data through those counselling conversations, those chats that you have, which are super important. So thank you, Matt, for joining us. I'll be back with you shortly. And then finally, I'm going to introduce Cameron Parker. Cameron, I haven't seen you for a couple of years. How are you doing? I'm great, mate. How are you? Yeah, it's good to see you. What have you been up to since we last spoke? So I kind of hate the term, I guess, motivational speaker, because that's how it was all built. But, you know, with a one-off talk, it's hard to measure the impact. So kind of what I do now on a daily basis is I run a high-end program, within schools, mainly focused on pupil premium students supporting the school on closing the attainment gap. So in the program, we try and measure everything from behaviour, obviously attendance, all those common things there, including the soft data element of it, the wellbeing, the English, all of it. So pretty much when I go into schools up and down the UK, so I'm in Manchester tomorrow, I'm in Newcastle on Friday, and I'm also based in Bristol. So I'm in schools doing it absolutely everywhere. And yeah, that's what I'm passionate about is just all about impact nowadays, Ross.  So I'll be back with you shortly, Cam. Thanks for joining us, and I look forward to seeing you. So I'm going to bring everyone back in in a moment. I've got an admin team helping me behind the scenes. Manage all your comments in the chat box. So whether you're watching in Nepal, Japan, Liverpool, Manchester, Morocco, wherever it is. Thank you so much. So we've got five big questions with lots of kind of ad hoc as we go through. And I'm going to try and true presenter style bring in all our guests about now. And if I ask us all to kind of maybe throw in some comments here and there, but I'll try and chive you along in terms of an alphabetical rhythm to try and make things a little bit manageable for us all. So our first kind of theme everybody is we're going to look at, you know, think about standardized testing from an individual point of view for a student, you know, the use of standardized tests to measure student efficiency. We know is important. It's a major topic, but I guess critics argue that to stand, you know, standardized tests maybe sometimes might not be an accurate measure of students learning and can lead to as all kind of teaching to the test. So the key question I've got for us all is what are the alternatives to standard testing, particularly when we think about diversity, inclusion, those types of things. And Nadine, I'm going to come to you first. What are your immediate thoughts? You might have to unmute yourself. I think there we go. Hi. What's that me? Yeah. So what are your thoughts, Nadine, on the alternative standardized testing? Yeah. So I definitely think standardized testing has a purpose. However, we know of everything has this limitations. And I know personally, I was that child who was rubbish in tests. Made me nervous, made me sweat.  And so I walked out of that room and I was thinking, oh my gosh, I've got that and so forth. So I think I was never able to show my best self in those tests that then produce those, you know, standard testing. So I think things such as, you know, authentic assessments, I think are a very, very powerful tool. Something, a way of assessing pupils that are, it's a natural way of assessing in EYFES early years. You know, when you have those portfolios, being able to give children a range of opportunities and experiences and give them that opportunity to demonstrate their learning, to apply their learning. And I think there is so much power in that because it allows creativity and a range of skills and knowledge that you can then assess. And in terms of, you know, alternative solutions that you might be trying in your own school, you're doing the things that aren't necessarily, I'm sure you're doing lots of things that aren't necessarily reported at a national level. Any suggestions for people watching? Yeah. And so we've introduced the idea of the pot of gold activity. So we think about the arc of the learning. So we're very, very clear on the learning objective, what is it we want the children to, what skills and knowledge we want the children to achieve over a period of time. And then at the end of it, what is it we want them to be able to do with those knowledge and skills? So what experience do we want them to have in order to showcase that learning? So for example, I know one of my teachers did a lesson around length and perimeter. So we're currently developing our garden. And so the idea, the pot of gold activity was for them to work out the measurements for certain plots that we needed. And actually it was real life application because we do actually need to know the size. So that's in its own form. And we use that across a lot of our foundational subjects. Sure. I love that expression pot of gold. Thank you, Nadine. Bobby, as a mathematician, you know, numbers is obviously your world and it's super important. But we know that we need to test in and standardization to a degree. Can I push you for any new ideas on your alternatives to the current model we use? So like looking at from a statistical perspective, the way generally examinations at UK at 16 and I guess at 18 as well are done. They're sort of norm reference. So the traditional bell curve and for mathematics and I think our subjects English as well, it roughly is historically one third on the bell curve. The bottom one third will fail every single year. So as a nation, we have one third of people that leave entering into the workplace thinking that they can't do maths, they can't do numeracy. And again, all the negative impacts there again, trying to do with money, trying to understand your bank balance, budgeting statements, all those things there. And how do we try to overcome that? Because again, that's the nature of standardized testing where you will say X amount will fail. And I'm going to speak with the hat of, I'm an ambassador for a charity called National Numeracy. And what they try and do is work with government, organizations, communities to try to improve the state of numeracy in the UK. And instead of looking at, again, they say, obviously, GCSEs, there are purposes because again, it gives sort of a credential so people to move on to the next stage of exams, but they have something called a national numeracy challenge. And essentially what it is, it's similar to like, let's say for a driving test, driving tests in the UK, people will do a theory test and a practical test. They're not bell curve reference. Essentially they are. If you meet the certain set of standards to be deemed a competent driver, then you get the certificate. So again, in some years you might get very high pass rates, in other years low pass rates. Whereas with school examinations, it's literally just, here's the bell curve, let's make the bottom third fail. So I think if we're thinking about alternatives to examination systems, it should be less reference to the bell curve and more reference to how people met the standard required to progress. So I think it's, again, there's a stigma of failure, something that can be very damaging for children with the current, yes, one third of mass, the rest pass and others fail. So you use the analogy of the driving test. I used to maybe use the analogy of the scout or girl going to help.  Brett, can I bring you in here? What would you say your alternatives to the standardized system from your experiences running pupil progress? Well, I mean, it's actually interesting because I've been making some notes here about the direction of conversation. It's not necessary to do with pupil progress, but I think about my daughter and she's obviously now in that place of finishing her first year of A level and going on to second year A level and she's actually trying to work out what do I want to do. And my question that evokes with me is, how are we assessing and actually testing students that prepare them for an actual career or moving forward with their life past the school? And if I think about what some of the other countries and I'm going to ban them because I know it's obviously a short period of time, but a lot of the Nordic countries are testing project-based learning where we can actually start to assess. Well, Barack Obama, I watched a short video of his the other day. Are we teaching people how to just to get things done, manage a project within that project, be able to deliver, be able to organize themselves, core life skills that are just being kind of almost ignored because we've got a national picture that we need to present that we're very good at English and good at maths. So it's actually, I suppose the question for me is what are we doing to actually prepare young people to go into work and can we create an environment where we can enhance potentially the apprenticeships, the vocational side where we, someone like myself, I'm in Nadine's town, I was really, for me, GCSEs was a major problem-solving exercise and I've later found out at the age of 33, I was actually quite severely deflexed. So I'm not quite sure how exams served me other than to problem-solve that, to get through that and go to the next stage.  A little technical request from me, can I ask you to meet your microphones, everybody? Just a little bit of feedback from us, just cautious that we're more upset with people listening in. Matt, can I bring you in here?  That question again, alternatives to assessment, what are your immediate thoughts? Immediate thoughts. So as long as we've got a GCSE or an A-level system where we're asking kids to regurgitate knowledge via a syllabus, the only way you can assess them is a standardized test. But I'll go with what Brett was saying about the Scandinavian topic-based learning. I think we've got to be brave as a country to just maybe tear the rule book up. I'm really quite thankful that the guys that are going to be doing my hip and my knee operations a little bit later in life actually know the proverbial from their elbow and I think they're the right kids to be doing that. But if we go from the topic-based learning, I think all of a sudden, rather than just learning about how much we know about something, maybe if we do group work, kids are working out whether they're leaders or followers or maybe kids are working out, well, don't put me in charge of the fact finding, but I'll deliver a brilliant presentation for you because I've got the gift of the gab and confidence to present where your textbook professor may well be licking the print off of all the research and all of the quotes that they can possibly find.  So all of a sudden, are we able to take away this topic and this knowledge-based assessment and maybe put a humanistic strand into what our strengths and weaknesses are? On the topic of presentations, Cameron obviously does this as their job. So it's a good opportunity to bring Cameron here. Based on what Matt said there, Cameron, did school prepare you to do your presentations or would that get into the history of how you got into this? Hello. How has school prepared you for that experience and what was your own diet from the assessment point of view? Were you in Brett's camp and Nadine's camp, my camp in terms of the sharp edge of the wedge for the GCSEs? Working with teenagers up and down the UK, just in general, and working in the workshops that I'm working with, I'm going to chuck a very cliche line out there and it's the Albert Einstein one.  And for me, I am dyslexic, struggled through school, also ADHD, so I was medicated whilst I was going through school and I know what I went through to be able to, just to come out the other end, and yes, some exams do have a knock on your confidence and when I was in year 11, and this is a common thing in my sessions, is I live with my grandmother, my grandmother passed away, then I had to focus on getting into school, attendance and stuff like this. I don't know what the solution is because there's a lot more smarter people in the room than me at the moment, but all I know is in the space of even year 11 or year 10, a lot of things can happen in the life of the teenagers that we work with. So if you're just relying, you know, 90 minutes, 11 years comes down to 90 minutes, it doesn't sit right with me. You can do all the revision in the world, turn up to all the intervention clubs you can think of, but you can just get the flu on a day, or you might not have slept very well that night, and it can have an impact on the results, and sometimes that's life and sometimes we have to be able to show an element of resilience and get through it and do what was asked of us because I'm a great believer in doing the things that we don't want to do sometimes, and that's discipline, but I do think what Matt was saying at some point we're going to have to have a look at all of this and maybe look for different options and different solutions out there which would challenge everybody. You mentioned a good point because if you look at the statistics on ADHD pupils here in England, you have diagnosed ADHD you're a hundred times more likely to be excluded and if you think about all those vulnerable children or children with our digital learning needs this standardized model you can see we've got quite a big headache still to fix. Right, I'm going to chivy the conversation along, so thank you for that, that's the big question for us all, what is the alternative? For people watching live, comments I can see already coming in, so we'll display one or two here as we go through, there's one just on the screen there. So I'm going to come to the next question and we're going to talk here next about making data meaningful in terms of how can we authentically assess alternatives? So a key question I want to pose to our guests now is can teachers be supported to develop authentic assessment and what might that look like?  You need to unmute yourself, Matt. Yeah, I'm really thankful for Brett for inviting me along here because Brett would use me as a former data hater, so it's quite a brave introduction for me but I think it's a blended process because having the stats and having the information on how well a student is performing in a lesson on a breakdown is massively important because it gives the subjects the meaning and also gives the conversation that you might have with a student meaning, but it's not just how many percent they are away from a grade boundary it's not just how close they are to getting that A or that nine or whatever it is these days it's more so that arm around conversation that you had about it is this worthwhile for you? Is this a significant conversation? Is this a significant subject for you? Do you need it? I think when you bounce the question back to do the students need the conversation I think you'll get your answer there because some kids will just simply say I don't need this, sir, for what I need I don't need geography and it's harsh on those non-core subjects because kids are getting strategic on what they are putting their efforts into and that's not based on a kid just sacking a subject off it's a streamline in their efforts into what they specifically need to get to the next level and I think those authentic conversations that kids are having on the way back as opposed to our conversations towards them are really informing their effort levels or their interest or the significance of what we're trying to achieve with them simply by whether they need it or not and that's not in a selfish way that's just in a strategic revision sort of way. You make a really valid point Matt, my son's just started year seven and as a teacher for 25 years he's experienced from primary to secondary and his experiences and conclusions of each day and each subjects there's some subjects that are winning but a good half of them are starting to eat away at my soul because he's starting to see aspects of things that he doesn't like so it's quite painful to watch sadly. Nadine can I bring you in here you mentioned the pot of gold earlier and there's clearly a great example. How do you support your teachers to do that? Yeah so I think with anything like that there's always that aspect of quality showering, training and so forth so it's great to know opportunities for collaborative learning for sharing ideas it's really important as well that we can share resources so we're very fortunate to be part of a trust and so creating those opportunities to network across the trust the number of schools is really really helpful and I am thankful that the trust provides those opportunities and I think just yes it's those professional dialogues and creating time for that to happen not just yes it can just happen authentically I'm really fortunate because I've got really strong kind of family ethos, supportive ethos in my school but actually sectioning out time for teachers to have those conversations and to share ideas and so forth are really really key in order to support teachers with knowing what's possible So time is key we'll all know people that have worked in the education sector Bobby can I bring you in here thank you Nadine Bobby so authenticism assessment time any kind of solutions that you see I guess on your kind of teacher training in type travels that you do what nuggets of gold have you seen on your travels of people doing authentic assessment really well and battling with that time pressure we all face as teachers and unmute yourself here sir even with your high profile yeah that helps so what I've seen in visiting schools on my own school as a teacher is schools some schools including my own what we're trying to do is trying to tackle this concept of student compartmentalisation so again I speak from a maths perspective students will learn about how to plot a graph in maths then they'll go to science or geography or another subject of PE and then when they introduce the graphs in that lesson they'll be saying oh my god I've never seen graphs before or they'll forget where to plot things so I think students they maybe just a human feature they'll say in a maths lesson think oh this is maths and now when they leave the lesson everything for maths is forgotten and again they're in a geography lesson and they'll say oh I have a geography brain now so what we've been trying in our school is when we're thinking about assessments and it gets early stages so we haven't got any results to show for it yet but we're trying to think when we're teaching science or teaching PE or teaching geography what are the commonalities then again I speak from a maths perspective again one thing is students need to understand data and how to plot graphs and how to interpret it we're trying to see when we do assessments again in let's say looking at graphs how can we enline the way in which we teach and assess drawing graphs and interpreting graphs across the different subjects because I feel as if you're trying to make learning something that's across the curriculum you need to make sure that students are not being like almost like what's an animal that pokes his head in an ostrich or an animal that pokes his head into one subject oh I'm in a maths lesson and they go to another subject oh I'm in PE now but actually when people or students enter the real world no one ever says oh use your maths brain use your English brain they just want you to think and come up with a solution so the same way teaching should be more linked up and joined together absolutely and you know that kind of approach to that whole overview I guess is something that we've still got quite a bit of work to do here in England Cam can I bring you in here the things that you see I know a particular role that you do with skills in particular can you come across any skills that are doing assessment really well um firstly I just want to say what Bobby just mentioned I think is absolutely key and that's one form of where I try and get the students motivated especially for year 11 is I try and get you know I normally ask what does a car mechanic need to fix a car they always say tools I say okay the same way can it use tools to fix a car to get the job done is the same way you can use school as a tool to get you to where you want to get to um so for me what Bobby was just saying then and actually not putting your maths brain on English or science brain and actually um thinking about the overall picture I think will result in better outcomes long term because I feel like um sometimes depending on what schools I go into and obviously I'm not going to mention names sometimes there's a massive massive divide and it's very it's very difficult for the students to think outside of those individual boxes um as far as this collection data collection there's some schools I go to which are all over it um and they also can provide me with certain data you know you got effort you got you got a wide range of different data then you got other schools who um may not be investing as much time in it apart from the normal behaviour and attendance um I don't know enough about the inside outside what you do um but one thing that I do when I go into a school is I do look at a lot of the data and that is very handy for me to create a direction um because most of the time we don't know the end destination we think we do but what is the direction to actually get there um and that's really why I used a lot of the data which is provided for me but as far as individual subjects I mean you guys are you guys are the ones I was at a training event the other week and I think you know one thing that I tend to do is get the data that people in front of me that not data from the actual adults but who's in the room not as a teacher but say with student data to allow you to develop and lead a more engaging session um I guess the key thing from assessment is it shouldn't tell us things we already know but tell us where our teachers and how we can make our interventions more targeted one of my favourite phrases is there's a road to Mecca we can go down the M25 we can take a a boat from Dover all the way around to Riyadh or we can fly directly from Heathrow so you know we've got the written the summative the formative assessment this is the next topic I'd like to switch to is the formative many teachers will use the words mark in or feedback but you know there's other words such as feed up and feed forward which are different types of formative assessment so a very simple question for this topic I'm going to really push things forward a little bit more and what formative assessment strategies have you found to be most effective so Matt if I come to you first in your experiences again chatting with students on the front line what great practices have you seen how formative assessment is used to meet the needs of that individual student so they feel like being listened to at least and I'll meet yourself again Matt don't forget to I'll meet yourself everybody yeah it's a good point raised Ross I think we need to look at it not just from the pupil point of view of informing them how close they are to grade boundaries or how far off they are what they can do to achieve to get to the next level I think we need to look at it in terms of who's it for is it to inform the kids or is it to form us in terms of how our teaching is we used to use a tracking model way back in the day just a simple very very simple traffic light in red amber green whether you're above that or below your target grade and if you went across the class list you'd be able to see an individual kids attempt at every exam that they sat but also if you flick that vertically you'd be able to see how well a test was taught so all of a sudden you had sort of a kid that was green and red and yellow and all that going across but all of a sudden there was a bit across the top and every kid was red going down every kid that sat that exam was red that that formative assessment informed me that I must have had an absolute shocker during that lesson and they didn't get it all of a sudden that formative assessment stuff from what I'm hearing on the ground now isn't just about us telling the kids how good they are it's all about the teachers actually getting a gist from the kids about how good that particular part of the course was and I think if everybody is in this process together that informs not just the learning but it also informs how good the teaching is I think maybe you've got a more authentic assessment where people are actually talking two ways rather than this is just a one way conversation about how much the kid has to do to improve for grade level they are the kids could actually in this I think this is the trigger stuff for some stuff that I talked to as well a kid talking back about them not getting it because it wasn't taught very well doesn't it's not necessarily a slur how brave and how resilient are we as educators to go maybe you've got a point maybe I need to teach that again in a different way I think more and more it can be used in schools departments individually as a two way process I think you have a better quality conversation a more a qualitative conversation rather than a quantitative conversation and I guess from that perspective you know looking at that authentic assessment then if Brett can I bring you in here I can get all the data and as Matt has mentioned you get all the data and then you can see which kids have done really well in a test or a question or not how do you see teachers using that software because you know all of us have used lots of different bits of software in our careers and we get back to that word and Dean mentioned early time I need it to give me what I need to do next how does your software help teachers what do you hear from your schools in terms of this data now gives us this formative assessment intervention information that we need and what can you share with us yeah I mean just as a brief step back as well sadly we can't the education system is the way it is and everyone's can ironically as someone that started pupil progress and there's a data tracking tool which is going to tell you exactly what grade students are working at I still firmly believe that there's a difficult point that teachers have got is marrying the skills that require so I'll always turn around and say look we need to make sure it is exam board specific to support the students in a system that can't change and what that system will do is it will allow you to actually see where are the quick wins and we can come away from potentially grade boundaries and actually say well which topic areas which sub-sub topic areas which skills so we're actually working with a number of schools now where we're really supporting how have you got that question wrong not just in the fact that you did get that question wrong or maybe you only achieved 5 marks out of an available 10 how have you done that is it a gap in knowledge is it a gap in skill is it a gap in the application of that knowledge so you can see that from our system because it's just highlighted very clearly well the breakdown of the courses X is why I was talking about the exam board specific requirements again I completely agree we can't just always just talk about grades however the students do need to be able to pass those exams because they are in a system that we cannot change as much as we'd love to and I'm not suggesting anyone's on their soap box it's just unfortunately we have to make sure that students are acutely aware of what exam board requirements are needed to pass that test to get accepted into the college they want to go to to get accepted into university they want to go to and until that system is changed and reformed and hopefully we're starting to see the birth of it which we want to really be at the forefront of too unfortunately we've got to be really specific about what they do and don't need and this is exactly why we created the system so that teachers can see exactly what they need in order to meet those requirements and here lies the bigger challenge we've all got is trying to how do we offer a genuine alternative to the current model that we have that meets everybody's needs Nadine and Bobby I'm going to bring you both in here could you give us a really pragmatic formative assessment tool that you can use reliably or your teachers do that really makes a difference to that formative feedback that students receive so you've got a particular methodology or a strategy that you use Bobby I'll come to you first I'm trying to think in terms of when I first started teaching about nine and a half years ago and now so nine and a half years ago the routine was I remember we'd set work for students a math piece or homework if we were super quick we'd mark it in a few days usually it might take a week and we would give the feedback to students a week later and again the students they're enthusiastic I can't remember so the feedback was not timely what's happened in the last three four years and again pandemic is accelerated somewhat is the use of tech and what I found is that again I can't speak for all subjects mathematics it's the real time feedback that makes a significant difference because the way I think of students is almost like they're like a little machine they're going progressing learning the more real time feedback can give them the more they can correct and again I use various online quizzes things like Kahoot so in the lesson again we might be looking at Pythagoras theorem and then maybe halfway through a quick little assessment three minute test and then I can see how has the class understood where the areas of weakness so I think it's again this is where tech will play a part and again subjects like the arts and English it might be a bit more different but in the things like the maths and the scientists where there are correct answers or incorrect answers it's more about students benefit from regular and often feedback in you know on a particular topic and I think that's where we do the real time feedback concept. Sure and Nadine in early years in the primary context I will assume it's the same and more beneficial for teacher workload as well as for pupils what are your thoughts on a practical strategy that you use in primary? Again I'll use the word time timely I definitely completely agree with what's been said previously with Bobby and Matt but it's yes that timely feedback and it's the here and now is absolutely imperative there are things such as we use mind maps so not anything mind blowing you know you've all heard of this before but it's just that opportunity for them to be able to recap what they previously learned or to think about retrieve the knowledge or even to go back and use it as a resource tool to support them with thinking about what they do need to do next and I think it is just really important that dialogue that ongoing dialogue with the children is absolutely key for every child and one key thing that we have done is get away from the whole idea of marking books that whole idea of marking every piece of work is it absolutely necessary is it timely is it there it's one way it's not the way yes right so it's more about the dialogue that's really really important and making sure if you think about all different year groups from early year to year six and primary it's the language you've got to think about the language being used but then also being able to check that they understand what you're saying so just writing it down cannot guarantee that they've actually fully understood what you're asking of them so yes thank you Nadine you know that timely is a key thing there Cameron as a student in the system with ADHD could I get you to just articulate what you think would have benefited you more for everyone else to maybe hear maybe something you've not considered before to meet more vulnerable students in our system I kind of liked what Bobby mentioned and it was definitely something which was there when I was in school and I guess it's just the use of technology and that instant feedback I mean even in my daughter's primary school now you know she had a test two weeks ago which she was preparing for she's practised on this app it was times tables there's 25 of them and she had to do it within six seconds she's been practising practising and whilst doing it she had that instant feedback and I guess now she's done that test in school two weeks ago she's still not received the results back yet so I guess there was a difference in you know even at home she's got the technology obviously in school they need to be marked and I think especially being in school and especially with the students that I work with on a daily basis most of them they say oh I don't know how to revise or I don't know where I'm struggling I don't know what I need to do and there's a lot of I don't know's I don't know's and you can talk about that maybe mindset and mentality but at the same time I think the more we have instant feedback the more you know a bit of accountability I think the more beneficial it would be for me when I was in school and I also like how Brett brought it back around really and you know I say to year 11's when they say oh school's a waste of time I don't need it and whatever I say you've got a choice you know you might go to London and protest outside parliament or you know we can play the game to change the game a little bit it's not going to change over the next seven, eight months so then what can we do to ensure we get you know the most out of it to ensure the next five years of your life to make it easier and then you know it takes responsibility away from the government and everybody else and I said what can I do again Yes a brilliant point I mean I'm sure I wasn't the only person that thought when the pandemic came along here's our perfect opportunity to reset the hamster wheel I suppose but here we are again replaying out the same old system so like you've mentioned Cameron maybe we influenced from within which is I guess why we're here right I want to switch to another big topic I'm already behind schedule got two big questions left to go I want to talk about bias within the system so whether it's teacher bias when we maybe look at student profiles student names those types of things that might influence how we assess students work or also teacher evaluation so if I get a really rubbish set of results what implications I might have in terms of evaluating teacher performance so the question I guess is and it's a big one for a kind of short sound bite from each of you is how can we ensure that teacher evaluations of one another as well as of our students are fair reflective free from bias if possible and actually represent actual performance so Bobby I'm going to come to you this time big one on kind of bias and unreliability within the system for teachers as well as for people's I'll mute yourself sir so this I feel like it is a challenging question how to remove bias from the system it's almost I think takes us back to how can we move bias from society because it's bias exists within society then schools and teachers will just be a reflection of that and again I just draw a comparison between I'm not sure I'm necessarily going to give you a solution but I'll talk about my own experience I went to a secondary state school in East London in New York till I was 16 and I got a scholarship to Eaton for my two years at A level and at my state school in East London again there are people from very sorts of backgrounds South Asia Africa and Eastern Europe whereas again when I went to Eaton it was predominantly white upper middle class children educated on those systems again at Eaton when they see someone coming from a different background to them how can you challenge those biases again I don't think I'm necessarily answering your question but I think it's almost like a bigger question how do we tackle bias at a society wide level because that again if it's tackle at a society wide level then it filters through to the classroom so again in classrooms we're trying to we ultimately reflect what's happening in the wider world any suggestions how do we improve the reduction of bias within the assessment system I scratched my head straight away when I heard the question and I just wrote down why would it be bias and if it is bias what's the point of all of this so what's the point in accurately assessing people and accurately giving them grades if all of a sudden there's a bias that's going to tilt it all anyway my look at bias was how it possibly was in that grade factory education system that was starting to come in when I was teaching as I guess the bias maybe that you're referring to is inflation because if this is a grade game there's an inflation of grades as opposed to a restriction of grades for people to be seen better than they possibly are sure I guess I'll mention the reliability of maybe teacher assessment when it comes to individual students also so maybe there's a that I've not got on very well with and I have to mark their final course with that type of stuff my kind of anecdote there was I always use the term I get dragged I used to get dragged to data meetings I always felt as if it was a drag it was up a hill as well so I always felt a little bit longer but all of a sudden we were asked to put forward our expected predicted aspirations whatever the term was at the time and our grades were slightly below where they should be and we weren't allowed to put them in because we were said would there be below what they're expected to get we said were there the accurate ones of what we would so we wouldn't say they're below where they should be just to get a kick out of it this is accurate assessment and we weren't allowed to put them in we had to put them at least at or preferably above and all of a sudden the head scratch goes if you didn't have these data tracking systems that we have available today what is the point of this assessment anyway I guess it's that regurgitation or influence and a bias to begin with can I come to you please in terms of reducing Bobby mentioned a good point these things exist at a societal level so obviously their schools are a mirror of what things happen externally any thoughts from your perspective being a black female woman I know even my mother are three boys and I remember when I was pregnant with my first son being told by a family member not to call them a certain name because they'll be at a disservice just because of their name and I did go ahead and still call my son Elijah but again it's that stereotype of that's the black name people will know that when they look on a CV and so forth so he's at a natural disservice which is a very very sad thing and it's very very real that we do live in a society where there's discriminatory practices biases, racism all sorts which we know for many wants to be there but it is a systemic issue so in terms of tackling it on school level I think it's really important to create it's all about the culture that you set and it does start from the top it really really does not to say that there cannot be some level of power in other roles but it is really important that as leaders that we create the culture of training and really resting the importance of addressing these issues and you know for example and to racism training and so forth and creating a safe and supportive environment so that people can make mistakes and errors because a lot of times these conversations are not had around biases and so forth and people are nervous they're nervous about it and so it's really really important that leaders create a safe environment where people can make mistakes that it's a learning environment recognising you know for example I shifted the whole idea of work and we talked to children about learning and really highlighting how it's a privilege to learn so it's always about learning but then also I'm a head learner it's really important again to create those spaces to have those important dialogues I'm also aware I don't have the statistics to hand but I'm sure there is I know there's statistics around actual tests and the outcomes for children based on their race and so forth as you said to bring that biases but one thing in particular that always upsets me or gets me is with certain standardized tests so for example I know the reading test this year for SATs the content and so forth you just think okay unless you're living or have a rural life experience you won't necessarily understand or be aware of the name of that bird or so forth so really it just does a disservice and I think that's something that really needs to be explored about the context of the test I've been reading lots of racial linguistic academic papers lately and how you could argue that Ofsted are trying to maintain perhaps a certain standard of English without necessarily recognizing you know what children might learn from certain communities or estates rather than middle England and those type of things but it's another big topic isn't it but we would be foolish at least there are schools and leadership teams to continue to ignore that bias, unconscious bias and racism things so looking at our policies and procedures everybody is something we should all be doing so thank you Nadine, Brex quick thought on that bias issue in the system if you can give me I like what Matt, it's such a broad topic it makes me just think about how I perceived the word bias and when Covid hit and we were talking about teacher-assessed grades and centre-assessed grades we actually used that the terms unconscious bias quite a lot in the webinars that we were running and it was the missed students the ones that were missed because very two different profiles the student works really hard they're a really nice kid therefore they should be achieving a poor grade and then the other profile which is restless, difficult, challenging therefore it's going to be a poor grade or poor performance and actually what we need to make sure that tracking and monitoring and that ability to see the outcome of assessments without bias really starts to make sure those students don't get missed and it's the ones that are either all profile because I've seen so many kids that are really well behaved and but they don't get the attention they deserve because they're slipping through because what they're really well behaved and they're also really attentive so that must mean they're going to do well and they actually fail and the students actually very bright but restless for a different reason they've got different learning needs all of a sudden did pretty well but then the data tells you they could have done exceptionally well and that's one of our one of my passions about this is not missing those students and taking away the bias with effective use of data I suppose my response really is about how we drill into deep classroom practice rather than what's happening around the bias happening nationally because I do understand it but we can actually combat that bias of all I mean those two profiles I gave which is very broad and generic but that bias is happening in the classroom with so many different types of subgroups and so those are thank you Cameron I'm going to bring you in you mentioned earlier about play the system I suppose that your message that you give to young people have you got any stories that you can tell us that maybe students experience some bias from your travels yeah I mean it's one of my favourite conversations it's a big conversation as well and what Nadine said it's a difficult conversation and the type of schools that I go into and where we're talking about the race it just totally depends on the school and that's one thing that I've noticed massively travelling in the UK I mean I had there was a girl in my session background she was born in England parents from Jamaica and the pastoral leader said to her that racism isn't that bad and she was in a majority of a white school and she brought it up into one of my one-to-one coaching sessions at the time and obviously we broke it down and going to other schools you know like there's one in Birmingham which is 93% Asian and then you know it's it just it just totally depends on the culture and the conversations that is being had and then also what are we trying to do about it but one thing that you know with the data and the assessments I want to kind of talk about the bias leading up to that element because a lot of the students that I've worked with in particular they feel like they already have a target on their head for whatever reason and sometimes they take responsibilities for their actions in the past which may not reflect to them in the right light with behaviour and attendance and stuff but sometimes one thing that I've noticed is expectations have lowered with particular students even before the assessment and then leading up to the assessment and for me I'm all about expectations I'm all about standards and obviously when you lower expectations I believe it has an impact on outcomes and where that has an impact in the classroom for example actually back to that school in Birmingham they've got a great behaviour policy the school is amazing and even talking to the deputy head he said sometimes the school is so well run that you forget what happens outside the school gates or you sometimes forget what some of these students are involved in and it's true but what happens is in the classroom because the behaviour policy is there staff and teachers use them too quickly so instead of trying to have high expectations they just remove the student from the classroom they don't give them a chance but it's just easier to get them out so that they can teach the class and I think that has an impact on our own well being mental health and also the student knows that there might be a little bit of a misjustice kind of going on whether it is those biases and stuff down in those exams anyway and you've not been in class but you've been in the class 40% of the time and the rest in isolation or whatever it is then that's also going to have a massive impact on outcomes and grades I believe. Thank you, some really important and important points and some big ideas buzzing around in my head I'm going to have one more question for our guests for people watching, last opportunity to put your comments in the chatboxes into whatever channel you're watching and I can display your questions for our guests on the screen but I'm hoping to wrap things up in about 5 or 6 minutes we're going to just finish with this big topic on technology for assessments, all the different software tools that we use as teachers the receiving end as parents and students and I'll just throw into the mix chat GPT so Matt I'm going to come to you first the pros and cons of assessment you mentioned those uphill meetings the data meetings I remember those two they were important but they were never the most favourite experiences of my leadership career what are your thoughts on chat GPT in particular I'll unmute I will get the hang of this it's the Devonian in me Ross I do apologise assess we need we need to know where we are and I get it and it's informative and it allows clarity to enable us to know where we are so tracking where we are an assessment of where we are I'm now in the business of tracking emotion so all of a sudden it's not just knowing where you are it's how you are and I'm coming around we've had chats with Brett about data why would you get somebody that didn't like data to appear on something like this but I've come around to the blended approach you need the formative assessment to know the building blocks of how far you off of a grade boundary and what you probably need to do and where you need to do better in order to get your grade better but it's not the be all in end a lot of this stuff of tracking emotion is the other side of this stuff this blended approach of the whole rounded student as to how they are how they're feeling whether they explode or implode whether the thought of walking to that science classroom is making them churn inside whether they're invigorated by the English because of how it's taught whatever it is this blended approach of just emotion and tracking a performance in the classroom it's a must I don't know about going off track and I'm just on one here the exit card thing was massively important and I just used to think kids that used exit cards back in the day what a melt why use that exit card when we could have a conversation here to try and sort this out and I used to see it as being a weakness I'm on the other side of that now I think exit cards are incredible because kids are now not leaving lessons because they've got this laminate square in their pocket and they're practicing actually and they're not using it because they know they could if they had to so you're already seeing this emotional performance go hand in hand with the ability for them to be able to do the classroom work as Cam said they're not going to be any good if they're outside the classroom anyway it's equipping them to have the skill or that self-regulation for sure the emotional tracking inside the classroom will allow learning to happen we don't learn unless we feel loved if you don't feel loved and you don't feel safe I remember going to the bet show probably five or six years ago and I saw probably one of our first emotional tracking bits of software and I was a bit skeptical back then but I would totally like you mentioned that emotional tracking sense I think it's quite a valuable insight for teachers to see how that tool works isn't either here or there but I guess it's something for us to consider tracking the full child not just this assessment before you pass on there Ross I'm never too far away from a rainbow which is based upon but yeah it's certainly making an impact in terms of how people are expressing themselves emotionally tracking emotions Bobby, maths chat GPT technology for assessment what are your thoughts so one thing I'll say is from a teacher perspective chat GPT is something from our side that's really has made an impact on our teaching so I'll give you one example before I talk about the assessment side so we were recently looking at reworking our schemes of learning so after school one week we had like a two hour session where different teachers are allocated different parts of the curriculum they had to sort of look and adapt and we were given two hours for the task and what we did was almost like sort of half the group half the teachers use chat GPT as an aid to try to help them with looking at these new schemes of learning and other teachers did the traditional way of using Google using textbooks and in that two hour period the teachers that use a traditional method spent two hours and again completed the new schemes of learning sections but the teachers that use chat GPT and again these are teachers that knew how to use chat GPT and how to use the adaptive features of it spent 40 minutes on it so again just from a teacher perspective it just transforms our ability to do things in a quicker period of time but you do need the expertise there so in terms of like the assessment side I think the big part where it could make a huge difference is in terms of adaptive assessment and again with chat GPT if you type in a question you can keep over time iterating what you're looking for but sometimes the first iteration of chat GPT question could be way out it could get it from an incorrect source and you can challenge it and over time get that adaptive response and I think the same thing with assessments offered again if I got very bright students really struggling students they'll do a test and they'll get 10% or the really bright students get 100% so actually in both sides the test hasn't really done much but with technology and again AI generated assessments over time it can be adaptive so the student getting 10% in the test actually as it adapts to that student's needs that student will actually get better forms 30-40% because actually the test will actually ask questions that the students can answer and again for the students getting 100% it doesn't serve any purpose and adaptive assessment will mean actually it'll ask them more challenging and probing questions so I think yeah from a teacher perspective and from the student's learning perspective I think yeah AI will revolutionise again we have no idea how but it will definitely revolutionise and Nadine over to you you mentioned the word time earlier and we've seen a good example of how Bobby in his school are using chat GPT has chat GPT reached your school it has not yet so I had to retouch say what is that what is that I do know the term AI I didn't actually know that and I have actually been using it for when my husband introduced it to me and using it in terms of for other things but not in terms of in school yet but just again just re-tracking the conversation I just want to say that I currently we call it a BOTSOL but we BOTSOL all the children so different form of assessment but we assess every single child's social emotional mental health needs and from that we're able to target children and give children the support that they need so just in case anyone wants to know how we do that that I just wanted to point that out but that's something that we do and I'm very proud of because I do think it's about a holistic approach but in terms of AI in particular that is something that I'll be definitely coming to those more expert in the room to find out more about it Happy to help, happy to help Cam, can I come to you in terms of you know technology in schools chat GPT, AI what are your thoughts on the future of assessment At the moment I have absolutely no idea I'm just trying to listen and learn as much as I possibly can When I went on to chat GPT one thing I thought it was a bit more of a glorified Google which is probably not an accurate opinion if I'm being honest so being honest Ross I don't really know it seems like everyone's talking about AI being the future and you know how powerful it is and what it can do and stuff but yeah I'm just not really too sure but I do know it's here to stay and it's going to have a big impact on all of us I guess you know the assessment side when students see the grades on a bit of paper or they're logging into a bit of platform the things you see on your travels with students any kind of sound bites there from the technology to the piece of paper that the students get I feel like at the moment just from my experience in general there's just a massive connection in general so even from data we've collected nationally out of 3,000 teenagers in the year 10 and year 11 just talking about technology in general students average screen time out of those 3,000 students is 7 hours and 22 minutes 7 hours and 22 minutes of 3,000 students that I've been working with yes you get some of the 2 hours and 3 hours but then you've also got 12, 13 hours and you know you can talk about tip-talking this and that so per day Cameron that's an average daily screen time yeah it's a lot I'll come to you Brett and then I'm going to come back to everyone just for one concluding remark if that's okay and then I'll wrap things up Brett you've created your own technology bit of software so the future of assessment with technology and you know I know we've got chat GPT behind the scenes yeah yeah I mean if I'm honest I'll probably park the conversation around chat GPT because I know outside of education it's certainly not in its infancy but in education I think it's still when it's infancy the fact that you've still got that comparison between Google where outside of education it's doing insane yeah it is it's doing fast like even in how we run pupil progress it's becoming impactful so I'm going to stay away from that but the power of technology if I think about why I even created pupil progress it had a huge impact on my mental health because I knew where I was as a teacher as a head of department and again I know our education system is flawed I'm not here to say oh you know we know what grade students are working out in the education system and know it's completely flawed because I was a potential victim of that education system and I know we're failing people however we can't change that now and we have to be patient with that technology has the huge amount of power and I'm not just talking about pupil progress of helping me as a teacher school leaders, students most importantly feel less anxious about where they are what they need to do and I'm not just talking about pupil progress I'm talking about formative assessment tools about organisational tools about Google run schools that allow them to understand what homework needs to be completed organisation so technology can be massively powerful and I just want to finish on this I'm not going to go on a massive rant especially with Matt on the call as well my fundamental belief is if a student can compartmentalise that okay you know that's going well that's in order I know what I need to do I'm creating action on that I'm creating room to actually think about who I am as a person and the more deeper skills as to how do I self-regulate how do I manage my anger actually schools are going to start to see and this is my fundamental belief is being able to understand where students are and what they need to do in order to achieve well from an exam it's going to create room to bring in people like Matt to bring in people like Cam that there's a bigger picture out there than just exams but we do need to get that right but we can create room for it so if I carry on I'll keep going and I'll probably just leave it at that point that's a brilliant way to end I guess our formal conversation so I'm going to come to our guest just to finish everybody who are watching live last chance to pose some questions in your comments boxes and I'll display these when I wrap things up I guess the big question is the future of assessment if you had one wish sentence everybody what would it be so I'll give you a tight upon to that question what would be your one thing to everyone watching publicly thank you for joining us comments in the display blocks on your platform wherever you're watching and I'll put those in I've got quite a few comments to go through just to finish and wrap things up once we end things formally so Matt was the key thing that I've learned from our conversation what's your one wish I've one wish for what Ross I've managed to unmute myself I guess in the assessment grand scheme of how we currently do things in our education system here in England what thing you'd like to see done differently not too much done accurate assessments at the current stage we're looking at just exam based outcomes that needs to be accurate but also an emotional strand that gets the well-being of the student as well as the student's performance sure and if I bounce over to Cameron now who's probably on a similar theme with that emotional well-being inside Cameron any wishes I guess just potentially just spreading it across maybe the 18 months or whatever they're in year 10 and year 11 I don't know what that will possibly look like but I know some schools might do particular exams in year 10 so they don't have to do it in year 11 just something where they do genuinely have a really bad day then there's maybe another opportunity and quite an opportunity soon where they can rectify any issues or you wake up with the flu or your grandma died or whatever it is it's an alternative to you're either ready on that one day or you're not and then that's your chance Nadine over to you Nadine what would be your wish I think for me it would be around learning styles and that personal that every child will be represented fairly and accurately through the use of assessment then that's what I'm trying to say I fall into this dyslexia camp as well we can individually yes yes so as a mathematician someone that loves data and stats obviously I believe that the increasing use of real time data will transform my ability to correct course of students in the real time but why is this data numbers I think the really important thing is we mustn't forget the value of individual humans and teachers and their professional judgement because with this drive towards using tech, AI, chat, GPT we mustn't forget that education is ultimately delivered by a human thinking feeling person too children who are real people not just data points fantastic and data points so keyword for you Brett what would you hope would be a wish for the assessment system considering that your platform relies on those data points you know what I'm going to go quite broad because the moment you ask a question my instinct gut feel was personalised to the needs of our young people considering what I spoke about my daughter's journey but actually just listening to Bobby I would really love to see students can be assessed in a way that meets the needs of their future and actually we are part of an education system that is giving them the skills that allows them to be successful outside of school and not just to pass an exam so that would be my wish for assessment I would be my wish for the future of education brilliant that's a good way to finish that I'm just going to end four more procedures can I just say one more thing yes Ross what about you what about me well yeah so very good question one size fits all only fits one person so if we've got 9.1 million children in our education system we need 9.1 million alternatives I don't think it's anything we're going to fix anytime soon but thinking about all our different backgrounds and stories and how we're trying to always meet the individual needs of our students in a challenging system which is time poor and not funded we have to work harder at genuine assessment alternatives that take our hence why we're here the future of assessment into the next decade so I don't know if that's a coherent or simple answer I think it's very difficult to make these things quite pragmatic but we've got lots of work to do I'm going to wrap things up everybody so can I just thank you for all of your time so brilliant people beautiful people, brilliant minds and loads of alternative interesting suggestions thank you so much for joining me and for everyone watching publicly also thank you for taking part thank you for your questions thank you for your comments could I just remind everybody on the screen here there's a QR code here where you can learn a little bit more about the brilliant work that pupil progress are doing kindly who have helped co-host and organise this event and bring everyone to place and if you're interested a little bit more it'd be nice to have a few other people join Brett and I are going to have a little chin wag on a Twitter space this Thursday evening just to kind of reflect on the things that we've discussed here today so if you want to join us if you go to teacher toolkit on my Twitter profile you'll see this kind of Twitter space if you've not done that before then it's a nice way to listen in an audible fashion and if there's one or two people so Nadine I'm happy to help with chat GPT can I thank Brett, Matt Nadine, Bobby and Cam all for your words of wisdom and thank you everybody for joining me other than that can I wish you a good evening stay safe, be happy and have a good evening bye for now thank you everybody


Hello, all in this video, we're going to compare between mainly desktop and mainly reference manager. At the end of this video, you are going to decide what is the best out of these two. We all know, mainly is a product of LC were providing reference management free of cost for those who all don't know about the difference between mainly desktop and mainly reference manager on your right side is the mainly desktop, which is the older version of this mainly, which is indicated by dark purple icon. On the other hand, the new mainly reference manager, which is the newer one indicated by bright red icon. Those have already downloaded this mainly desktop can use now, but authentic download of this mainly desktop is not provided and the support is also not provided with this desktop mainly the LC were recommends all the researchers to move to this new mainly reference manager. So basically both this tabs appears almost similar on the left side. There will be the folders and the groups here also it is named as collections here. Articles will be arranged in this pattern. But if you click on this, the individual details can be there. You can take out notes and contents will be available here when it comes to the reading tool, the older Bentley desktop is better than this mainly reference manager tool. When it comes to adding the new references, almost both are same. Both mainly desktop and mainly reference manager functions same. Now secondly, if you look at the synchronization, we need to manually synchronize after each download from the web importers. Mainly reference manager synchronizes automatically without me being synchronizing it. It has synchronized just now in that way. Mainly reference manager is better, which makes our works little easy. Whatever called as folders here will be called as collections and similarly groups also will be present as your mainly desktop. Now the third most important difference is this checking for duplicate. It is okay that when we are writing an article with 20 to 30 references, both will be manageable. But if we exceed more than 30 suppose in case of thesis and dissertations minimum, we will be using more than 100 references. In that case, we need to check for duplicates for that function that is in mainly desktop in tools. We have a check for duplicate options. So if we click on this automatically in this entire list of references, how many duplicates are there? So there are 415 sets of duplicate. If we want to merge these documents, we can do this in a single click. But on the other hand with the mainly reference manager, there was no check for duplicates options available previously. So now this duplicates is recently rolled out, but this function is very limited. That is only with the articles having same DOI will be merged. But here the duplicate search will be matched for authors titles and other details. I prefer mainly desktop to be the best option in case of check for duplicates. Many of the researchers complain that mainly reference manager is a downgrade when compared to the mainly desktop for this reason alone. Then the fourth and last important point is mainly desktop does not need an active Internet connection to operate. Whereas your mainly reference manager needs continuous Internet for its working. That is also one of the notable factor to be considered when we are using mainly reference manager. So if you're going for mainly reference manager, you have to keep in mind your synchronization is going to be very easy and fast. If you're still using this mainly desktop, then you will get the benefit of having a good reading tool and merging the duplicate and you can use this without active Internet connection. Rest of all is going to be the same. But when we compare these two reference managers with Zotiro, Zotiro is fast, but about 200 MB of storage you need to pay for the premium version. But both this mainly desktop and mainly reference manager allows you to have storage of up to 2 GB. So with the newer upgrade with the duplicate and betterment of mainly reference manager, people are still adhering to mainly reference manager and waiting for Elsevier to upgrade equivalent to previous mainly desktop and their main competitor Zotiro. Hopefully in near future that is going to come. We all will wait for that with fingers crossed. Thanks for watching this video. If you like this video, please share it to your friends and if you haven't subscribed to the channel, please subscribe. Thanks again.


Before I go any further, I want to check in with you about my audio levels and general audio health because I had to switch out some equipment and that always makes me a little nervous as far as sound stuff goes. So what I'm going to do is check the chat for a moment and see if I can get any feedback about that. I see C Grover is over in our Discord chat. Speaking of Discord chat, if you're wondering where is the chat, who am I talking to? Well, I'm keeping an eye on our YouTube chat as well as this thing right here. This is our Discord. If you want to join in the chat and you're over on Twitch or somewhere else like that, just head to adafrew.it, that's a-d-a-f-r-u dot i-t, see it's adafruit but with a little dot, a couple of letters early, adafruit.it slash Discord, you can then jump into our Discord server and look for the live broadcast chat channel and that is our, that's the place to be. Okay, let's see, we've got a little feedback, thank you, hey thin man, I was here last week for this show, yeah I missed on Thursday but I'm feeling much better now, thank you. Todd said the video, the voice levels are lower than the intro song, well sure, yeah let's see if we can boost that without breaking anything so I'm gonna give this a little extra gain and a little, there we are, we're just reaching just below clipping level, I just don't want to get it all howling and nutty but it's worth, I think it's worth the effort to get this taken care of so thank you for your patience with me as we get this going, all right I've goosed that a little bit and yeah give me some feedback and I will move on with things now, so first of all, if you want to go to the place to be for today's product pick, that's the URL right there, go to that product id or head to that QR code if you're into that sort of thing, if you want to point gizmos at symbols that'll do it, thank you, yeah feedback on the audio is that's even better, perfect, all right I will mark those settings later, try not to touch them, head to this URL, this video right here, this live stream is happening right inside the product page so you can watch it from within there and you can be poised to purchase if this product is something you're into, there's no coupon code necessary, you just throw it or it and nine more of its friends because you can get up to 10 of them during this, you can just throw them in your cart and get them before the end of the show, so it's a special discount we do just during the show, just on this product, you want to usually get it taken care of within a few minutes of the end of the show before the price goes back up and today's product is half off and it's a good one, it's a doozy, what a price this is for this, but before I hype it up any more, let me let Lady Aida jump in here from the past and tell you all about it, so take it away Lady Aida. The ESP32 S3 Reverse TFT, so many words and letters there, it's a ESP32 S3 feather as you can see here and so let's look at the back first, so the back is the front, the front is the back, okay so this is your ESP32 S3 mini module, four megabytes of flash, two megabytes of PS RAM, dual core 240 megahertz 10 silica processor with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth low energy, it does not have Bluetooth classic by the way, but it's the latest S3 and then you've got all the little accessories that you would want on that back and I'll show this on the overhead, it's got USB-C for data and power, it's got a LiPo battery that charges automatically, reset button, a 7qT port for iSquared C, two 3.3 volt regulators, one for the iSquared C port, one for the main board, so you can have like ultra low battery usage and power max 17 048 battery monitor, so you can check your state of charge, a little Neopixel for Neopixeling and then all the GPIO you need iSquared C analog input, SPI, UR, etc GPIO plenty and then on the flip side you get a 240 by 135 pixel IPS display, very tiny display with again the reset button is also on the front because it's useful and three GPIO 0, 1, and 2 connected to buttons that you can press and you can press them to make it do stuff, so I can actually show on the overhead, so on the overhead you can see the buttons you know I press D1, D0, D2, so we already have an ESP32 S2, this is just the S3 version so it's actually kind of you know the same pinout and everything, reset is handy because you can enter the bootloader, although I don't think I'll enter the bootloader because it will, so there's a UF2 bootloader already programmed in for drag and drop of course you can erase it, this works with Arduino and circuit python because we have support for both of those modules and the reason I like the reverse mount style is that you can put like a feather on top but then the TFT isn't blocked, right so if you want a feather wing you want to add a GPS or real-time clock or lower radio and then you still have the TFT on the front, shift this down a little bit, you still have the TFT on the front with some buttons that you can use to have it do different things, display status, sensor output, battery warnings, et cetera and yeah I think this is great for IoT projects, we'll have whipper, snapper support and again like I said circuit python and Arduino, all in one, I mean you can do a lot of projects with no soldering just plug in the stem and QT in the back and you have buttons in a display, yes indeed that is it, look look there it is right there, I'm holding it up but I'm gonna put that down and flip it and reverse it because that right there is the product pick of the week this week it is the ESP32S3 reverse TFT feather, this is a feather board but it's also a display, we've got a display on the bottom side of it or the back side of it as well as three user buttons and a boot or rather a reset button, button zero can be used as boot and if you flip it here it looks like hey kind of a normal ESP32S3 feather, really great particularly for projects where you want to integrate this into a panel, you want an incredibly small little, it's basically a display that happens to have a microcontroller dev board bolted to the back of it which is pretty impressive, let me jump over to the page here, here's the page for it, you can see we've got this on this incredible discount right now, it is $12.47, that is a lot of microcontroller for your buck, we've got on here a 1.14 inch diagonal TFT IPS display which means it's beautiful from all sorts of angles, in fact let me plug this one in while I'm talking about it, I've got the basic demo on there right now with that one, so you can see that right there, it is a 240 by 135 pixel display, you can add feather wings to the top of it without blocking the screen, this is one of the reasons that LeMore came up with this idea, is that you can go ahead and put some either direct solder or use some header pins if you want and plonk on the critical feather wing for your use or you can go ahead and plug things into i2c using the stem of qt port there, this has also got battery charging battery power so you can use usb or you can use the lipo battery there to get your board up and running and you can charge it right through the usb if you want, we have built-in native usb on this chip, it has 2.4 gigahertz wi-fi, it also has ble, no bluetooth classic but ble is typically what you want, someone asked in the chat about it, we use ble for a lot of hid projects for wireless midi types of projects, you can control media players with it, there's a lot of cool ble projects but it is not bluetooth classic, one of the main differences I think is bluetooth classic is often used for actual beaming of music and sound wirelessly so this does not do that, at least not through the bluetooth classic, what else has it got, 4 megs of flash, 2 megs of ps ram has this nice spi display which is really good and fast there, if you take a look at the product page here and scroll down a bit you can click on a link for the learn guide here as well as a project guide using this board, it's a pretty new board so we don't have a lot of projects with it, however most of the s2 esp32 s2 projects particularly reverse tft feather projects will work on this board, so here is the main guide, it will give you all of the stats and relevant info and tell you how to get up and running with it for all of your connectors, power management as well setting it up with circuit python or arduino, you can also code it wirelessly using pi leap, I actually have a project here that I initially used the pi leap program on iOS to upload, this is from a project from trevor and I just modified it a little bit, hey whoa sorry wrong button, I just modified this a little bit to have a different graphic on there but this is an iot clock so this is using a time server and wi-fi to keep itself in sync so this should be exactly 112 if I look at any of my other sort of internet clock connected devices just turn to 113 and this one just shows off the tft with an adorable little couple of pictures of lars there also in respect to the original project which has a blankachan from street fighter on it he's got his blankachan t-shirt there or a sleeveless shirt there because he's lars and he wants to go sleeveless I don't blame him so there you can see we've got I don't have any functionality on these buttons on this demo here we can reset right there so that's your typical reset button that'll just take a moment for it to go and hop online we'll see yeah you did it it found the internet so I have a wireless router here that is jumping on and grabbing that info from otherwise it looks like your your typical feather with all of the many many GPIO pins available for lots and lots of things you can see this little antenna built into the edge there here is another demo I wanted to show you in fact someone said in the chat I think it was cgrover said hey you can also mount these vertically for euro rack this is a project I did this is actually the previous version or the the s3 it's not really the previous version but it's a different version I had mounted this into a little euro rack compatible panel you could do the exact same thing with our s3 there it's the same same board size feather standard holes for dimensions for the holes there but there it is mounted vertically so you can see you got a little access to your buttons and the screen there I'll throw this under the under the down shooter so you can take a look at that let's see okay and focus that you can see I have it kind of doing random little random stuff there and when I press these buttons I'm changing the colors of the the different elements there so there there's a s2 version but this will work with the s3 the same way so you can see on this demo here you can press the buttons to get a little feedback on those if you plug in i-square c devices you will see their address show up on there as well as if you have battery plugged in let me grab a battery i'll steal it from this other project here plug that battery in there and now we're getting we should be getting our hey it's 101 charge that's a very well charged battery you can see it's giving me four volts right now that should that should start to drop as we as we leave that on there uh and if you want to take a look at the code that's running on this one so this is uh this is this project here I mentioned the reverse tft digital clock display featuring blankachan blankachan that's hard to say for me if we switch over to uh code view here this is the modified version of it so I just had to basically point it at some different um graphic files and I adjusted the the text layout just a little bit to fit this nicely and here's my code view so this is circuit python here and as far as some of the online stuff you can see we're grabbing ssl wi-fi socket pool eight of fruit requests this is allowing us to go and ask a time server for the time and then some wi-fi radio setup going on here we have the world clock api that we're grabbing time from and look at the display setup this is so easy on this because it's integrated into the board we know in the board definition exactly what display there's here so I say display equals board dot display I don't have to tell it much else other than that I'm going to go ahead and display use display i o for throwing up that on disk bitmap there create a tile grid from it and then I'm using a text text labels on top of that and this just is updating it changing the image out every five seconds and checking the time to make sure that we are current so that's a really nice easy clock project you can do let's see do we have any questions over in the chat let's see cables yes mqt cables have been out of stock hopefully we'll catch up on those I've noticed the same I get them when I see them available I grab a couple um let's see someone asked in the chat uh I can bring back the discord here someone asked about the can bus or the can device pins brought out uh Rufus would like to hook this up to a can network uh and Todd posted that the schematics are posted uh in the learn guide there's a download page if you check out uh pretty much any any learn guide towards the end of the guide where's the there's the guide uh there'll be a downloads link and if you click that you will find uh the chip data sheet as well as uh fabrication and and schematic diagrams uh Todd said looking at that diagram uh the s3 pins are all brought out so that should um should be able to give you can you might want to ask uh in the chat uh in project help as well uh to see if anyone knows for sure uh let's see I think that is it however so head to that URL right there that'll take you to the product page good grief what is that guy doing there uh you can get them right now for 12 dollars 47 cents we have them in stock I know we stashed uh at least 100 of them before the show so you should be able to to get them now before the time runs out uh and that is going to do it so there we go how about that one that right there is my product pick of the week this week it is the esp 32 s3 reverse tft feather for ate a fruit industries I'm john park this has been jp's product pick of the week thank you all so much for stopping by and I will see you next time bye bye


This is what your desk looks like by department. First we got sales, accounting, notice the calculator. This is marketing or like office culture. Then we got HR and the executives. Let me know what you want to see next.


Black voters, like Will Mega, say Democrats need to get much more aggressive. What would you say to President Biden if you could speak with him? I would say, Mr. President, we delivered for you. It's time for you to deliver for us.