May 9th, 2018 by Jakub Mastalerz

Supporting Educational Technology Research

Supporting Educational Technology Research Thumbnail

As you may know, Explain Everything was created in part to address educational research opportunities around mobile devices, multimedia creation, and formative assessment. Foundations in and around progressive, social constructivist teaching, learning, and communication continue to be woven into the fabric of the platform that we continue to develop and provide.

We were recently contacted by our friends Dr. Kevin Burden, from the University of Hull’s School of Education and Social Sciences, and Dr. Matthew Kearney, from the University of Technology Sydney’s School of Education about an interesting research project they are working on.

One way that we like to continue to engage in research and practice in education technology is to help connect researchers to practitioners, especially when the Explain Everything product can be involved and helpful. So right now, we’re sharing some information from Kevin and Matthew and inviting K-12 teachers and educators to participate (anonymously) in their study by completing a brief online survey.

This is completely voluntary, of course!

Below is more information from Dr. Burden and Dr. Kearney and a link to their survey.

Dear colleagues

We are researchers and academics from the University of Hull (UK) and the University of Technology Sydney (Australia), and currently we are exploring how we can support teachers and educators in selecting educational apps that are appropriate for teaching and learning. We have developed a framework for using mobile technologies and a set of practical resource to support this (see  www.mobilelearningtoolkit.com). One of the resources in this toolkit is a rubric to support teachers in evaluating the pedagogical value of the apps they use. We would like to ask for you support in helping us to validate this tool.

To do so we would like you to complete an evaluation of the Explain Everything that you are familiar with. The evaluation will take no more than ten minutes and is completed entirely online at the following address:

http://richprocter.co.uk/survey/mttep/rubric/

When you open the link you will see there is an opportunity to evaluate any app (see question 2). Please only evaluate Explain Everything for the purposes of this piece of research.  The evaluation is entirely anonymous and we collect no personal data that can identify you or your institution. This piece of research has been fully approved through the University of Hull’s ethics procedures. If you are happy to be interviewed at a later date there is an opportunity to state this at the end of the survey, but this is not compulsory.

We anticipate the data we collect from this exercise will enable us to validate the app evaluation rubric we have developed and we then plan to make it freely available as a web based resource that you can search and interrogate for apps based on their educational value. We will circulate further details about this when it is ready for release.

Thank you for taking the time to complete the evaluation survey and please contact us if you have any further questions or queries (see details below).

Professor Kevin Burden

School of Education and Social Sciences

Faculty of Arts, Cultures and Education

University of Hull

www.hull.ac.uk

k.j.burden@hull.ac.uk

Dr Matthew Kearney

School of Education

Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences

University of Technology Sydney

Matthew.Kearney@uts.edu.au