Redruth School: A Technology College is a large secondary school in central Cornwall in the UK. Redruth School’s students range in age from 11 to 18+, and it offers a wide variety of academic courses. The school states, “High quality ICT work, display and presentation should be an essential feature of every subject, and we must give our pupils and staff the skills, motivation and resources to achieve this.”
Improving marks in time for exams
The AVerVision355AF was recently trialed at Redruth School with Year 10/11 GCSE and Year 12/13 A level students. The aim was to prepare these students for their final examinations by helping them to understand the objectives of the set assessments and to identify how skills are assessed in marking schemes. The visualizer (document camera) was used primarily to show students models of writing. Teacher Owen Jermy, the head of the English department at Redruth, marked students’ work so they could see the application and impact of a marking scheme. The most useful application was the ability to share students’ work. This was especially important during a plenary, but could, in effect, happen at any appropriate moment in a lesson. For instance, the teacher might find a student who had written down a particularly important point or an interesting piece of description; using the visualizer (document camera), the student could immediately have the work displayed as an example for the whole class to follow.
Learning from each other’s successes and failures
Displaying the students’ work lead to discussions on style, technique and other issues connected to the writing process. As the teacher marked the work being displayed, the students benefitted from real-time commentary, giving them insight into how the marking scheme worked. Mr. Jermy commented, “Sometimes I had not planned to use the visualizer (document camera), but if some students were struggling with a task I was able to put up an example of what it should look like. I encouraged students to mark each other’s work using the visualizer (document camera), showing their understanding of the mark schemes... I am beginning to keep exemplars of work that can be shared with future classes. If I had something I wanted to share with the class I could display it on the screen without having to photocopy – it saves money!”
“A visualizer is a really simple idea that makes significant differences to learning and teaching – just use it as much as possible to get the best results! In the future, I would like to use the visualizer to develop a really good bank of exemplar materials for both students and staff CPD initiatives.”
- Mr. Owen Jermy, English Dept. Head, Redruth School
Self-confidence and enthusiasm both go up with the visualizer
Mr. Jermy had the following comments about the impact of introducing the AVerVision355AF into his classes: “Student work improved, or certainly their practice papers did! It will be of great interest to the school to see the impact/contribution the visualizer (document camera) had on improved GCSE results... Another positive was that there was less paper flying about; teachers could concentrate on teaching and be far more reactive and spontaneous to students’ needs.” Overall, Mr. Jermy was extremely impressed with the visualizer (document camera) and the impact it had on his class. He said that he intends to share his findings with other members of the staff during their next regular faculty meeting.
Classes were far more engaged by the immediacy of the feedback, and students gradually became more confident in having their work displayed. In fact, I quite often found the teaching staff had to fight back the volunteers… students were disappointed if their work was not displayed.”
- Mr. Owen Jermy, English Dept. Head, Redruth School
Our thanks to Wendy Delf at Cornwall Learning and Flic Hampton, Advanced Skills Teacher, Cornwall Local Authority, for leading the pilot across all eight schools and enabling teachers to come together to share good practice at regular intervals throughout the duration of the project. The project would not have been possible without their commitment and hard work, and AVer are indebted to their continuing support for the use of visualizers across Cornwall Schools. AVer would also like to thank Steljes Limited for helping us to collect this case study.