Hi. So, initially, another colleague of ours was planned to give this talk, Paul Horn, but he's unfortunately sick, so I'm here instead. My name is Max. What you know is that we all work for Neo4j, specifically in the Graph Analytics team. And today we want to present you one new or not so new project that we are working on, specifically, we are working on this project, and that is the Neo4j Graph Data Science Library. Some of you might already have used or not have used the Graph Algorithms Library. Basically, this is the successor of it. I'll go into the details about the history a bit later. For those of you who don't or haven't used it so far, what is the Neo4j Graph Data Science Library? It's basically an add-on for the Neo4j database, which is a graph database for those of you who don't know.  So, the Neo4j database itself is more of an OLTP database, so it's mainly used for short queries that query only smaller parts of a graph using mostly the Cypher query language. There is in-with-in Cypher support for some algorithms like shortest path, for example. But the Neo4j Graph Data Science Library gives you a much broader access to global graph algorithms. And we have implemented a broad set of algorithms, or there exists a broad set of algorithms. We have algorithms for community detection and clustering, for example, label propagation. We have algorithms for similarity calculation. So, for example, you can calculate how similar are two nodes given their neighborhood. Therefore, we use node similarity using jacar similarity. We have centrality algorithms such as page rank. We have some link prediction and pathfinding algorithms. Pathfinding, we have dykstra A star. And then we have some auxiliary stuff like graph creation for the in-memory graph. And another thing the library basically provides is an API for implementing your own algorithms. There are certain ways you can do this. The easiest way is using the Pregil framework. That was introduced by Google quite a while ago, so we also support that. And that allows you to easily write your own algorithms and then also make them available in Neo4j through Cypher through the Procedure API. So, when would you use the graph data science library or GDS as we call it because graph data science is pretty long? Oh, no, no, that's otherwise. First, we start with some of the timeline information. So, as I already said, initially this project started as the Neo4j graph algorithms library, which was a project that was spearheaded by the Neo4j deferral or LAPS organization led by Michael. So, he initiated this project and it was spiked by an external contractor, Avangard LAPS, Paul, who was initially supposed to give this talk. He spiked this project. He's been working on this project for quite a while. And as you can see, this was already started already in Q1 2017. And then they kept on working for this for a while. The library was already open source and public. By then you could use it. And at some point in time, the Neo4j product engineering took actually over. So, we came into the picture to actually make it a fully-fledged Neo4j product. And that work started in Q1 2019, so last year. Since then, we've been working on mostly productizing the library, doing some code refactoring, making sure that all the algorithms run in all the ways you would expect them to. And also so that they have basically the features that users want them to have, which is not to say that when Michael and Paul and the other guys at Avangard LAPS developed that they didn't focus on that, but we talked to potential customers and then looked what they actually wanted for algorithms. And then took a smaller subset of the algorithms that already existed and made sure that they run in the best performance that we could make them run. And now we are at basically today, Q1 2020. And we are or have basically re-open sourced the project. So, while we were initially developing it as Neo4j product engineering, we had closed sourced the project for a while and we have now open sourced it again. The link for it I'll show you later. And we will make a first pre-release, I think, next week. And then in Q2 2020, this will be globally available through the usual channels, mostly the Neo4j desktop if you want to try it out. So now, when would you actually like to use that? So we basically make the decision between, as I already mentioned, more OLTP focused or like online transaction focused workloads where you have small short lift queries that you basically run over and over again just with different parameters. For example, if you want to drive your website, then you would do more OLTP-style queries where you only touch a very small subset of your graph. And this is where actually Neo4j with the Cypher language like performs on its best. That's not to say Cypher and Neo4j both support also queries that can do more analytical or can support more analytical work cases or workloads. But from both the query language and mostly Neo4j, it performs at its best when it's OLTP. So short lift graph localized queries. And then we have the graph algorithms library, which is more when you want to analyze the entire graph. So you're not really knowing what you're actually looking for. So you have basically an idea of what you want to analyze or maybe you have an idea of a hypothesis and you want to prove that hypothesis. Then you can use the graph algorithms library and discover new insights in your graph by doing graph global aggregations. So as I said, when you run more Cypher-style queries, then you only use a very localized part of your graph and you actually know what you're looking for. You know that I'm looking for a person named this and that and I want to know its neighborhood. But when I'm using the analytics library, then I'm basically using all of my graph or a very big part of it and I'm basically digging into the graph, finding new information, finding new insight and then maybe feeding it back and that's where you call it graph data science library. Maybe feeding it back into my data science workflow that is now aided by graph processing. So how does our library work? How would you use that for those who haven't basically used the graph algorithms library? So currently we always start off by a Neo4j database. So you have your graph loaded into your Neo4j database and it's living there. And here I'm using a graph which basically I use the colors to denote nodes with different labels, for example. And what you then do is because inside of the graph data science library we are using an in-memory model of the graph to basically empower those very fast graph algorithm runs. We can't really rely on the layout and the store layout of Neo4j. So what we are doing is we are loading the graph from Neo4j into an in-memory model. And that's what you would always start with. You load your graph, you can project the graph. So that means you can rename labels, you can skip certain labels. So you can skip nodes with a certain label, you can skip relationships, you can rename relationships and also you can load certain properties or not load certain properties and you can even reverse the direction of edges into your in-memory graph so that I've visualized this and we've basically skipped the red nodes in this visualization. And now we have our sub-graph in-memory. This graph now lives in a thing that we call the graph catalog. Basically it's just what you would imagine. The graph basically has a name and you can retrieve that graph by the name as long as you stick inside of the graph data science library. So we've loaded this graph now into memory and now it's time to run an algorithm. So here for example we do some clustering in my example. So you specify now I want to use this in-memory graph and I want to run for example a clustering algorithm and then what you get is you get another in-memory graph or some information about that graph that says, well I think those nodes belong to a cluster and the other nodes belong to a cluster and then as a next step you would consume this result. You could run another algorithm on that graph maybe using the information from the first run or you consume the information that the algorithm returned to you and you can do this in two ways. You can either write the results back into Neo4j. This mostly happens by writing a node property. So for example if you do the clustering we would write a property on every node that says well this node I think belongs to cluster with the ID one or you can for some algorithms like the similarity algorithms you would write back a relationship to the graph and another option is you can stream back results. So if you don't want to persist the result of the algorithm you can just stream back the results inside of your Cypher query and then use it in the driver or your application program as you see fit. So these are currently the two ways that we are supporting and the most important thing is the workflow always starts currently at Neo4j then you load a graph you can load as many graphs as you like or as fit into your memory and then you can use them for running algorithms and then you can consume the result. So what kind of algorithms do we have? I already hinted towards that we have community detection to find clusters of nodes that somehow belong together we have centrality or importance of certain nodes patronage is probably the most well-known there or between the centrality similarity algorithms link prediction and path finding and search. Those that are currently marked in bold font here are the ones that we have actually productized by productizing we mean they here we guarantee some form of matureness of the algorithm by our team and by Neo4j basically that is if you use those parts we hope that those are bug free run as fast as they can all these things. And I think it's time for a demo now. So I actually, where is my mouse? I have this Neo4j browser here which is huge I'm sorry for that but I can't really change that. Can I zoom out? No. Okay so what I've loaded into this graph is basically the Game of Thrones data sets that we were using for many examples so it's basically an extract of how people in the Game of Thrones books when people appear together on a page then we basically create nodes for those people and then we link them together with an edge and so we have edges interacted with so people interacted with another in a certain book and then we have those interactions also split up into these different books. We have some more information that we're actually not going to use in this demo. So this is actually the most important information we have persons and then they act with one another. This graph is loaded into this Neo4j database. We can run a simple query here to see to get a bit of an idea of how this graph looks like. This basically just counts the average number of interactions between the people so an average people interact with another or people interact with 6.7 other people in the book the person who interacts with most of people has 170 interactions. That's just to get an idea. I think it's about 5,000 nodes and slightly more edges in the graph. Now we can dive into the Graph Data Science Library. As I said, the first thing we always do is we have to load a graph. That's horrible. What we do is we use the Cypher procedure language here because as I said, we are a plugin so you can use the Graph Data Science Library via procedure calls. The first procedure call that we would do is we would say GDS, which every of our commands are prefixed with, then graph, that's basically all the catalog commands and then creates because we want to create a new graph. What we say here additionally is we want to call this graph GOT interactions because from the GOT graph or Game of Thrones graph we load all the interactions. Then we specify a node projection and that means what kind of nodes do we want to load. We have a very simple form. You can specify many more things if you like but here you just want to load every person that is in the graph, so every node that is labeled with the labeled person. For relationships, we want to load all the interactions relationships and then we have a thing that we call projection. That means because we need to know in which direction do we want to load the relationships because of how we store them internally, we need to know do we want to have them in their natural direction that is how they are in the database from one node into another because Neo4j every node is directed. Do we want to load them in reverse then we would say reverse or do we want them undirected and then undirected we basically store them twice in every direction.   I mean that's basically the same thing. We named the GOTA interactions. Here's what I said we just specified a very simple form of a node protection. Here's the extended form and then it gives us some information so we have only 2000 nodes now, 7000 interactions or relationships and it took 67 milliseconds to load that. Right. So now it's time to run a first algorithm. We're going to use Patreon for that. Where am I? I guess most of you do know I can't find my way back. No? There it is. So we are running the Patreon algorithm now. Patreon as I said is a centrality algorithm so it gives every node a score about how important is it to the network. And here again we can basically demonstrate how our algorithm syntax looks like so we have again GDS, our general prefix and the algorithm we want to run and then the mode we want to run on. As I said there are two different ways of how we can consume algorithms it's either by writing or by streaming. Here we stream results back to the user. We say we want to run this algorithm on this graph in our catalog and that's basically it because we don't want to specify any more or any more detailed things about the algorithm we just run with the default settings. And when we run it we almost immediately get some information back. In this case we see that Jon Snow is apparently the most important node in our network with a patron of 17-point something followed by Tyrone Lannister and Cesar Lannister. For those of you who've read the books that kind of makes sense at least to me they are the most important characters in the book series. So at least it's returning what we would have expected. To show a more detailed example because we're running out of time we have no that doesn't work because I think we don't have much more time for more examples. So let's switch back to the demonstration. To the presentation I mean. Again just a short wrap up of how the algorithm syntax looks like we have always a call because we want to in cipher we want to run the procedure we have the algorithm name and then the mode we have the graph name and then the configuration so you can specify many more things for the algorithm for patron for example you can specify the dampening factor or whatever configuration you have or when you write back you can specify into which property you want to write the patron value we have usually three different modes we have write we have stream and then we have a stats mode which basically just returns the metadata about an algorithm run basically just as writing without the writing but it gives you some information about how long did the algorithm take to compute maybe some information about distribution of the result here's another example with weekly connected components so here you can see you can specify many more properties or configuration options for your algorithm run and with that I want to thank you for listening as I said we have open source to repository just last week I think you can find it under Neo Technology just graph analytics on github currently it doesn't build it is green but we haven't released anything of our build configuration yet so if you have a problem we are working on that soon you will be able to also build that but at least you can already have a look at the code hopefully at some point start hacking on it and trying it out thank you questions we have time for maybe two of your questions is the data science library accessible from like python or other languages so the question is if it's accessible from python or other languages it is kind of through cypher I mean you can use the python cypher driver and then what you are writing is basically just cypher queries you can prepend or append cypher statements around your algorithm as you see fit there's currently no way of basically writing your own algorithms in python we've been thinking about that we've experimented a bit with that but we don't have anything that is working in that direction currently but there's a wrapper for there will be more in depth next Tuesday in Amsterdam I don't know it's actually slash neo4j slash graph data science if you want to go to the public version of it and if you didn't get the chance oh private one you will get a 4 or 4 when you are done and if you didn't get the chance to get the book it's also available online free for download so the book that was around here just go to neo4j.com and you can download the copy of the book which explains all the algos that are part of the library and with the pre-release that Max mentioned for next week we will also do a docs pre-release that explains all the API that he just sketched over in of course very much more detail so yeah thanks again Max


I have unmuted both of you now, so and we are recording. So, welcome everybody and thank you for joining us for this teacher academy webinar hosted by School Education Gateway. I am Eleonora, project assistant for School Education Gateway, which is an initiative of the European Union that brings you examples of innovation practice in European schools. This webinar is part of our monthly focus on formative assessment and if assessment is always key topic in teaching and learning perhaps in the current situation where our school education is shifting the line at a distance, it's even more crucial to understand why and how teachers should give feedback for evaluation to their students. To talk about this topic today, I have with us Dylan William, a Meritus Professor of Educational Assessment at University College London, who has also kindly accepted to share with us an expert article about formative assessment, which is available on our website, and Javier Sancha English and science teacher in a primary and infant school at Lumine San Gregorio in Aguilar, the campus of Spain, and among others, any twinning ambassador. So before leaving the floor to our speakers, some technical information for you. During the webinar you can post your comments and questions in the chat box. Also please note that this webinar session is being recorded and the recording and the slides of the presentation will be available this week on the webinar webpage on the school education gateway. So again, thank you very much to our speakers for joining us this afternoon and I end it over to Professor William. Thank you, Eleonora. So in the time we have available, I'd like to talk to you about why I think formative assessment should be a priority for every school, every college, and every teacher. And it's really very simple. The need for formative assessment comes from two simple ideas, a principle about learning and an uncomfortable fact about the world. The principle about learning comes from the work of David Azubel, who 50 years ago said, if I had to reduce all of educational psychology to just one principle, I would say this, the most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. As obtained this and teach accordingly. In other words, we should start our teaching from where our students are, not where we would like them to be. Why is this so hard? Because our students do not learn what we teach. So our guilty secret as teachers is that we teach these wonderful lessons and the students do not learn what we teach. Now I want to stress that I'm using learning in a very precise sense here. Learning as defined by psychologists like Paul Kirschner and others is a change in long term memory. When people hear that definition, they often object because they think it's more than memorization. It is. But everything that we know how to do, riding a bicycle, recognizing what our children look like, all those things are in memory. And the really important point is every teacher has had the experience of teaching something to a group of students. They seem to get it. They can do it tomorrow. But two weeks later, it looks like they've forgotten everything. So my argument would be that they have not learned it. Learning is a change in long term capability. And therefore, if students aren't able to do it at some point in the future, they haven't really learned it. So if we take that idea, then obviously, the fact that somebody could do something now does not mean they can do it in six weeks time. But if they can't do it now, it's highly unlikely they'll be able to do it in six weeks time. So the big idea of formative assessment is the decisions we take in the classrooms should be driven by what sense we are making of what our students are thinking. And it's such an obvious idea. But the trouble is that teachers all over the world do this in a way that doesn't give them what they need. So when I was teaching back in the 1970s, when I first started teaching in London, the decision I made most often every single day was this. Do I need to go over this point one more time or can I move on to the next page? I would make that decision dozens of times every day. How? I would make up a question, ask the students, maybe six of the students would raise their hands. I'd choose one of those students, and she'd give me the correct answer. And I would say, good, and move on. And that's not very smart when you think about it. Because I'm making a decision about the learning needs of a diverse group of 35 or 40 students based on the responses of one or two confident individuals. I'm pretty sure that if 40 years ago somebody had asked me, is what that one confident student said a good guide to what's happening in the heads of the other 39 students in that classroom, I would have said no. But the point is, nobody did ask me that question. So I did what teachers all over the world still do, which is to make a decision about the learning needs of a diverse group of 30 or 40 students based on the responses of one or two confident volunteers. And that cannot be very smart. So the big idea of formative assessment is that if teachers have better evidence, they'll make better decisions. And if they make better decisions, we'll get better learning. And the really important starting point here is to start with the idea of building plan B into plan A. In other words, we design our lessons with checkpoints. And if the students aren't with us, we'll move on. It's a very simple idea. It's just very hard to do in practice. Now that's the intuitive case for formative assessment. There's a very strong empirical case now as well. So if you look at the research evidence all over the world, on feedback and other aspects of formative assessment, it turns out that no matter which country you're looking at, which age of students, which school subject, when teachers pay attention to this process, students learn more. And if you're interested, this list of research studies here, each of these is a review of research. And between them, these 18 studies draw together about 5000 different research reports on the effects of feedback and other aspects of formative assessment. So now we have a very coherent picture of the research, when teachers pay attention to this idea, when teachers find get better evidence about what's happening in their students heads, then students learn more. Now this idea of formative assessment is interpreted differently by different people. So I've just stressed that I think it's about teachers making decisions minute by minute and day by day in the classroom. In the United States, the term is often associated with the work of Richard DeFore and his colleagues, where the idea is that we would actually give formal formative assessments once every six to 10 weeks. And those things are useful. You know, we need to be finding out whether students are making progress. But the difficulty is that that often arrives too late to do anything with it. But I'm very happy to call that formative assessment. But to clarify the conversation, I think it's useful to distinguish different kinds of formative assessment. So I find it quite useful to think about long cycle, medium cycle and short cycle formative assessment. So the long cycle stuff is characterized by across a term or a semester or a teaching unit, typically four weeks to one year length cycle, because then you can monitor student achievement, other students learning what they're meant to be learning, and you can also use it to align your curriculum. Are we teaching the right things to enable our students to progress? It's often also important to share the criteria for success with our students. I often ask teachers, if you use a letter grading system like A, B, C, D, F, if a student gets a grade C, do they say I got a C? Or do they say she gave me a C? And in many countries, students are much more likely to say she gave me a C. And that's because the student doesn't really understand the criteria for success. The student thinks that the grade given by the teacher is somehow a judgment about that student's likability or something else completely unrelated to learning. So one of the things that we find very useful is to involve students more in the process. Within and between teaching units, typical cycle length for one to four weeks, resulting in what Richard Stiggins calls student involved assessment. The idea that assessment should be something that is done with students, not to them. And both of these long cycle and medium cycle formative assessment practices are helpful. But the biggest impact on student achievement comes when it's done within and between lessons, minute by minute and day by day. Because the big idea then is that you actually increase the level of engagement. You get information from the students and therefore makes them more engaged and the teacher can make their teaching more responsive to students' needs. So the big idea here is that all three kinds of formative assessment are important. But the biggest impact comes with the short cycle. The reason that's important is because it's actually much harder to change the short cycle stuff because it's involving changing teacher habits rather than the long cycle and the medium cycle which is involving data. Another way to think about this is in terms of the strategies of formative assessment. So the framework that we found most useful is to think about three processes, where the learner is going, where they are right now and how to get there, and different kinds of people teachers, peers and students in the classroom. And that gives us a box of nine cells. I could discuss each of these nine cells separately but we found it useful to group some of them together. So the first grouping is clarifying, sharing and understanding learning intentions. Teachers being clear about what it is they want the students to learn and sometimes sharing those ideas with the students. Now unfortunately in many countries this has led to a practice whereby teachers think they have to tell the students what the learning intention is at the beginning of the lesson. That may be a good idea, it may not. I'm thinking, I'm very clear in my own thinking that the teacher needs to be clear about what the purpose of that activity is, what learning will result. But whether you choose to share that with the students and if so at what point could be the beginning of the lesson, the middle or the end of the lesson, is a professional judgment by the teacher. So the teacher needs to be clear about this whether it's helpful to tell the students about it is a separate decision. So I'm not in favor of a rule that says to every teacher every single lesson must start with a learning intention. That seems to be a recipe for uninspired and uninspiring teaching. The second strategy we call eliciting evidence of learning. Some people call it questioning but we use this phrase eliciting evidence of learning to underscore the fact that it's all the ways that teachers can get evidence about student achievement. Sometimes you might ask questions, sometimes you might make a statement and expect students to respond, sometimes you might just observe how the student is completing a task. So sometimes just noticing is a good way of eliciting evidence of learning. The third strategy we call providing feedback that moves learners forward. Why do we phrase it like that? Well, back in 1998 Paul Black and I wrote a book called Inside the Black Box and in it we suggested that feedback was generally more helpful in the form of comments rather than schools or grades and to their credit many teachers follow that advice. Unfortunately, a lot of the comments the students were getting were not that helpful. They were along the lines of this would have been a better piece of work if you had done the following things but you didn't so it isn't. The trouble with the word feedback is people look at the last four letters B, A, C, K and they think that feedback should be backward looking or as Douglas Reeves once pointed out it's like the difference between getting a medical and a post-mortem. Too many of the feedback comments that students get are more like a post-mortem than a medical. So the big idea here is the main purpose of feedback is to move learning forward. The idea is that feedback helps the students do a better job on some task in the future rather than looking at what went wrong in the past or to put it another way. The purpose of feedback is to improve the student not just to improve the work. The last two strategies underscore the fact that Rick Stiggins has said many times the most important decisions taken in classrooms are not taken by teachers they're taken by students. So it doesn't matter how good your feedback is if your students have no desire to learn you're wasting your time we have to activate students as learning resources for one another and activate students as owners of their own learning. And in a way this last strategy is the most important because actually it's where all the others lead. The main purpose of feedback is to help the students give themselves better feedback so they can actually become what psychologists call self-regulating learners. So the big idea here is that students should be owning their own learning understanding when they're learning understanding when they're not and if necessary making decisions about how to do that better. Another way to think about this is that some people find useful is to think about these strategies of just simply using evidence of achievement to adapt what happens in classrooms to meet learner needs. It's about making classrooms more responsive to student needs. So one way I found useful in explaining this to teachers is to think about those first the second and third strategies eliciting evidence and feedback as being about responsive teaching. Then the bottom two rows concern the learner's role and one of the most interesting findings in our work with teachers is you can't change what teachers do in classrooms without changing what students do so the students have to be involved in this process. But I want to stress that none of this can start until the teacher is clear about what it is they want the students to learn. So before you can even begin the teacher has to be clear about the learning intentions. Formative assessment does not tell you what to teach. Formative assessment does not tell you how to teach. Formative assessment does not tell you what happens when learning takes place. All it does is give you a way of finding out what is happening in students heads so that you can make smarter decisions about what to do next. So more recent support for this idea comes from the work of the Educational and Diamond Foundation toolkit where they looked at different kinds of things we might do to improve achievement particularly for low achieving students and they thought that a good way of presenting this would be in terms of how much extra learning would you get, how much would it cost and how good is the evidence. And the top three things they found in terms of cost effect biggest impact on student learning for the smallest cost were three things. Feedback, metacognition what that's what psychologists call thinking about thinking and self-regulated learning and peer tutoring. In case you're interested I included the other things they looked at in the slides but I want to draw your attention to the relationship with formative assessment. What was the first one? Feedback. What was the second one? Metacognition and self-regulated learning. What was the third one? Peer tutoring. So the three most cost effective strategies according to the review conducted by the Education and Diamond Foundation are three of the five strategies of formative assessment. What about the other two? Well you can't give feedback until you find out what's going wrong so you have to elicit evidence of learning and you don't know what evidence to collect until you're clear about the learning intentions so you have to clarify share and understand the learning intentions. So these five strategies seem to be a minimum set of the most powerful strategies for improving student achievement. In other words if all you care about is improving exam scores you don't care about creating productive citizens or the quality of learning if all you want to do is to boost test scores then these five strategies appear to be the best way to do that. Now obviously these strategies are quite vague and can be implemented in many different ways so one of the things we've done with teachers is to distinguish between strategies and techniques. So when we talk about implementing classroom formative assessment we take the five strategies and for each of these strategies we describe to teachers a number of practical techniques. So for example if you want students to understand what they're meant to be doing one technique we found very powerful is to give students a scoring guide or some of some people call a rubric and then they give students an anonymous piece of students work and then say to the students what feedback would you give this student to help them improve their work? And the reason this is very powerful is because that forces the students to actually look at the rubric in a different way and it's less emotionally challenging because they're not applying it to their own work they're applying it to the work of somebody they do not know and so the sneaky thing about this is that students then come to understand the rubric in the context of somebody else's work and when they've done that they can then apply it to their own work. The idea of eliciting evidence one practical technique is what we call an all student response system so many teachers use many whiteboards many teachers ask students to vote using an electronic voting system I actually think those things are probably unnecessary because I quite like the idea of students just answering one A, B, C, D or E by holding it one, two, three, four or five fingers. Now people who sell the electronic voting system say you can record every single response but I don't think that's necessarily a positive thing. If we want to create a classroom where students feel okay by making mistakes I don't think we should be recording every single one of them so that's why I think in terms of building plan B into plan A a really good idea when you're planning a lesson is to have a checkpoint in the middle of the lesson where you ask a multiple choice question and get every student can answer A, B, C, D or E and you can make a quick decision about whether to move forward or they go back and explain something a second time. The idea is we're making those decisions on the basis of every student response rather than just the confidence students who want to share their thinking with us. In terms of feedback a nice technique that was developed by a teacher called Charlotte Kerrigan in London she'd been giving comments rather than grades and scores and but she was still unhappy with how much attention her students were giving to these comments so this was a 10th grade class they don't have a piece of writing on Shakespeare and she wrote her comments on strips of paper rather than writing all the students work and then each group of four students received back their four essays and the four comments and their task was match the comments to the essays and the reason this is so smart is because the teacher has got the students to look at the comments in a different way because now they don't know whose whose comment is whose so there's no emotional engagement when they first pick up that comment because they don't know whether it's their comment or not. Students is learning resources for one another the research on practice testing now shows that it's very beneficial just testing yourself it can be hugely productive for learning but a way to actually make it even more powerful is students can complete a test under test conditions but then students meet together in groups of three or four and between them their task is to come up with the best composite response so in other words what's the best test paper we can compare complete as a group and finally as a technique for promoting self-assessment one thing that students can do is to be encouraged to reflect on their practice and the piece of work you just done what was easy what was difficult and what was interesting about the task and teachers have told us when they engage students in this process of reflecting our task they ask clearer sharper and more focused questions so one teacher said to me my students used to say things like I can't do quadratics when there's a my I can't do quadratics the teacher would say what's the problem I can't what can't you do the student would say I can't do any of it and the teacher said now they say things like I can't do quadratics when there's a minus in front of the x squared so this process of reflection can help students help the teachers more effectively so we can come up with more of these techniques but I think what we're also learning is the hardest part is helping teachers use these techniques in their classrooms and so the model we've developed we call content then process first figure out what you want to help teachers change and then figure out how to change that so the evidence I've talked about I've talked to a bit about the strategies and techniques I now want to talk about how to support teachers in making these changes and we think five things seem to be especially important the first one is giving teachers choice on what to work on every teacher should choose for themselves which aspects of formative assessment will be the most effective in their classroom encouraging teachers to adapt these techniques to fit their own classrooms because what works in one classroom may not work in the same way in a different classroom giving teachers permission to change slowly changing the way you ask questions giving students more time to answer a question involves changing habits and that can't happen quickly and the last two parts are basically accountability and support and we think these are really two sides of the same coin so we sometimes call this support of accountability what is needed from every single teacher I think is a commitment to carry on improving their practice even if they're already good to be even better and an agreement to focus on the things that make a difference to students that's where the research evidence comes in so the teachers don't waste their time on things that don't help and what leaders need to do is four things the first is to create expectations for that continual improvement practice every teacher needs to get better not because they're not good enough because they can be even better the leader needs to keep their focus on formative assessment because that's what the research evidence shows has the biggest impact on student achievement they need to give teachers time to work on this and in fact this is the greatest barrier of all in almost every experiment we've done well we've actually given teachers time to think they get better the hardest thing of all is just giving teachers time to think and then supporting risk-taking and every principle I've ever met says they support risk-taking but they don't really because they don't things to go wrong so if you really want to support a risk-taking culture I would suggest as my advice to leaders is don't praise people for risks that pay off praise people for risks when they're taken not when anybody knows the result that is the best way to create a risk-taking culture and the evidence from randomized controlled studies with large numbers of schools 140 schools in one study was that when teachers get given time to work on this the rate of student learning goes up by about 25 percent at a cost of roughly two dollars per student per year so right now classroom formative assessment is the single most cost-effective thing that we can think of that we know of to raise student achievement if you want to find out more there's some resources there some books there that you can actually look at and there's also some resources for teachers but the big idea here is giving teachers time to reflect on the evidence they get about the students progress and taking action to do something about that seems to be the most powerful thing we can do to help students make more progress one teacher said it's about making the teachers hearing better and about making the students voices louder now one objection might be how do we know that this is not just this year's new thing well I don't think it can be because I focus on formative assessment encourages teachers to look at two things one what did I just do with my students to what do they learn and as long as teachers are reflecting on the relationship between what did I do and what did my students learn then they will always be able to advance their practice thank you thank you very much yes I have a mood to behavior yes good good afternoon everybody thank you Eleonora and and thank you D-Land because it was really really interesting what you tell us about formative assessment lady on on my presentation will be to to talk about formative assessment this on a practical way is trying to give you examples about how I share the assessment process with my student okay remember if you want and you want me or send a question you have the chat here to to say any kind of questions well first of all I want you to talk about my school okay my school is colegio sangria where it is in a small village or town in the north of Spain we have just 700 students from babies to 18 years old okay so that means we have the whole range of students of in a in education before university we also have a bilingual section it is said that some subjects are taught but English like science or arts and club we are calling like Microsoft so cases cool because of the use we we do it about Microsoft tools we have a bio program from year five till 18 years old second second of high school by it means bring your own device it is said our students have their own device in the school we are also in a team in a school and we have the budget of all hundred and plus of European excellence there is a website of the school just in case you want to have a look about that okay I'm going to talk to you about assessment in three concrete moments first of all the previews assessment the assessment I do when I start a project or a unit or a topic with my students then how I assess the assess the daily daily process okay how do I assess every day in my class and then finally how do I do the the formative assessment with them and how did I give feedback when I start a project I used to I used to use sorry thinking routines okay because I need to know two things what do my students know what do they already know and what do they want to learn sometimes it's very important not to know because we are set we are set all the time that it's very important to know what my students know about the topic it also it's very very very important to learn what do they want to learn because in my game I always said the same the same thing when an example when I'm talking about that imagine I am going to do a project about animals with my students and I have to teach them mammals maybe my students want to learn mammals about their favorite animal it's like the horse or the dog if I didn't ask it to them I didn't know so maybe I will start talking about mammals using as an example the cow which is something very very important okay so this is something I used to do it at the beginning okay because and why do it through a thinking routine because sometimes the problem is it's not easy for them to think maybe if I just say to them okay let me know what do you know about this topic they just look at me with my staring eyes and saying what do I have to say I don't know so with this kind of things and structures I can say them and I can trace to them a way to to to think I'm going to present you this as an initial assessment what is a thinking routine thinking routine are basic structures that make our our students to think in a structured way in a topic it says maybe they don't really know how to think about it so I give them the steps to think on it and to give a very very very good structure opinion to the teacher or to the whole class okay if we do it before starting a topic or a project we can get important information about the students knowledge and interest remember sometimes it's very important what's the pre knowledge of our students but also it is very important to you know our students interest on the topic because on that way we can drive our project easily to them okay and also if I know what's the knowledge of my students and I know what are their interests I can redesign the project okay sometimes I can design a topic or a project what I think in my house when I am preparing at my office that I can think it's the most amazing project or unit or something like this that sometimes when I offer this to my students maybe it's not related with their knowledge and their interest and it is not good when they are doing so if I ask in a previous way I will redesign it and offer it a better idea okay I'm going to offer you a couple of I'm going to offer you a couple of examples of thinking routines that can be used in as an initial assessment and also you've already signed these thinking routines they could be also a powerful tool to use it along the whole topic or project first one is KWL okay KWL is a thinking routine that can help us with the assessment about along the whole project yeah from the beginning through every day okay first of all with a K what did I know about the project we can about the topic sorry we can use this at the beginning of the project we can create a very big template of this in the class and give the students some post-its or pieces of paper so they can write there what do they know about animals, machines, whatever it was okay then at the same moment we are going to have them okay very good this is what you already know about that now what do you want to learn okay so I am assessing their interest and they can say to me how I can write my project to make it more effective and more near to their interests okay also I can use this every day because at the next day when I go to my class and I start again the project or the task I can say okay very good let's review what do you want to learn yesterday and now let's check if we have already know and learned about that so I can change the post-it from the W to the K and also I can add more things on W for next days okay and at the end of the project I will go to L what did I or what have I learned along this project okay and there my students will say to me what they have already learned about that and I can check not with a test not with a composition not with something really for me their learnings sometimes they learn they learn lots of things which are not very formal and they can sell to me there okay another one this is something I found in the internet the picture and I already signed to convert and created their a thinking routine it's like like I will I call the triple chocolate cake to a chance okay with the following graphic organizer the picture that you have there maybe the letters are very small but I'm going to explain to you you can assess also the beginning okay and also you can assess along the project as I have explained to you in the KWL picture thinking routine again so they are at the base of the bowl students also we can create a template of this in our in our class at the base I will write the topic okay the topic animals then on the bowl I um I will just think on the base my students have on this topic it says I will just write down there with my students what do they already what do they know about the topic okay the previous learn the previous knowledge sorry or the or their interests again that's great then if I go to the brown chocolate brown chocolate is not real chocolate because it has got chocolate and milk okay so something that I can doubt there every day my students at the end of the lesson can paste or stick or write down the doubts they have at the end of the lesson so I can take it there at the very beginning of the lesson next day and solve the doubts with them okay white chocolate white chocolate is not real chocolate again is something different than chocolate so there students can stick the posties and the things with the things that surprise about the topic that the project the things that we are doing on this project so there I can check and talk with them what it is surprising to them and finally black chocolate black chocolate is real chocolate the the the good one so there the students will stick the things that they are learning along the project we can do black chocolate at the end of the project to assess everything or we can do it on a daily basis so I can check what they are learning there you have three links that you can check about thinking routines here is thinking routines were created and or were studied a lot by Project Zero of Harvard University there you can find lots of information theoretical one and lots of practical things this link about Alice Beagle is a really nice teacher who has lots of things here and here is the website of our bilingual section of our school that you can have this and other ones that we have already translate into English to be used are they checking the process so we have assessed at the beginning and now we are going to check the process it is very important especially when we are using team-based learning or when we are using project-based learning or when we are using any kind of learning where the student is the center of the of the learning it is very important to check on a daily basis what our students are doing of learning really important is not to miss any one of them okay sometimes if I check on a regular basis daily base I will check and I will know what are the doubts and problems on that mean not at the end of the project know when I give the final assessment and also something which is very important because it's one of our key competencies is learn how to learn okay how they are learning and solving their own problems very good to assess this on the process and on a regular base I have these the learning diary okay the learning diary is the best way of practice of the is the best way I can practice my daily assessment okay the students develop the key skill of learn to learn and I can check easily how do I do I have these questions served with them I can do that in different ways it says I can have I can have a share notebook that is in the middle of the group I can have a short document via Google Drive or OneDrive or Word or in my case I use one note so in the collaboration space of the one note students go there through their own groups and they have these four questions these five questions okay I will just explain to you how how they are like this first of all they have to write the date okay yes so because it's a diary so if it is a diary they need to organize they're learning on a regular basis date then I will ask who is taking the role the different roles I have in the class okay why because if the problems are related with the responsibilities of each one of the roles I'm not going to talk with the whole group I will try to help each role okay so then the aim okay what's the aim of the day okay what do they have to do or learn today what they have to what they do okay it is very important because when they are working in groups on the same project you have less than 50 minutes it's very difficult to sit down and work with the whole group all the time so because it is very difficult that I need to know what they have done at the end of the lesson okay what they have they learned and what problems do they have at the same time I am asking how do they solve so I can know if they are solved it or not what happens with the document at the end of the day I can check it everything and next day I start from here okay I start from here talking with the groups going back in something that maybe it should be better explained or something like that okay as I said to you you can use a notebook which is always in the school and teacher can check it or you can use using the ICT with where to recommend one node Google Drive okay assessment equals reflection when I arrived at the end of a project I did this kind of assessment again I've never assessed yes with a final mark and on my own I everything we did in my class we assessed it from three different points of view first of all the teachers assessment I offered them a a rubric so in this is I when I offer my point of view of the final product or node what do did my students learn from my point of view from the point of view of the person who knows what was the maximum I really want them to get self assessment in which each student offer their point of view of their knowledge okay how did I learn and what did I learn in my final product okay and finally because I always work in in groups I need to offer them the opportunity of assess not other ones product or other ones learning now about how did they learn together how did they work as a group and most of all how can they interpret okay I'm going to show you quickly how did I do because I have instruments to do it everything first of all the teachers assessment I offer this kind of fabric I always do it in mother tongue because I think if I offer them the opportunity in mother tongue when I am assessing is better than doing in English despite my subjects arts in English because if not I will miss lots of information which are which is really really important to me okay we always offer them at the beginning of the project so when I started the project or a topic I'm saying to my students that this is what you need to do what you need to learn then self assessment this is the instrument I use it to I use it to do with my final to assess where my students assess themselves sorry at the end of the project or topic they have an assessment lesson it's an assessment lesson in where we only assess students assess themselves there so this is one I have to it's not first assessment target the self assessment target is then using the rubric it says a student has in front of him the rubric and things that are around the target are the same topics that are in the rubric okay so the student have a look and they say okay I get here or I get there and in the back part of this document which is the second part they have to offer me that points and why do they give themselves these points and how they can improve that point okay this is how is the final assessment self assessment target done okay students with that if the color part is bigger is because they think they work is better if it is smaller it's because they they do it wrong and this is the Pierce assessment okay Pierce assessment here you have four parts okay because normally my groups are made of four people so they have to write the wrong name here and they have to give them points how do I do that okay I am as a teacher I only walk around the class listening what's taking place on each group but I've never said nothing about that so they have to talk about these points and they can give four points of each topic to each student so three students talk about one and offer and giving them opinions and points at the end this first one say okay I'm I'm agree I think I have to improve that and things like this so they sign the final this document okay and in the back part they'll write to me the different the different things they talk about to justify the the marking okay if there are no four signatures here it's because someone is not really agree with their the discussion so this is when the teacher sit down with them and try to talk and moderate the the discussion and get an agreement to everybody and one of the things that they ask to me is to say because we are suffering this kind of remote learning time and I'm just paced here please like to take hope to give out how we are doing now in the school with the remote learning just in case it's useful for you well we use Microsoft Teams here in Microsoft Teams we have the opportunity of sending that assignments to them give a daily feedback to them and we can set the rabbits here same folders and communicate we have live online sessions every day with the students here how do I assess them okay is using one note I have three options here rather than Seba I give them the topics and the contents then here in collaboration space is the place in where the students can work together and as I talk to each other and create final products together then I have their personal notebooks okay students have their personal notebooks in where they give me the answer so the things I'm asking in the assignment and then we use forms by these kind of questionnaires they are not only giving them just questions we try to work on skills more than on contents and also we use Flipgrid in where we can share videos and also not only saving videos I can check what my students are doing because they are not giving an answer to me they are explaining to me that answer to a video and I can give a back them recording videos sorry I forgot something here it's just going to be a second because maybe you make it's you can review the presentation later and you can contact me through Twitter if you want and ask me more questions after that the final mark of my students because at the end here in Spain we have to offer them a final mark in the report it's that 60% is created by the teacher assessment 20% is created by the self-assessment and another 20% is created by the your assessment okay your assessment and self-assessment uh sorry I will go to the end just to find um to to to finish assessment is the engine we drive students learning if we don't use the assessment to create the process of our students learning it's not going to be uh the right way so thank you so much you can contact me through Twitter if you want and it was a pleasure to be here yes with so many people listening about our experience at Colleges and the body thank you so much thank you very much I hear and I think that yeah we still have time for questions and I just wanted to really thank everybody it's incredible to see how many people have joined us and decided to join us this afternoon and it was great to see the interaction between participants and um I really would like to loop space for specific questions if any or if perhaps Dylan you you would like to add something change the second part of the presentations there's so many comments right now it's incredible I think it was a nice example yes Dylan yes thought that what I thought what Javier did was to do a nice example of a couple of the things that I talked about so he's talking about activating students as owners of their own learning he's talking about activating students as learning resources for one another and he's brought in the feedback as well as the eliciting evidence so I think that was a very nice example of a way to integrate all these strategies into a single activity yes thank you I picked a question that perhaps is summing up some other question that our participants might have and the question is do you have any recommendation or strategy about formative assessment for online teaching and more specifically about formative assessment or practical workshops in vocational training well I think the important thing to remember is that the principles of learning are the same in online and in face-to-face settings so formative assessment is even more important in online settings because you can't rely on seeing your students you can't rely on that kind of interaction that you get in a face-to-face setting so I think this idea of building plan B into plan A when you do a piece of explanation of something to your students online then you could use a multiple choice question to check they've understood it there's also I think a different kind of usage which is if you by using a flipped model so for example you might tell your students to go and work through chapter 3 of a textbook for example and say that when the group comes together the next day that you're going to ask them a question about this so you might begin the session with a question with a key question about what they've been studying and there are two benefits here the first is that it gives the teacher some idea of whether the students have understood the things they were meant to be reading but it also tells the students you better do the reading because if they know that the teacher is going to ask them a question at the very beginning of the next session they're much more likely to do the reading because they don't get the answer wrong so I think just formally building in opportunities to collect evidence and make decisions about what to do next I think is even more important in online learning than it is in face-to-face teaching Dylan perhaps another question for you but also of course for a year and one participant is asking how should teachers deal with the pressure to give summative assessment in combination with the need of formative assessment well I would say that summative and formative are not different kinds of assessment I think the words summative and formative are most usefully used to describe the conclusions we draw so if I give students a test and I grade the test and I give a student a score of 75% that's a summative conclusion the student has mastered 75% of the content of this test but if I can look at their test responses and I see that this student is having a particular difficulty with a scientific concept such as the gas laws that gives me something to work with so any assessment produces evidence and that evidence can be used formatively or summatively so I think the really important thing is to get into the habit of trying to use the same information both for formative and for summative purposes Javier somebody was asking whether students are involved in creating the rubric well I think it's a really really great point to do it that the problem now is that when I'm talking to you about all of this I'm talking about my year 5 students in most of the cases it is the first time they work through projects and they work with this kind of assessment so I think it's not really easy to them to understand how they are implied what they used to do it is maybe if they want to add any kind of topics to the rubric I gave to them they can add and we can talk and share it in the assembly we have democratic assemblies so they can offer me ideas about how can I improve the rubric the giving one the one I gave to them is the one I did it it is very difficult on that point because it is the first time they start working like this maybe 2 or 3 years later when they are really used to these kind of things they could be a really really great point some teachers use this process they call co-construction where the teacher constructs the rubric with the students but I think that's fine if it works well but it's dangerous because the students do not know enough about the subject to know what good work looks like so I think the idea of giving students some say in how you develop the rubric can be valuable but the teacher has to be in charge of the process so what I suggest is that the teacher shares some examples of work from students from previous years anonymously and then asks the students are some of these pieces of work better than other pieces of work that come up with ideas about which is the best piece of work which is the not so good piece of work and then the teacher says so what can we say about these pieces of work that are better so that the teacher can then draw out from the students' ideas but the important point is the teacher is still in charge the teacher is still making sure that whatever the rubric looks like is something that is that matches the sense of quality about work that the teacher has the teacher is an expert the students are not experts and therefore they can't be in the role of deciding what makes a good piece of writing what makes a good piece of science what makes a good piece of mathematics they don't know enough to make that judgement I think that you just answered most of the questions we are listening of course so it's impossible to tackle all the questions and cover completely this topic in just one hour so I would like again to thank our speakers for joining us this afternoon and now I would like to remember everyone that we would truly appreciate if you could fill in our feedback survey and at the end of the feedback survey you will find the link to download the certificate of participation I will leave the slide on for the next 24 hours if you have any issue of technical nature you can get in touch with the School Education Gateway I would like to remember that we will share the recording of this presentation and the slides will be available on the School Education Gateway this week if Javier would you like to add something I will just I think there is lots of information that we have given to them in a few times so if they can contact me whenever they want to ask me and I can give examples of things like this thank you so much for all the attention and to look about the small experience I have in this kind of small school in the north of Spain thank you very much Javier I will share the link to this with participants this webinar was also part of our online course and you can find more information on Teacher Academy so once again thank you very much Javier and so that's Teacher Academy webinar you're welcome


Everybody forced here ripping 20 22 flawless collegiate football hobby 1 box number 17 left side serial numbers Let's do the random. Good. Look Seven times on a random six and one one two three four five six and seven Sal C Down the Michael I and then the number seven times as well one Two three four five six and seven 15 down to five Dude frowns of the Euro set is really good Sal C 15 der word 21 Nick C 20 Jacob P 25 Nathan Q 17 and Nick C 7 Gregory M 12 Stephen B 10 William L 6 James B 1 Gregory M 23 Sean H 14 Ray a 8 Michael S 16 John M 18 Daniel B 13 Penguins C4 Gregory M 3 Mauricio 11 Brian H 22 Scott F 24 Lauren E 19 Jamie P 2 Gregory M 9 and Michael I 5. Let's get these results posted and I'll get you a Lincoln chat and we'll keep rolling here do like my closest aunt like Loves the Christmas story or a Christmas Yeah, put us down on the pole You'll shoot your eye out That's it's a good movie classic. It's definitely it's a classic a lot of people say it's the best I prefer the comedy. I like Christmas vacation though. Here we go y'all call out the hits as we go as well Who's hit is who's as we go along here? We already have a plan for us Dude that We used to do like polar express and make me hot chocolate and stuff. Yeah, that's a good newer one newer It's like it's like 15 years old now Tom Hanks singing about hot chocolate. It's great Okay, here we go y'all floor stress is worth a watch. I think it's on HBO Max right now I think HBO Max is a lot of good Christmas movies right now Or holiday movies Nick bonito 8 of 10 on the patch card 8 spot ray a triple patch Kyler Hertz and Baker 13 of 25 Daniel B with a 13 spot Oklahoma QB's rookie patch card number to one of 20 Sam Howell James B with the one spot Right Yeah, I poor trust is fine. I wouldn't say it's great I'd say it's it's above average rookie auto Devante price one of 20 James B again with the one spot Don't do that Taylor Don't be talking about die hard and love actually don't don't do those things Home alone. We haven't said that yet, but home alone the first two. Oh, man The first two are they're so good both of them. Yeah, I'm going to is one of the better sequels. There is RPA Carson strong 9 of 20 9-spot Gregory M Someone trying to say home was a Christmas movie I'm like it plays Christmas movie the entire time and it is centered around that holiday like it is a straight-up Christmas movie The family goes on a Christmas vacation And he is alone during Christmas David O'Jabbo auto eight out of 20 ray a with the eight spot Got a sauce Gardner auto one of five team logo signatures one spot again James B a few numbers hitting a lot of the cards here sauce to five a Bo Jackson auto nine of ten nine spot Gregory M Bo knows baby. Yeah, but the message behind home alone is to be together on Christmas like it's a Christmas movie I didn't think that that was taken till I saw it on the internet. Oh my god All right, we got a DAC sapphire 20 of 20 Nick see what the 20 spot That's awesome Taylor Joe Montaigne 18 of 20 18 spot John M and a Drake London RPA on the back 24 of 25 going to the 24 spots Scott F a high-numbered RPA Nice London nice USC patch there and that'll do it for the break. Thanks again everybody another one of those is coming up next


Hello my name is Natalia and I'm coming from Indonesia. I welcome you all in this virtual open day. I studied in Indonesia. I took my psychology in Catholic University of Atma Jaya on the year 2003 but now in 2012 I come to this Tilburg University to continue my master degree. I took my master in social psychology because I think that the master here is awesome. So far it's been a great choice actually. I don't regret it at all. I've been seeing different subjects like work group psychology so you understand a little bit about how to actually deal with teams and I studied back at I'm sorry I've worked back in my country so I already have work experience. So when you actually see the theoretical part and you link it to the practical experience you already have it's really amazing how it really works like that. You learn more concepts or more strategies that obviously I will take back to this practical scenario. Well Tilburg University provides you with a comprehensive explanation about social psychology in an exciting yet different way. What I like the most here is that there are no standard lectures but every class is made as a creative workshop so we can learn from our own experience and from our interactions and discussions into class and really it adds great value from the point of view of every one of us. In most of the courses you will do an analysis or a review of a journal but after that you can conduct a research a mini research that will grabs the whole idea about the journal that you just read and then you can understand better about the theory that you just learn. And I also have another course which I think is one of the most interesting ones for me which is occupational health psychology. In my country stress or the well-being of employees is not an issue I think we have basic needs that have to be covered and well you don't worry about other stuff such as if they're stressed or not they're more worried about having a job a secure job so actually jumping to that dimension receiving this first-world perspective is really an individual experience to me and that's why I like for example that course I like all the other courses I also see leadership and organizations I also see like personal psychology all about the different processes within HR and well there's a lot of scientific research as well which was also very new to me because I never thought there was research in organizational psychology field so that's also really really interesting. My thesis will be devoted to the subject of projection of preferences and priorities in negotiation and I'm going to do experiment in the lab it's for the first time in my life and I'm really excited about it because in Russia we are mostly concentrated on surveys so we just give people the questionnaires and they feel it and then we analyze the data but here it's like a unique experience once again to go to the lab and to see how it works. Thank you for coming for the Open Virtual Day was nice to see you and to hear you maybe if you have some questions please send them by email or you can post them also in the Facebook page. Thank you very much bye!


So there's this ledge spot that I've seen people post clips of and I've always wondered where it is because it looks like a really fun spot, really nice ledge. And I seen someone had posted a clip and in the background was a bridge that looked awfully familiar. So I did a little bit of Google Earth recon, found the spot, came here today, checked it out. Pretty cool spot tucked away off the road, away from the public eye. I brought my broom. I think I have some wax in the car. So yeah, I'm going to have a nice little solo session today. Sometimes it's good to skate by yourself. I'll talk a bit about that later. But first, I've got to get the sweeping. Actually, you needed some wax. And I came up across this sandwich bag and look what it is. Wax.  What a great spot. I don't get it. I don't get this trick. I don't understand it. But you know what the irony is here? Back in like 2021, I could backsmith. I backsmithed down the three Hubba, if you will, at El Serino. Dan filmed it, but I just can't seem to remember how to do it. Like you're supposed to have your board touch the ledge as you slide or grind across the ledge, but I keep lifting it up. I don't know how to put my foot down without my heel touching the edge of the ledge. I'm out of breath, fell over, hid my head and I got a palm scratch. I'm done with this one. One of the main reasons why I enjoy skating alone sometimes is because you have this kind of attention and clarity that you can spend on like concentrating on your own type of skateboarding. I'm not saying that skating with friends is bad or isn't helpful because it definitely is. You guys seen how my capabilities skateboarding are much greater when skating with Dan. But sometimes I feel like I'm kind of pressured to learn something on the spot real quick, you know, so I kind of get in my head and the makes that I do land like the tricks that I do land, I either like Hail Mary's like I'll just hail Mary one and like try or like I'll spend like 30, 40 attempts trying to land. So I feel like skating by yourself. You can really concentrate on what you want to learn. And if you film yourself skating alone, too, you're actually able to see yourself skate and see what your body is doing wrong if you need to correct anything like weight or foot position stuff like that. That's why I enjoy skating alone. Sometimes I'm as you guys seen, I'm still trying to figure out the backsmith. Honestly, like I know someone that has a really good backsmith shouts out skateboarding Jordan. His backsmiths are like dipped like I've seen him backsmith and the nose of the board is like dragging along the ground. That's how I want to backsmith, but my body just won't allow me to. Another great reason why I think skating alone is good is because if you are introverted like myself, believe it or not, I'm pretty introverted. I'm an only child, so I'm quite used to doing things by myself. I grew up skating majority first part of my life without anyone. Like I'd go and skate by myself at the football field up the road that had like this three set and a couple of edges. I feel like skating alone has always been that kind of foundation for me. And you gain this kind of sense of connection with your skateboard as lame and as like Hollywood as that sounds. You gain like a better connection with your board. I don't know if you guys are going to think that's cringy, but I personally believe that I feel like I have more of a connection to my board and I'm able to concentrate and get in like the right mind state to like skate and like learn things when I'm alone. So yeah, that's cringy or not. But comment below if you kind of feel like you've had that experience where you're skating alone on the session, you're getting things done, you're learning things and you feel this kind of humbling feeling where it's like, OK, I feel like I'm like in the zone with my board. Another great thing too is like I get a lot of people DMing me and commenting saying that they're beginning like the beginners are learning to skate and they feel intimidated to go and skate at the park around people. And that's completely normal. I feel intimidated sometimes going to skate parks and LA, you know. So skating alone kind of gives you that confidence and backbone because then you know your capabilities when that time comes around to like going to the park when you feel comfortable after to go to a park and skate with people. You kind of already have that sense of foundation of skateboarding. So you're not learning on the spot. I want to make a video about doing all the tricks that I hate. Baxmyth being one of them. I don't hate the Baxmyth, though. I just feel like why? Why isn't my relationship with the Baxmyth as healthy as it is with the front Smith? You know, front Smith, I have in the bag. Like that's a trick I can do pretty much like first go. But Baxmyth is like a completely different ball game.  Another one is a hard flip.  Apart from that, there's the Baxmyth, the hard flip and the backside big spin I struggle with greatly. So, yeah, comment down below if you guys want to see that. That don't want park. What's the beach, Mr. Beach? Got some big bikes. Yeah, there's some big bikes. If you guys enjoyed the video, please leave a thumbs up. If you're new here, subscribe, check out evening mob.com, pick something up, three stickers of every order. And yeah, feel free to drop a comment below to if you think that skating alone is better or worse than skating with friends. But it's always a good time to skate with friends. So yeah, anyway, thanks for watching the video. Cheers if you've made it this far and I'll see you guys in the next one. I'm tired of this trigger man stuff in Tennessee. Now all the time while this stuff is going on, I called up another rodeo on my flip phone. Junior, I'll put you to call down the text. This is special order. The American Land of the London.


It's just so important to be able to tell a really good story. But how do we actually think about telling a good story? For me, it's really focusing on who are the audience? Who are you speaking to? And then think about the narrative. Try to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. This might look like presenting the problem, presenting the solution, and then what impact that solution will have. And another thing is just prep and plan.  Like I said, something really simple around presenting your roadmap or if it's trying to get that promotion that you want, harness that skill of being a good storyteller.


What is going on guys welcome back to the channel and I appreciate you being here today I want to talk about the recent announcement of Strike unique and exclusive weapons coming to Destiny 2 but before we get into it guys if you do enjoy the video leaving a like really helps me out also tell me down below in that comment section what your favorite strike exclusive piece of gear was from Destiny 1 so let's get into it on a recent Destiny 2 roadmap we can see that Strike unique rewards have been pushed back with the 1.1.4 update on March 27th next month the latest roadmap confirmed the change of dates and to be honest before recently we had no idea what these exclusive unique rewards were from Nightfalls I initially thought they had something to do with the emblems and ores they've already talked about but there has been confirmed to not be the case here is what Christopher Barrett said in regards to why the Nightfall unique rewards have been delayed with today's update we've moved a few items out to later releases this is because we are trying to ensure each feature we add hits a sufficiently high quality bar so while we really wanted to get Nightfall Strike unique weapons into your hands next week to come inside with Nightfall Scoring it's more important that each of these rewards live up to the difficulty it will take to earn them they have to be super cool so we're giving the artists extra time to make sure they are super cool so here for the first time Barrett states Strike unique weapons so it's basically confirmed also interesting is the fact he states these weapons will be difficult to earn and that the design team artists need more time making sure they're extra special I think pretty much this confirms that there won't be reskins which again is great news I'm also expecting there to be at least one unique weapon per Strike so what strikes do we have we have Exodus Crush, the inverted Spire, the Pyramidian, Satharvan's Song, the Arms Dealer, Lake of Shadows, the PS4 Exclusive, Tree of Probabilities and a Garden World now saying they might be one per Strike seems a little bit much but I actually believe it's in Bungie's best interest if strikes have unique rewards those unique rewards need to be different for sure let's take a look at the Strike exclusive weapons from Destiny 1 and to be honest there's actually more than I remember the Treads upon Stars which dropped from any Kaboom-themed Strike, the Imar-Gol Loo which is from the Echo Chamber and Undying Mind Strikes, the Baron's Ambition which was from the Fallen Saber Strike, the Devil's Dome which was from the Sepix Perfected, the Wretched Eye and the Abomination House Strikes, the Grasp of Malak which was from the Will of Quarters Strike this one I remember everyone grinding for for such a long time the Shadow Thief Strike offers the Does Not Bow we had the Darkblade Spite from the Sunless Cell Strike and the Stolen Whirl from the Winter Run Strike and there could be even more also many of these Strikes also offered exclusive class items and armor pieces so these Strikes offered more than just weapons as unique pieces so to expect a single weapon from every Strike in D2 isn't too much to ask really think about how they were in Destiny 1 so as we refold with Destiny 2 things are definitely starting to pick up with the recent changes to Nightfuls in terms of these new Emblems to Chase also with the additional addition of unique weapons also coming Strikes and Nightfuls could be a fun place to be and grind again the fact they state these weapons are going to be difficult to earn also is a great thing too not everybody's gonna have them what these weapons will be though we don't know at the moment I wouldn't mind seeing a few old beast return from Destiny 1 maybe an improved Grasp Malak that would be epic imagine a return of the Margo Loop the wannabe Fatebringer these Nightful unique rewards I've got a feeling will be great and I can't wait to see what they are at the moment they are planned to be released in May sometime and the exact date is not yet being released but when it does I will have you guys covered here on my channel as per usual but yeah guys tell me what you think about these Strike unique weapons coming to the game if you guys enjoyed the video leaving a like really does help me out remember tell me what your favorite Destiny 1 Strike exclusive piece of gear was thanks as always for stopping by and hopefully people I will see you on that next one


Hello, I'm Graham Stewart and I'm Chairman of the Education Select Committee in the House of Commons. The committee consists of 11 MPs, Labour, Liberal Democrat and Conservative. We're independent of government and in fact holding the government to account is a central part of what we do. The committee's job is to look at the policies, the administration and the expenditure of the Department of Education. We mainly do this through conducting enquiries. We gather written evidence from the public, from schools, teachers, social workers, parents and in fact anybody who chooses to write to us. Then we hold oral evidence sessions where we ask questions of a wide range of witnesses and that all helps us finalise a report which contains recommendations for government on how to improve what it's doing and the government then has to respond to us within two months. The committee chooses which areas to look at, so it's not constrained by government or told what to do, it can look at any area in the remit of the Department for Education. So that's education up to the age of 19, family and youth policy, children's services and childcare. Recent Education Committee enquiries have looked at teacher training and supply, the exam system, off-stead and inspection, services for young people and child protection amongst other things. Now as well as formal evidence, we hold seminars and private events where we meet young people, parents and others engaged with policy at the front line and indeed who have to live with the outcomes of those policies at the front line. And we try to get out of Westminster as much as possible. We've had great visits to York, various London boroughs, Doncaster, Rugby, Barnsley, Leicester, Birmingham and Tyneside. Hearing from the public makes our enquiries much more valuable so that we can produce better reports and it also is one of the most interesting and enjoyable parts of actually being on the committee. Please have a look at our website, look at our current enquiries and please then let us know what you think and do participate in any future enquiries, make submissions however short or long, make sure your voice is heard and that way we can make better recommendations to government where we can improve the world of education and childcare for the future.