learning activity management system specialist...

Learning Activity Management System Specialist Schools Trust pilot

Learning Activity Management System Specialist Schools Trust pilot

A Review for Becta and the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust by

Terry Russell,

Tünde Varga-Atkins,

Daniel Roberts,

CRIPSAT, Centre for Lifelong Learning, University of Liverpool

September 2005 http://www.becta.org.uk© Becta 2005 Research reports

Becta | Learning Activity Management System Specialist Schools Trust pilot

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments................................................................................................................................. 1

Executive summary............................................................................................................................... 2

Review recommendations...................................................................................................................11

1 The Learning Activity Management System................................................................................15

2 Introduction to the LAMS pilot.....................................................................................................20

3 The Becta review of the SST LAMS pilot....................................................................................223.1 Aims and objectives...........................................................................................................22

4 The role of the Specialist Schools Trust during the pilot.............................................................24

5 Review methodology................................................................................................................... 255.1 Initial questionnaires...........................................................................................................275.2 User statistics.....................................................................................................................275.3 Practitioner visits................................................................................................................275.4 Secondary sources.............................................................................................................345.5 Workshops......................................................................................................................... 345.6 Community forum...............................................................................................................34

6 Profile of pilot LAMS use up to July 2005...................................................................................356.1 Learning sequences created using LAMS..........................................................................356.2 Learning sequences run in LAMS......................................................................................396.3 Discussion of user statistics...............................................................................................47

7 LAMS pilot: Objectives and achievements of participants...........................................................517.1 Initial pathways and incentives to participation in the LAMS pilot.......................................517.2 Trends in managing LAMS adoption during the pilot..........................................................527.3 Objectives of pilot schools active during the pilot...............................................................547.4 Schools discontinuing pilot – Analysis................................................................................617.5 Original objectives - Barriers and enablers.........................................................................657.6 End of pilot – Final questionnaire assessment of achievements........................................71

8 Pilot achievements: Benefits of LAMS........................................................................................788.1 Teachers’ perceived benefits of LAMS...............................................................................788.2 Benefits to pupils – Teachers’ perceptions.........................................................................918.3 Personalisation and differentiation...................................................................................1008.4 Home-school links............................................................................................................102



9 LAMS classroom practice and pedagogy..................................................................................1049.1 Attaining confidence as a LAMS practitioner....................................................................1049.2 Introducing LAMS to students..........................................................................................1059.3 Integrating LAMS with pedagogical intentions..................................................................1069.4 Classroom management support function of LAMS.........................................................1089.5 Using LAMS for subject teaching: Case studies...............................................................111

10 Pupils' attitudes to LAMS..........................................................................................................13710.1 Exposure to others' ideas.................................................................................................13810.2 LAMS interface and usability............................................................................................13910.3 ‘Get more done’ and ‘learning better’ with LAMS.............................................................14010.4 LAMS session as ‘better than classroom’.........................................................................14210.5 Ability to express opinions in the absence of peer pressure with LAMS...........................14310.6 Classroom atmosphere in a LAMS session......................................................................14410.7 LAMS and active learning................................................................................................14410.8 Miscellaneous focus group comments.............................................................................14510.9 Student survey................................................................................................................. 145

11 LAMS and attainment...............................................................................................................147

12 What is LAMS? Teachers’ perceptions.....................................................................................149

13 Technical issues and enhancements........................................................................................15413.1 Technical issues...............................................................................................................15413.2 Enhancements................................................................................................................. 155

14 LAMS practitioner workshops...................................................................................................15714.1 Group needs analysis.......................................................................................................158

15 Community forum...................................................................................................................... 161

16 The future of LAMS in pilot schools..........................................................................................16216.1 Schools planning to continue – Future aims.....................................................................16216.2 Schools planning to continue – LAMS needs...................................................................165

17 Review recommendations: Pilot and research..........................................................................16817.1 Recommendations for continuing LAMS adoption............................................................16817.2 Recommendations for future research.............................................................................169

18 Comparison with the JISC evaluation: Cross-sector LAMS experiences..................................172

19 References............................................................................................................................... 175

20 Appendices............................................................................................................................... 17620.1 Appendix A – LAMS tools.................................................................................................176

Acknowledgments



This report was made possible by the collaborative efforts between the teachers and pupils of the participating LAMS institutions and the Becta Review Team at the University of Liverpool. The Team would like to thank all the organisations that took part in the review, in particular those which made the practitioner visits possible, namely:

Queensbridge (Birmingham), Notre Dame Catholic High School (Sheffield), Bishop Challoner Catholic School (Birmingham), Kemnal Technology College (Sidcup), Hathershaw Technology College (Oldham), Brayton College (Selby), Cator Park School for Girls (Beckenham), Charles Darwin School (Westerham) and Beaverwood School for Girls (Chislehurst).

Each visit brought something new to the review and to the report including teachers’ and pupils’ perspectives on the current and potential use of LAMS. Several schools offered comments to the effect that participating in the review was an active learning process, the review dialogue serving to focus attention and encourage articulation around issues that needed to be discussed. In this sense, we feel that the review has been able to give something back to the informants, as well as to receive their information and insights.

Thanks to Simon Harrison (Project Manager, Pedagogy Models) at Becta and Beverley Johnston (Director Bromley 14-19) for their support with the LAMS workshops. Thanks must also go to the UK LAMS team, Andrew Logue and Dave Caygill for their excellent and timely technical support given throughout the review.

Thanks to the Australian team, James Dalziel, Robyn Philip and Donna Gibbs for LAMS reading materials and advice and to the JISC LAMS evaluation team for sharing information.

The LAMS review teamProject Director Professor Terry RussellProject Manager/Researcher Tünde Varga-AtkinsResearcher Daniel B. RobertsDesign support Rachel Walker Administrative support Nga Nguyen, Diana Benford



Executive summary 1. Review remitBecta commissioned a review team from CRIPSAT to:

examine the impact of LAMS use in the pilot schools; offer workshop support for the use of LAMS in pilot schools; provide pedagogical support to pilot schools via the LAMS community forum.

The more specific aims and objectives of the review were: to reveal the objectives of individual pilot schools in implementing LAMS and report

on the success of the implementation against these objectives; to identify emerging models of subject-specific e-learning (and the effectiveness of

such models in raising learner achievement), support for personalised learning and providing links between the learners’ experiences in the institution and the home;

to identify future opportunities for robust research into the use of learning design software to support emerging models of subject-specific e-learning (and the effectiveness of such models in raising learner achievement), supporting personalised learning and links between the learners’ experiences in the institution and the home;

to make feedback from practitioners on the usability of learning sequence design tools such as LAMS available to the LAMS Foundation.

2. Review methodologyA range of methods was used to collect data:

initial and final LAMS questionnaires; semi-structured interviews (27 management staff and teachers); structured observation (12 LAMS sessions); focus group interviews (12 pupil groups, sampled from LAMS sessions); LAMS sequence pupil survey (3 classes); interrogation of SST LAMS server system statistics for activity sequence construction

and use.

All interviews were audio recorded and transcripts analysed and classified to identify emerging themes. Additionally, some sessions were recorded using high quality equipment to offer the possibility of re-usable illustrative material.

Pilot schools were identified by SST in January 2005 and review activities ran through to the end of July 2005.

3. Profile of pilot LAMS use (up to July 2005)a) Participating schoolsForty-one schools registered to participate in the SST LAMS pilot and the scale of their activities defined the evidence available to the review.

September 2005 http://www.becta.org.uk Page 1 of 180© Becta 2005 Research reports


Six schools (15%) informed the Review Team that they had withdrawn from the pilot. Twelve schools (29%) did not respond or had no practical LAMS activity to report

though some had plans for such activity. Seventeen schools (42%) described as in an ‘exploratory’ mode appeared to be

seriously exploring the potential uses and benefits of LAMS. Six schools (15%) referred to as in an ‘incubatory’ mode suggested significant

strategic engagement with LAMS.

b) Evidence base - LAMS sequence constructionInterrogation of the LAMS database using server data for the period October 2004 to July 2005 – most of one school year – provided a quantitative guide to schools’ LAMS sequence construction. This server data needed interpretation by the Review Team from its original raw state and so the results here should be regarded as cautious estimates as opposed to pre-designed system statistics. It is also important to note that server data was available for 40 of the 41 schools surveyed by the Review Team, as one school ran LAMS from their own server.

It is estimated that 224 uniquely titled sequences were created by pilot schools. Of the 40 pilot schools using the pilot servers, 26 created at least one sequence, 14 created none.

23 schools (58%) scheduled at least one LAMS sequence for either a staff or student group, 17 scheduled no sequences.

11 schools (28%) scheduled at least one sequence for a student group. Of the 324 non-unique sequences, nearly one third were adaptations of another

sequence by the same person; 36 sequences were re-used by people other than the original author from a pool of 46 users. These data suggest that, albeit on a small scale, users have confirmed the re-usability of LAMS sequences.

N.B. These statistics represent the scheduling of sequences and not the actual running and delivery of sequences in classrooms. Before the Preview function was available (Feb 2005) authors had to schedule a sequence to test it. Therefore, some sequences were tests rather than real classroom sessions run with students. Those respondents who completed the Final Questionnaire and who had created and/or run sequences (n = 17) had, on average, created about three sequences.

The above confirms that the review team had access to relatively limited data from early adopters of some novel software over a limited time scale. It is clear that training does not automatically trigger implementation. However, it seems that LAMS training sessions and review visits were associated with ‘spikes’ in the frequency of LAMS activity in schools. These usage statistics are illuminated by review data collected directly from practitioners and pupils which present the quality of teaching and learning activities made possible with the introduction of LAMS.



4. Objectives and achievements of participantsInitial pathways to the LAMS pilotRoutes by which schools came to the LAMS Pilot have been examined for their significance in determining the success of objectives, and for indicating a management strategy. A range of routes were found, falling into three broad categories, often combining in different ways in each school:

High-level management initiative such as an LEA project available to schools and offering an easily accessible, low-risk route.

Interest in LAMS either from a management or staff individual enthusiast or ‘champion’ prompting a school to seek out and ‘buy-in’ to the pilot to explore the benefits of investment.

LAMS pilot/training found to be in some way convenient to a school’s immediate needs.

It was observed that, where a school had at least one management or staff enthusiast/champion to engage with and support LAMS development, then positive achievements would generally be made in that school. There was a high-level of crossover between the first two categories, often combining very successfully, albeit currently on a small-scale.

Pilot objectives of LAMS pilot schools – TrendsOnce schools joined the LAMS pilot, their aims and objectives were either:

small scale and experimental (an exploratory approach). Here schools were looking at LAMS to find out its real applications, how useful it would be as a teaching tool to the staff and what further investment would need to be made for the wide-scale adoption of LAMS;

or the institution embarked on more comprehensive, long-term plans (an incubatory approach). Here schools had already committed to the idea of LAMS and its potential value in a school, and had formed a long-term strategy (often extending beyond the LAMS pilot).

23 schools can be categorised from the data available with 6 having an incubatory and 17 an exploratory approach. Of the remaining institutions, 12 did not report any activity and 6 were known to have discontinued the pilot.

Pilot objectives of LAMS pilot schools – Some findingsA number of factors are identified as being consistently associated with the successful achievement of a school’s aims and objectives for the LAMS pilot. Briefly, the most significant were found to be: sufficiency of school ICT provision; staff skills – levels of staff ICT confidence and literacy in a school influence whether there is a broad-based uptake of LAMS or it remains the specialism of enthusiasts; time – staff have cited available time as being critical to their LAMS activity, yet all recognise that reuse is the payoff for this time



investment; management strategy –models of management at pilot schools might act as replicable models for other schools to achieve success; networks – formal networks between schools can be a very powerful means of driving success and also embryonic networks of LAMS pioneers are emerging and need support and direction; cascading LAMS within school – crucial to the success of a strategy within the school is the positive example of staff using LAMS successfully in their teaching and so putting them in a position to create demand and influence management.

End of pilot – Final questionnaire assessment of achievements95 final questionnaires were emailed and there were 16 respondents from 14 schools (return rate under 20%). The data from this low return rate, although not necessarily representative of the whole pilot population, may not be misleading in the context of the server usage statistics which show that only 12 schools delivered LAMS sessions in the first year of the pilot. School staff were asked to quantify their sense of achievement in the pilot period as compared with anticipated benefits that LAMS would bring to their institution, the staff, pupils and other groups (e.g. parents). The reported achievements of the LAMS pilot were wide-ranging and comments are listed in tables in the main body of the report. Opportunities for differentiation, revision, self-paced and collaborative learning received high ratings in terms of materialised achievements. A comparatively large number of teachers indicated that LAMS not only had the potential to promote independent learning, including guidance and structure to help students along, but also thought that this achievement materialised during the pilot period. A few teachers felt that LAMS supported the development of metacognitive skills and those few that did, thought that these benefits materialised at a high level. Few achievements actually materialised over the review period with respect to reusing and sharing sequences amongst staff but this remains an objective for schools.

5. Pilot achievementsa) Teachers’ perceptions of the benefits of LAMS

LAMS offers teachers a structure with which to build their lessons, allowing them to guide students to achieve lesson objectives and keep students focused and on task.

Teachers reported greater levels of pupil motivation as compared with traditional lessons, this being acknowledged as at least in part attributable to the use of ICT as a delivery medium. More significantly, it was felt that LAMS allows coherent, structured and integrated use of ICT for teaching.

LAMS was found to increase the likelihood of every member of a class contributing, all students having a voice in a non-threatening environment – anonymity often means harder-to-engage pupils or those lacking confidence or fearing failure or peer censure would be more likely to contribute.

LAMS was valued for its potential to promote the development of metacognitive skills through independent learning, peer and self-assessment and reflective work. The



self-paced nature of LAMS sequences contributes to the development of the skills of autonomous learning.

The monitoring function of LAMS offers a powerful mode for keeping track of pupils’ progress and contributions and is an excellent formative assessment tool. The online monitoring provides a quick snapshot of pupil classroom progress at the whole class and/or individual pupil level. The immediacy of feedback was appreciated as beneficial both from a teaching management point of view as well as for offering students instant results. The effective exploitation of LAMS’ monitoring mode tended to be practised by more experienced users.

LAMS’ administration facility gives teachers a 24/7 point of access to students’ contributions online, the ‘Submit’ activity gathers pupils’ work in one place and digitally produced LAMS work is easier to mark and return.

Teachers commented that LAMS is an excellent tool for non-ICT subjects to adopt integrated use of ICT in lessons in a seamless, meaningful way, in contrast to previous obligatory but unmotivated ‘bolted-on’ ICT use.

Teachers confirmed LAMS’ potential for re-using learning designs by sharing and/or reusing subject sequences. Some departments had planned a strategy to develop and share subject sequences within the department.

b) Teachers’ perceptions of the benefits of LAMS for pupils LAMS offers the opportunity to prepare a guided structure for pupils to progress

through learning materials. There is the capability for students to have access to the ideas of every other

individual in the class, offering the potential for collaborative and constructivist approaches to learning.

The anonymous contributions as well as the neutral computer-student interaction prevent opportunities for mockery and bullying, thus promoting greater student engagement.

Students can work through sequences at their own pace, benefiting both low- and high-achieving students.

LAMS was felt to foster confidence in students, this being attributed to several aspects including the motivating nature of computers, self-pacing, access to whole class contributions etc..

Student productivity and efficiency is enhanced by the fact that students are continuously working when using LAMS. For instance, if teacher time is taken up by classroom management issues, other students can still continue to work through the materials.

The ‘Share Resources’ activity type allows teachers to give students a quick point-of-access to relevant materials (whether Internet sites or other digital files), eliminating time that might otherwise be wasted on searching and locating digital resources via the web.



Students benefit from instant feedback whether it is automated via the multiple choice tool or the result of seeing the ideas of all the other students in the class.

LAMS promotes active and independent learning, nurturing study skills through the use of its in-built activities. It also lends itself well to exploratory and discovery learning where students have to carry out research using digital resources. LAMS enhances students’ appreciation of the metacognitive process of learning, giving them directed experience of how to manage their own learning.

LAMS moves pupils into the foreground of learning. The teacher’s support is implicit rather than explicit in the LAMS sequence.

LAMS can support different learning styles and differentiated ability and experience and sequences can be customised easily (although it is not yet possible to include images).

LAMS offers the prospect and opportunity for out of school learning, stated by a number of teachers, and received also as welcome news by a number of students, although this model of use has not yet been attempted.

6. LAMS classroom practice and pedagogyThe review examined in detail any emerging pedagogy associated with LAMS (see Section 9).

Experimenting, rehearsing, technical preparation and networking with other professionals were consistently pointed to as important elements of building confidence as a LAMS practitioner.

It was apparent that where students had had prior instruction in what LAMS was, how to negotiate some key activities such as chat and what standards of behaviour were expected (‘netiquette’ and the presence of monitoring) then these particular sessions were focussed on the tasks rather than the processes of LAMS activity.

LAMS was demonstrated to be useful both as a whole lesson activity or as components of a lesson.

A highly valued aspect of LAMS was its positive impact on classroom management, especially with teachers’ using the online monitoring function.

(Seven subject-specific case studies are presented in Section .)

7. Pupils’ attitudes towards LAMSPupil focus group comments confirmed teachers’ perceptions of benefits to students of using LAMS:

One of the most often cited benefits of LAMS was that of ‘seeing what other people have done’. This means viewing other people’s opinions, answers, voting reactions and so on, and comparing their own responses in the light of these.

Students found using LAMS ‘fun’. That LAMS was ‘better than the classroom’ was often remarked, usually meaning the

opportunity afforded to work with computers as opposed to ‘pen-and-paper’ writing.



Some student focus groups, for non-ICT subject lessons, reported that their LAMS sessions were the best ICT lessons for that subject that they had experienced.

Knowing where one was up to in the sequence was also found very helpful by the students, referring to the sequence monitoring in the left-hand side of the screen.

Instant access to directed resources meant that students found LAMS made it easier for them to access web sites and other materials quickly without the need to make or type in addresses and URLs.

Students attending the focus groups often asked about, or were surprised and enthused to discover, the possibility that they were able to carry on with LAMS at home using their home computer.

Students also suggested utilising LAMS in other ways to that of the observed lesson, e.g. in a class where LAMS was used as a revision tool, they could see that LAMS would be useful for doing their coursework.

Students welcomed the fact that they were able to move through LAMS at their own speed, not having to wait for others nor being left behind, off the unison pace.

Interestingly, students sometimes did not imagine that it was their teacher who had made the sequence they had just followed. It is surely an empowering notion for teachers that they can create professional-looking ICT learning materials with LAMS.

The LAMS interface drew mixed opinions, some suggesting it be made more vibrant and aimed at young people, whilst some appreciated the bland look of LAMS, which was felt to have a more ‘grown-up’ look and feel, being ‘well spaced out’ and not busy with multimedia distractions.

8. LAMS and attainmentLinks between attainment and using LAMS were explored from staff perspectives; the short scale of the pilot did not allow the examination of longitudinal data or other quantitative methods.

Most staff reported that LAMS could impact positively on attainment. Some were unwilling to commit an opinion, citing the small scale and duration of their

LAMS use. Areas of impact (envisaged by staff offering an opinion) where LAMS might contribute

positively to attainment included:o Opportunities for a whole class to acquire, practise and improve metacognitive

skills.o Getting more work done in a LAMS session than in a normal classroom. o LAMS is a valuable vehicle for revision and recall.o LAMS increases self-confidence and autonomy.o Learners keep on task and cope with manageable chunks.o LAMS is particularly suited to rapid cycles of formative assessment, the latter

having a well-established correlation with enhanced pupil achievements.



9. What does the ‘Learning Activity Management System’ offer?Even following a period of initial exposure, some teachers found difficulty in identifying the unique (but seemingly elusive to apprehend) qualities of LAMS.

LAMS is an early representative of a new generation of ‘learning design’ educational software having an underlying ‘work-flow’ structure. It attends to the process of e-learning rather than content, in the manner of an ‘online lesson planning tool’. The uncluttered interface may tend to mask its power and unique qualities, the more so since many other software solutions offer separately many of the elements of its functionality. It is in its capability to orchestrate a range of functionality to serve the pedagogical inclinations of teachers that LAMS offers a unique contribution to e-learning developments. This overall management of the process of learning is a holistic feature of LAMS that must be borne in mind in reviewing the evidence presented in this report, much of which necessarily considers elements of LAMS functionality rather than its quintessential integrating quality. Some views of LAMS as a tool were:

Teachers tended to compare similarities and differences between LAMS and VLEs, with some finding that LAMS offers ‘something nothing else can offer’. It offers a structure for learning activities, e.g. a structured chat room embedded into a particular learning sequence.

LAMS is just a tool within a package of tools available to teachers, it will never replace other ways of teaching. Keeping a variety of tools is important.

LAMS is good ICT for non-ICT subjects, i.e. cross-curricular ICT skills can be integrated into lessons in meaningful and subject-relevant ways.

10. Technical issues and enhancementsa) Technical issues

Teachers frequently found the administration of classes and student logins to be awkward, mainly due to their lack of control over these. Class groups and passwords were created and administered by UK LAMS over the pilot so that related and potential technical problems could be quickly resolved. This offered advantages at the centre but some disadvantages at the classroom level.

The fact of having a closed network port on some schools’ systems prevented the chat activity being run.

LAMS was not always reliable. For instance, during sequence authoring, activities could be lost due to ‘save’ errors. Another significant problem was that when running sequences LAMS would crash if two classes accessed LAMS at the same time.

b) EnhancementsThe advent of the Preview facility in February 2005 was welcomed by all users. The following list briefly identifies some of the enhancements suggested during the review:

More class grouping options beyond the current random pupil grouping; Allow pupils to go back over activities and change contributions;



Allow modifiable font type/size in all activity types; Expand capacity for seamless inclusion of images and other multimedia; Improve management of sequences making it easy to find subject sequences in the

public area as well as ability to manage own and institution’s sequence library. Allow authors to copy and paste a single activity (or more) from one sequence to

another. Allow team-teaching i.e. allow more than one monitor for a class when running a

LAMS sequence. Allow classes in different schools to access the same sequence as if they were one

class synchronously or asynchronously.

On occasions, a user would state the desire for an enhancement to LAMS which in fact was an existing feature of the system. This highlights the importance of continued training and support, particularly as the system develops through later versions.



Review recommendationsThe recommendations that follow are based on the assumption that the evidence assembled in this review confirms the desirability of supporting LAMS use and warrants attempts to promote and expand its further deployment. The recommendations below address firstly areas in which an extended pilot might be enhanced in order to achieve a more effective adoption of LAMS in schools. Secondly, potential areas of future research based on a more comprehensive and directed adoption of LAMS in schools are suggested. Combined, these recommendations encompass a strategy for consolidation and expansion.

Recommendations for continuing LAMS adoption1. Continue the highly-valued technical support. Evidence for differentiated hosting and technical support requirements is given in the review, i.e. some schools are confident using their own technical support staff and hosting LAMS on their own network, while others will need support in all areas of LAMS adoption.

2. Make more public subject sequences available. The integrated LAMS Community Forum that is currently being launched could be an important vehicle for sharing sequences. Ways of efficiently increasing the number of sequences should be looked at, for instance by working with individual or groups of teachers to develop case studies.

3. A LAMS community e-mail bulletin is likely to offer a direct communication with users and potential users, to sustain interest and maintain the momentum of sequence development and sharing. The web-based forum, to which people need to make the effort regularly to log in, has not been successful in galvanising action. A more pro-active means of keeping LAMS in practitioners’ sights and making important LAMS-related information available to communities is necessary in the form of a mail bulletin. Likewise, a similarly prominent medium for disseminating practitioner contributions would be constructive. As the LAMS software develops, people who have been trained in earlier versions should receive comprehensive information on how these new features may be utilised, backed by appropriate support materials such as web-based multimedia training, examples of applications and case-studies.

4. Produce support materials to promote understanding of what LAMS is and what it can offer for management and for school staff. Confusion as to what exactly it is that LAMS offers that is new or unique is not uncommon and may have left some managers at the brink of commitment to explore further. This information needs to aim at sharing strategic thinking in managers’ own words, complemented by concrete examples in the form of illustrated case studies. Such material could be realised by a CD-ROM, a web site and hard copy materials, or some combination of these. Such materials would also be welcomed for the dissemination of information about LAMS throughout a school, as well as LAMS trainees cascading their knowledge to colleagues in their schools during staff training.



5. Enhance the support materials available to bridge initial LAMS training and in-school implementation. The review team became aware of a ‘support gap’ between a teacher receiving initial training and the processes leading to deployment of LAMS with pupils. Addressing technical and practical inconveniences will smooth some of these processes, but some ready-made support solutions for roll-out to pupils are necessary. Additionally, a supported self-study reprise of the one-off training to review their appreciation of some of the less immediately used functionality of the software would seem to be essential; this would include exploring the full functionality of the monitoring system, for example. CD-ROM, web site and/or hard copy materials, or some combination of these could help to realise this recommendation. A ‘LAMS clinic’, either visiting schools or set up on a drop-in or workshop model, could be an alternative or complementary means of disseminating information and for recommending to teachers new models of delivering LAMS sequences for their subject.

6. Further encourage networks of support, communication and good practice both cross-curricular and subject-specific. This recommendation can be realised by bringing groups of professionals to work together. The review team’s practitioner workshops proved an effective means of promoting and energising such networks and have the potential to provide a valuable means of disseminating and discovering excellent LAMS practice in subject-specific groups. The model could be emulated at the local level through school networks.

7. Introduce LAMS to teachers at pre-qualifying level and trainers of teachers. LAMS appears to be a useful tool for integrating ICT in subject curricula, so extending such awareness at teacher training level would expand a teacher’s toolkit at an early stage of their career.

Recommendations for further research8. Conduct further research into general subject-specific pedagogical strengths of LAMS. The review observed only a limited range of practice in the applications of LAMS and teaching approaches to LAMS sessions over the review period. While effective ‘purely on-line’ and ‘blended’ sessions were observed, there was not sufficient evidence to define emergent or replicable models of subject-specific e-learning pedagogy, therefore a period of further observation is required. Practice across all subjects and for all teachers was mostly tentative and experimental rather than habitual, established and embedded. At this early stage in implementation, teachers tend still to be concentrating on the ‘big concepts’ of LAMS and how these relate to their current practice. Once the coverage of LAMS adoption is wider (that is, more subjects using LAMS and more comprehensive usage, so that LAMS is part of habitual practice rather than a ‘special event’) then it should be possible to discern more securely those emerging models of e-learning that LAMS supports in each subject area.



9. Sequence re-use and adaptation, both subject-specific and general, should be monitored and analysed to determine means of optimising further exploitation of LAMS as a re-usable resource. The integrated LAMS Community Forum that is currently being launched could be an important vehicle here for information exchange both centre to periphery and vice versa. Furthermore, a better understanding of subject-specific functionality coupled with development work which makes sequences available for re-use is likely to accelerate uptake: enhanced supply might reasonably be expected to stimulate demand as well as the impetus to generate more re-usable sequences by extending the user base.

10. Study the use of LAMS to support formative assessment. While closely linked to more general pedagogical concerns, formative assessment techniques are worthy of specific attention because of the established associations with enhanced pupil achievements and because LAMS offers a particularly strong capability for making pupils’ ideas available to a teacher in a manner far beyond the scope of traditional classrooms. There is also scope to explore the potential of the system for summative assessment, using cumulative records through the monitoring function.

11. Conduct controlled studies to examine the impact of LAMS on achievement in key areas, cross-curricular and subject-specific. Small-scale qualitative studies offer one possibility of exploring the impact of LAMS on pupil achievements. Another route would be large-scale studies of learning outcomes.

12. Further research and development into personalisation and differentiation with LAMS, including uses with pupils having special needs or not attending school. LAMS offers a limited although improving level of personalisation at the interface level and the highly textual nature of the system may pose new challenges (not excluding the possibility of new solutions, also) for those students having problems with literacy. There is limited evidence of extensive personalisation of LAMS (with the exception of a hearing impaired unit) the chief findings being that teachers modify the language and complexity of activities to suit the immediate needs of the group. Extension activities and differentiated learning routes were not observed and may not yet exist in any practice.

13. LAMS and home-school links. There is no evidence of any model or practice of home-school learning revealed by the review. Schools that have thought about this issue cite inequalities between households in the level of ICT provision available as an obstacle. However, there is plenty of evidence to confirm that a vision of the possibilities is in teachers’ thoughts, including distance learning, homework, revision, access to and for out-of-school pupils, and enlisting parental or community support. The anecdotal evidence available from interviews and questionnaires indicates that there are several applications of LAMS envisioned by schools that would merit further research: parent discussion communities;



setting homework for students and offering education to ill or excluded students, were examples cited.

14. Other research possibilities. There are other research opportunities identified as the result of the review activities that do not necessarily sit under any of the categories above. For example:

LAMS implementation and school management and strategy, including the relationship between LAMS adoption and effective management of innovation.

Examining the impact of the integration of LAMS with other VLEs, e.g. Moodle, and/or school management systems.

JISC Reload and the European UNFOLD project on learning design suggest the opportunity for comparative studies that would place LAMS use in the wider context of learning design and relevant standards (e.g. IMS Learning Design).

Investigation of the potential for using LAMS as a collaborative or team-teaching tool, both locally and internationally.

Future activity should include monitoring of usage, including for example, time sampling and event sampling of LAMS sessions. The manner in which LAMS sessions are managed in real time, with blended ‘real-world’ activities related to subject-specific considerations, needs to be better understood.

Monitoring of server usage data will continue to provide a measure of usage, but coupled with subject classification of sequences, identification of ‘LAMS-active’ schools and teachers would be a possibility. This would enable research, evaluation and development collaborations to be deployed more efficiently, for example, by reference to active curricular subject groups.



1 The Learning Activity Management System The Learning Activity Management System (LAMS), written in Java, is part of a new generation of educational software which moves e-learning from a content-centric approach to an activity-sequence based approach. The Learning Activity Management System is a web-based learning design tool – or ‘online lesson planning tool’ as this review’s teachers called it – created at McQuarie University, Sydney, Australia. Given a hosted LAMS service, LAMS users only need access to a Flash-enabled browser.

LAMS allows teachers or tutors to author and deliver learning sequences. Each learning sequence contains one or more activities which students complete in a sequential order. The activities are chosen from a list of activity templates as defined in LAMS and can be both offline/online or self-paced and collaborative activities. Example activities include Question and Answer, Share Resources, Voting, Chat and Forum. (For a description of these, see page 173).

There are three LAMS modes: ‘author’, ‘learner’ and ‘monitor’.

1) The author mode allows teachers to create and preview their sequences through a visual interface in which each activity is represented by a box and the transitions from activity to activity by lines connecting the boxes. Figure 1 shows a sequence in author mode with activity boxes and transition lines.



Figure 1 The LAMS authoring screen: example ICT lesson sequence

2) Students log in to the learner mode and select the activity from the left-hand pane of the browser window. They complete the sequence step-by-step with their progress being shown in the left pane. Figure 2 shows the ‘learner’ view of the sequence from Figure 1.



Figure 2 The LAMS learner screen

3) The monitor mode allows teachers to schedule their sequences with a class and monitor the progress of the class as well as individual students’ contributions. Four main views are possible in this mode, accessed by the tabs at the top of the screen (Figure 3). The view shown in Figure 3 is the progress of each learner in the class. Each line represents a student and their progress: a green box indicates uncompleted activity, a red the current activity and the blue a completed activity. Every box can be clicked to find out the particular student’s contribution in detail, e.g. the student’s answer to the multiple choice test. The bottom image in Figure 3 shows this detailed view.



Figure 3 The LAMS monitor screen, “Learners” view tab and (inset) individual learner activity contribution

Organisations with administrator rights have a further administration mode which allows them to set up usernames, passwords and classes.

Useful LAMS links:LAMS Foundation – www.lamsfoundation.org LAMS International – www.lamsinternational.com


Clicking in the orange circle, the teacher can see the student’s individual response

http://www.lamsinternational.com/

http://www.lamsfoundation.org/


SST LAMS Pilot website – http://uklams.net Becta LAMS Review – www.cripsat.org.uk under e-learning projectsJISC LAMS Evaluation – http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=elp_lams


http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=elp_lams

http://www.cripsat.org.uk/

http://uklams.net/


2 Introduction to the LAMS pilotThe Specialist Schools Trust (SST) ran a pilot implementation of LAMS in secondary schools in the UK in the 2004/2005 school year. Schools were informed by the SST of the opportunity to join the LAMS pilot with information also available on the SST-LAMS website (http://www.uklams.net/. Representatives of secondary schools that joined the pilot attended a training session at Kemnal Technology College in July 2004. Repeated training sessions were offered by Kemnal between July 2004 and May 2005. (For more details on the training see Evaluation of LAMS Training by Andy Parry, 2005.) A number of pilot schools were based in the Bromley area, supported by Bromley 14-19.

LAMS was hosted on servers based at the Specialist Schools Trust (SST schools: http://apps1.uklams.net and http://apps2.uklams.net with Kemnal Technology College running its own LAMS server), technical support being provided by UK LAMS support team based at Millbank, SST. Table 1 shows the major technical milestones in LAMS software development during the period of the pilot. February 2005 was an important event for schools when the much awaited ‘Preview’ facility of LAMS became available, making it easy to test sequences during authoring development. At the time of writing this report, a new version of LAMS is imminent which will integrate the LAMS site with its own community forum to share sequences. LAMS integration with virtual learning environments such as Bodington or Blackboard or the open source Moodle is also under way.


http://apps2.uklams.net/


http://www.uklams.net/


Table 1 Major technical milestones of LAMS during the pilot

Date Milestones

7th Oct 2004 LAMS version Beta 5.0 becomes available at ‘apps1.uklams.net’

IE 6 and Flash version 6.47 supported

Other browsers will be supported in the future

9th Dec 2004 LAMS upgrade to version Beta 6.1

Optimised sequencing engine allowing larger numbers of learners

Visual improvements to authoring environment

All tools now have help link pointing to the learner guide

Forum tool able to display instructions at top of learners page

27th Jan 2005 LAMS server ‘apps2.uklams.net’ is deployed for additional schoolsdue to increased demand

2nd Feb 2005 LAMS upgraded to first release version 1.0

Preview facility available

New tool “Survey” is added

Most browsers are now supported (Safari, IE, Netscape, Firefox)

24th May 2005 LAMS upgraded to version 1.0.1

Noticeboard tool enhanced with Rich Text Editor

Accessibility enhancements

All major browsers supported

Plans (at the time of writing the report)

July 2005 LAMS version 1.0.2

Integration with LAMS Community forum

Beta testing for integration with Moodle 1.6 Virtual Learning Environment

Aug 2005 Beta testing for integration with Blackboard 6.2.3 VLE

Sept 2005 Integration with Bodington VLE

Oct 2005 LAMS version 1.1 release

Support for IMS Learning Design standard Level A



3 The Becta review of the SST LAMS pilotBecta commissioned the CRIPSAT team at the University of Liverpool to:

undertake a review of the impact of LAMS use in the pilot schools; support the use of LAMS in pilot schools through practitioner workshops; provide limited pedagogical support to pilot schools via the LAMS community forum.

3.1 Aims and objectivesThe review aimed at gathering information:

to reveal the objectives individual member schools hoped to achieve by implementing LAMS and to provide a report to the SST on the success of the implementation against these objectives;

to identify emerging models of subject-specific e-learning (and the effectiveness of such models in raising learner achievement), support for personalised learning and providing links between the learners’ experiences in the institution and the home;

to identify future opportunities for robust research into the use of learning design software to support emerging models of subject-specific e-learning (and the effectiveness of such models in raising learner achievement), supporting personalised learning and links between the learners’ experiences in the institution and the home;

and to make feedback from practitioners on the usability of learning sequence design tools such as LAMS available to the LAMS Foundation.

Becta and the Review Team were represented at the LAMS Steering Group meeting at SST, London in November 2004. In January 2005, SST identified the 41 participating pilot schools (see Table 2) with at least one LAMS contact person per school and provided this information to the Review Team. Schools either opted to participate in the pilot via Bromley LEA or via SST links, hence the separation into two categories in the table below (see Section 7 for more details). The team subsequently contacted the schools to introduce the review in order to find out the institutions’ objectives in taking part in the pilot. The resulting information was reported in the Becta LAMS Interim Report (March 2005).1

1 http://www.cripsat.org.uk/current/elearn/bectalam.htm


http://www.cripsat.org.uk/current/elearn/bectalam.htm


Table 2 Institutions contacted as part of Becta LAMS Review

Bromley Schools Specialist Trust Schools*

1. All Saints Catholic School * specialism Technology unless otherwise stated

2. Beaverwood School for Girls 22. Bartley Green TC

3. Bromley College of Further Education 23. Bishop Challoner Catholic School (Sports)

4. Burwood 24. Blake Valley TC

5. Cator Park School for Girls 25. Brayton College

6. Charles Darwin School 26. Brownhills Community TC

7. Coopers Technology College 27. Compton School

8. Darrick Wood School 28. Edmonton County School

9. Glebe 29. Frome Community College (Media Arts)

10. Hayes School 30. Hamilton Community College

11. Kelsey Park School 31. Hathershaw Technology College

12. Kemnal Technology College 32. Hirst High School

13. Kingswood Centre 33. Kingsheath Boys' School (Maths & Computing)

14. Langley Park School for Boys 34. Morley High school

15. Langley Park School for Girls 35. Mortimer Comprehensive School (Science)

16. Newstead Wood 36. Notre Dame Catholic High School

17. Orpington College of FE 37. Queensbridge School (Performing Arts)

18. Ravens Wood School 38. St Peter's Catholic School

19. St Olave’s and St Saviour’s Grammar School 39. Stantonbury Campus (Performing Arts)

20. The Priory School 40. Sydenham School (Science)

21. The Ravensbourne School 41. Wheelers Lane Technology College



4 The role of the Specialist Schools Trust during the pilotDuring the pilot the Specialist Schools Trust supported schools in a number of ways.

Sending monthly e-newsletters containing useful tips and hints; updates on latest versions of LAMS with technical advice; news on LAMS developments; examples of good practice and information on a buddy system; a community forum; and workshops,

Providing email and telephone support with advice on setting up new classes/sequences; and examples of sequences.

Providing promotional material to help newly trained users explain the advantages and benefits of LAMS to their schools.

Giving examples of ways to disseminate LAMS training to others in school. Working with the LAMS technical team on technical issues to ensure problems were

resolved. Providing contacts for examples of good practice and use. Supporting LAMS Workshops. Setting up initial training for new users and processing their training evaluations. Supporting newly trained teachers with an introduction email with advice and tips on

the way forward. Creating and supporting a buddy system where English LAMS users were paired with

Australian users. Matching ‘buddies’ and providing contacts for other schools to discuss with. Posting information to the LAMS community forum. Providing ideas and requests for further development of the UK LAMS website. Managing the LAMS Pilot Steering Group.



5 Review methodologyThe research aims were to: Identify the objectives individual member schools hoped to achieve by implementing

LAMS and report on the success of the implementation against these objectives. Identify future opportunities for robust research into the use of learning design software

to:o support emerging models of subject-specific e-learning (and the effectiveness of

such models in raising learner achievement);o support personalised learning and links between the learners' experiences in the

institution and the home. Provide feedback on the usability of LAMS design tools. Explore students’ attitudes to LAMS.

The review design had to take account of certain realities: The set of schools having adopted LAMS at the time of the review was relatively small. LAMS use, even amongst the more enthusiastic early adopters, retained a 'new frontier'

feel rather than exemplifying habitual use and embedded practice. The LAMS sessions observed were often provided specifically for the benefit of the Review Team.

While for review purposes it would have been desirable to complete practitioner visits in the earlier part of the available project timescale, demands on schools' time resulted in the bulk of visits taking place relatively late in the project.

In order to collect data as described above, the review used a combination of methods, all of which are described in detail in this section:

Initial questionnaires;o LAMS contact person for the institution.o Teachers who were LAMS users.

User statistics; Final review questionnaires;

and as part of the practitioner visits: Semi-structured interviews;

o LAMS institutional strategic decision makers.o Institutional LAMS contact person.o LAMS technical support staff.

Structured observation;o Teachers and pupils in real-time LAMS sessions.

Focus group interviews;o Random samples of pupils stratified by gender drawn from each observed

LAMS session. Pupil survey conducted through a LAMS sequence;

o All pupils participating in observed LAMS sessions.



The review also made use of:o Secondary resources, such as LAMS documentation and research articles;o The LAMS practitioner workshops;o The LAMS community forum.

In addition to written notes, all sessions (interviews, LAMS sessions and focus groups) were electronically recorded. Three different types and qualities of recording served different purposes.

Type 1) All sessions were digitally audio-recorded at a quality sufficient for transcription and checking the reliability of written records.

Type 2) Most LAMS sessions were video-recorded using a stationary camera on a tripod to provide a visual record of location, resources and the general manner of use of LAMS.

Type 3) A minority of LAMS sessions, interviews and focus groups were video-recorded using professional video equipment and two pairs of radio microphones to provide the possibility of high-quality illustrative material.

Table 3 shows the timeline of the review.

Table 3 Review timeline

2004Nov 9 SST LAMS Steering Group Meeting2005Jan - Feb Initial contacts established and review questionnaires sent to schoolsJan 11 JISC LAMS Workshop attendanceFeb Practitioner visit 1March 11 Becta LAMS Workshop, CoventryMarch 30 Interim Review ReportApril 12 SST LAMS Steering Group MeetingMay – June Practitioner visits 2-15June 6 Becta LAMS Workshop, BromleyJune Final review questionnaires sent to schoolsJuly 19 DfES LAMS meetingJuly 31 Final Review Report

Due to the relatively small scale and span of the pilot, it was not possible to use a quantitative study with a random or stratified sample of institutions, practitioners and students. The research design therefore relied on qualitative methods with that data quantified where it proved possible and useful to do so.



5.1 Initial questionnairesTo start the review process, the Review Team received a list of all participating pilot schools from SST with named LAMS contacts. Altogether 41 schools were contacted for the review. An introductory letter together with an initial LAMS Contact Person Questionnaire and Teacher Questionnaire were sent out to these schools in January 2005.

a) Initial LAMS Contact Person QuestionnaireThe aim of the Contact Person Questionnaire was to find out, at this early point in uptake, schools’ objectives in participating in the pilot and the anticipated benefits LAMS might bring to the school, the teachers and students. In order to encourage responses, repeated contacts were made with schools via mail, email and telephone during the January-March period.

b) Initial LAMS Teacher QuestionnaireEach teacher involved in the LAMS pilot was asked to complete an initial Teacher Questionnaire about their plans for using LAMS, their LAMS progress and potential review visit dates.

A detailed initial analysis of these questionnaires was presented in the Becta LAMS Interim Report (see References); findings from these questionnaire returns are drawn together with information gained through practitioner visits in Section 7 ‘LAMS Pilot - Objectives and achievements of participants.’

5.2 User statisticsUsing system statistics from the pilot schools’ LAMS servers (http://apps1.uklams.net and http://apps2.uklams.net), it was possible to identify the extent of LAMS use over the course of the pilot. The two main areas of interest were the number of LAMS sequences created and the number of sequences run by the participating institutions. The UK LAMS support team was able to assist with assembling the raw data from the LAMS database. These data have been compiled and summarised in Section 6.

5.3 Practitioner visitsThe aim of practitioner visits was to:

observe the use of LAMS in a real classroom scenario; offer teachers and pupils the opportunity to reveal their perspectives on and attitudes

towards LAMS; explore LAMS’ potential in raising pupil attainment; gather information about subject-specific pedagogical use of LAMS; gather information on the usability of LAMS as a software tool; explore the potential of LAMS for personalisation and home-school links.





The original review schedule included 7-8 visits in the Spring and Summer terms of 2005. Most of the visits, however, were conducted in the Summer term. The uptake of LAMS was slower than expected due to either the busy Spring/Summer period near the exams or other institutional commitments. It was noted that the collaborative workshops (March and June 2005) and LAMS training days had given some boost and confidence to LAMS activities (see system usage data, Figure 4, page 41). Researchers contacted potential LAMS users via email, letter and telephone and negotiated visit days with school management and teachers. The original intention was to look for a stratified sample of visits according to subject coverage and key stages. In practice, visits were selected on the basis of what was made available to researchers (e.g. where contact was made with schools via questionnaires or phone calls and where LAMS sessions were being conducted and where schools offered the possibility of a visit). There were perhaps fewer observations with the above Year-10 classes because most of the visits were conducted in the summer term when GCSE and A-level examinations were in progress or students had already left the school.

The Review Team was extremely grateful for the welcome and co-operation they encountered from institutions over the course of their visits. It was a positive advantage that the review personnel could offer support to sometimes apprehensive staff in the form of technical and pedagogical advice, information on the state-of-play in other similar institutions and contact details for practitioners in the same subject areas. Working in isolation, these early-adopting LAMS practitioners assumed that other pilot schools would have achieved much more than their own efforts. This supportive, collaborative aspect of the review often worked as a spur to LAMS development in a school.Altogether fifteen practitioner visits were made to nine institutions (with Hathershaw Technology College hosting four, Queensbridge, Cator Park and Beaverwood Schools hosting two visits each). It was possible to observe LAMS sessions on 12 occasions. One visit was cancelled due to staff illness, two were not possible as LAMS sessions had already been completed and no further sessions were planned by the time researchers were able to make contact with the school. The attempt at covering a range of subject areas was successful and the results are generalisable across the key stages.Table 4 summarises the practitioner visits made during February and July 2005



Table 4 LAMS Practitioner visits (February – July 2005)

ObservationVisit no.

Institution Dates (2005)

Subject Teacher Year LAMSsequence

ICT access Monitoring(F2F, online or both)

First LAMS session for teacher?

First LAMS session for student?

1 Queensbridge

28 Feb Geography Kate Squires Year 9 Comparing countries

PC room F2F No Yes

2 Notre Dame 28 Apr French Christine Bodin

Year 9 Metro 3 Module 3 PC room Both No No

3 Queensbridge

12 May History Kate Fanshawe

Year 9 D-day PC room F2F No No

4 Bishop Challoner

12 May ICT Carmen Wint n/a Setting up the computer system

n/a n/a n/a n/a

5 Kemnal TC 24 May History Chris Metz Year 7 Bubonic Plague PC room Both No Yes6 Hathershaw

TC9 June Maths Stuart Beech Year 9 Theme Parks Laptops in

class roomBoth No No

7 Hathershaw TC

9 June Biology (Hearing Impaired Unit)

Melody Dark/Christine Burnett

Year 11 Digestive System – hearing impaired group

Laptops in PC room

F2F No No

8 Hathershaw TC

10 June Science Dennis McDaid/Martin Wadworth

Year 9 Evaluation - Thinking skills - Self -evaluationPeer-evaluation

PC room Both Yes No

9 Hathershaw TC

10 June ICT Gabby Williamson

Year 8 Evaluating websites

PC room F2F Yes Yes

10 Brayton College

15 June History Neil McDonald Year 7 Elizabeth I PC room with extra laptops

Both with online contribution

No For some

September 2005 http://www.becta.org.uk page 28 of 180© Becta 2005 Learning Activity Management System


ObservationVisit no.

Institution Dates (2005)

Subject Teacher Year LAMSsequence

ICT access Monitoring(F2F, online or both)

First LAMS session for teacher?

First LAMS session for student?

s11 Cator Park 16 June Politics Rachel Hunter Year 12 US Resources PC room Both No No12 Cator Park 16 June English Carol Upson Year 9 Happy Prince n/a n/a n/a n/a13 Charles

Darwin 17 June RE Ewan

McKenzieYear 9 Science &

ReligionPC room Both No Yes

14 Beaverwood 20 June Science Sean Coomber

Year 11 Energy Resources PC room F2F No Yes

15 Beaverwood 20 June Business Kevin Davis Year 12 Accounts & Finance

n/a n/a n/a n/a

*F2F: face-to-face, n/a: not applicable as session was not observed



Before each practitioner visit, and in order to make the review process as transparent as possible to schools, a schedule was sent to the teacher or management personnel concerned. Table 5 summarises the schedule and data gathered. Most visits were made by a team of 2 or 3 researchers in order to ensure rich data being collected and to facilitate video data collection.

Table 5 LAMS practitioner visit schedule and outcomes

Research Activity

Aims Outcomes or data gathered

Pre-visit Questionnaire

The questionnaire aimed at recording the details, aims and objectives of the LAMS lesson to be observed, and was collected from teachers before the LAMS visit.

7 pre-visit questionnaires collected.

Observation Researchers observed the classroom LAMS session to record the educational and ICT contexts of the session, and where possible, followed the LAMS activities online. Video recordings were made during lessons where permitted.

12 classroom sessions were observed.

10 video recorded.

Interviews Researchers conducted interviews with teachers after the classroom session on their LAMS experiences and how the session went. Staff with strategic involvement in the LAMS pilot were also interviewed. Interviews were video and sound recorded.

27 interviews including staff members e.g.: teachers, heads of departments, strategic/management personnel, e-learning specialists in a support

role (e.g. ICT co-ordinator).

Focus Group A focus group was conducted with six randomly selected pupils, stratified by gender, drawn from the observed lesson. Focus groups were video and sound recorded where possible.

14 focus groups were conducted (including one pilot group; visits number 2 and 8 included two focus groups each)

Sequence The observed session’s LAMS sequence was collected from teachers to identify subject-specific uses of LAMS.

9 LAMS sequences collected.

Student Survey A pupil feedback questionnaire was created in the form of a LAMS sequence using the Survey tool. All teachers of observed lessons were asked to have their pupils complete the sequence.

Three classes completed the student survey.

Consent Forms Teachers and institutions were sent or handed consent forms for pupils’ guardians to complete to allow video recordings to be made.

These were either retained by the institution or collected by the researchers.

As the focus of the pilot was the adoption of a new software tool, the intention was to keep the research instruments open to accommodate novel uses of LAMS as they might emerge



throughout the project. The first school visit was used as a pilot after which the research instruments and schedule were refined and modified. The Pre-visit Questionnaire aimed to elicit teachers’ objectives for their LAMS lesson; researchers observed sessions to record ways of classroom delivery and to observe how the objectives might have been achieved. Where possible, LAMS sessions were followed online. (One shortcoming of the LAMS system surfaced when researchers attempted to monitor sessions that were scheduled by the teachers. LAMS currently allows only one staff member to monitor sessions and contributions online, so dual monitoring was not possible. Researchers therefore logged on as learners. This dual monitoring idea was recorded as a possible enhancement as team-teaching with LAMS was a practice that teachers had employed.) Altogether, seven pre-visit questionnaires were collected and 12 sessions were observed.

For the teacher and staff interviews, semi-structured interview schedules were prepared to elicit details of LAMS adoption at the institution, the institution’s LAMS objectives, teachers’ LAMS experiences and their perception of LAMS suitability for their subject teaching as well as their views on how students perceived LAMS. Eighteen teacher, five strategic personnel and two specialist e-learning staff interviews were conducted. There were three joint interviews so altogether twenty-eight staff members took part in the interviews. Interviews were based around the topic guides, in certain cases being adapted to suit the context or the time available for the interview, e.g. staff who were not involved in teaching were not asked about experiences of LAMS delivery. Each interview was audio recorded and interview transcripts were analysed with the identification of emerging themes and sub-themes (these being given alphanumeric codes, the classification being cross-checked by two researchers). Once the transcripts were coded, all responses in the same sub-theme were grouped together to prepare the review, analysis and interpretation of findings using this grounded perspective.

A similar process was repeated with the student focus group data. The focus groups were usually led by two researchers to maintain the group dynamic. Six pupils were selected at random by the researchers (e.g. every 5th or 6th pupil in the classlist with an equal number of boys and girls – except in single sex schools). Discussions took place either in the classroom or in a different room, e.g. library or board room. For practical reasons, pupils were sometimes selected on the basis of what their next lesson was, albeit still in a random way (so only one teacher had to be notified about the pupil missing part of the next lesson). The feedback collected from students is therefore considered to be representative of the student population of the observed lessons and offers a range of student views on LAMS. (See analysis in Sections 8.2 and 9.) Fourteen focus groups were conducted following the twelve observed LAMS sessions, with two sessions allowing for one extra focus group each.



Table 6 Focus group participants*

Year Girls Boys Total

7 4 8 12

8 2 1 3

9 17 21 38

11 8 8

12 6 6

Total 37 30 67

* some schools were single sex, hence the gender differenceThe Review Team, using the newly available Survey activity, created a student survey sequence in LAMS for students to complete. These sequences were made available to all the classes after the observed lesson. Teachers were asked to encourage their students to complete the feedback sequence outside the observed lesson so as not to compromise lesson objectives. It was hoped that these surveys would provide quantitative results of student feedback. Only three classes had completed the survey up to the end of June 2005. The fact that only a small number of classes completed the survey after repeated requests by the researchers may be symptomatic of the fact that perhaps booking the ICT room again may have been difficult. One teacher conducted her evaluations through LAMS and made the data available to the Review Team.

The Final Review Questionnaire was compiled to identify the extent of LAMS use and adoption by the end of the summer term of 2005 and to identify to what extent schools’ objectives were met by the pilot. Respondents were asked to identify any benefits that introducing LAMS had brought to various stakeholders (e.g. staff and students) and rate each benefit on a scale of 1 to 7, where 7 was ‘completely materialised’.

Questionnaires were sent out to all LAMS participants in the researchers’ database both via email and by post. The questionnaires were also mailed to the heads of the institutions concerned. Tailored questionnaires were sent to those participants who had completed the Initial LAMS questionnaire – their original responses (the LAMS benefits) were pre-filled in order for them to rate to what extent the benefit was achieved. An incentive was offered for the timely completion of the questionnaires, in the form of entry into a prize draw for a USB memory stick.

Those institutions which were known to have opted out of the pilot by the time of the Interim Report (March 2005) were also mailed a shorter version of the questionnaire soliciting their reasons for opting out. Altogether, 16 questionnaires were received from 14 institutions. Three people responded via email rather than by using the questionnaires explaining their progress with LAMS.



An analysis of the questionnaires is presented in Section 7.5.

5.4 Secondary sourcesVarious LAMS-related secondary sources also informed the review including:

Published and unpublished literature on learning design and LAMS (e.g. JISC e-learning models, JISC LAMS evaluation literature etc.);

LAMS presentations by James Dalziel; The www.lamsinternational.com site as well as resources on the SST LAMS website

(http://uklams.net).

The Review Team also attended the JISC LAMS workshop on 11th January 2005, benefiting from a cross-sector view of LAMS use.

5.5 WorkshopsAs a part of Becta’s strategy for introducing LAMS into schools, supporting and encouraging ongoing uptake and development within ‘early-adopter’ institutions, the Review Team (with much appreciated help from Simon Harrison) prepared and ran two LAMS workshops. The stated aims of the workshop were: getting teachers started with using LAMS; establishing mutual support with other teachers; bringing together fellow subject-specialists; gaining more experience and confidence in creating and delivering LAMS sequences. For further details about the workshop, see Section 14.

5.6 Community forumA password-protected Community Forum was set up by the SST in order to stimulate LAMS practitioner discussions and to offer opportunities to share experiences online. The site was linked to the SST LAMS site at http://www.uklams.net/community/. The Review Team provided some pedagogical support to the forum site. For more details, see Section 15.


http://www.uklams.net/community/

http://uklams.net/

http://www.lamsinternational.com/


6 Profile of pilot LAMS use up to July 2005As outlined in the review methodology section, it was possible to provide a snapshot of LAMS use over the course of the pilot using system statistics from the pilot schools’ LAMS servers (http://apps1.uklams.net and http://apps2.uklams.net)2. The two main areas of interest were the number of LAMS sequences created and the number of sequences run by the participating institutions.

6.1 Learning sequences created using LAMSTable 7 below provides a summary of all the sequences that were created and saved on the two LAMS servers to which the Review Team managed to gain access. Whilst it was not possible to ascertain with total confidence whether a sequence was for test or practice purposes, or a genuine subject sequence for classroom use, the data presented should reliably represent the scale of LAMS use at the participating institutions during the period under review.

A large number of sequences and test-sequences were created and run by the Review Team as it took on a supporting role during the pilot, for instance for the LAMS practitioner workshops (see Section 14 for more details). The LAMS technical team also needed to create test classes to support practitioners. These two sources are represented in the data but have been separated from the core of the pilot institutions’ data.

N.B. data from the Kemnal Technology College server were not available due to a hardware changeover at that institution, therefore the following discussion of usage statistics does not include this major user of LAMS.

Altogether 26 institutions developed 565 LAMS sequences between July 2004 and July 2005. The mean number of sequences per institution was 22, with Hathershaw Technology College creating the highest number of sequences (227). Sequences created by the Review Team numbered 185 for the purposes of LAMS support and 60 for testing or other purposes. The mean number of sequences created per institution was 21.7 but given that almost half of these sequences were produced by Hathershaw Technology College, it is more revealing to look at the median, which is 12. Ninety six staff members were involved in the pilot at the 26 institutions and the mean number of sequences produced per staff was 5.9. Excluding Hathershaw staff and sequences, this mean falls to 4.9. Given that the total number of pilot schools was 40 (excluding Kemnal College) it can be inferred that 14 schools have not used LAMS to save sequences outside the training sessions. The interim LAMS report in March 2005 reported details of eight schools which responded to the Review Team with details as to why they had discontinued with the pilot. The above statistics reveal that the number of

2 A demo server has also been used for training purposes and for an e-mentoring programme, the data from which was not included in this report as it was not closely associated with the activities examined in the review.





schools not making use of LAMS was 14, about one-third of the total schools which joined the pilot initially. (See Section 7 for more details.)

Table 7 Number of LAMS sequences created during the pilot (Data as of 7/7/05)

Institutions (n=26)

Number of staff involved

Number of sequences

createdBeaverwood School for Girls 11 28Bishop Challoner 4 13Brayton College 1 12Bromley College of Further Education 1 12Burwood 1 6Cator Park School for Girls 3 20Charles Darwin School 3 23Darrick Wood School 9 33Edmonton 1 1Frome Community College 1 4Glebe 1 1Hathershaw Technology College 28 227Hayes School 2 3Kelsey Park School 1 9Kings Heath Boys School 2 12Langley Park Girls School 1 16Mortimer School 2 2Notre Dame 3 25Orpington College of FE 2 4PRS (Kingswood Centre) 1 6Queensbridge 6 45Ravens Wood School 1 1St Olave's & St Saviour's Grammar School 1 5Stantonbury Campus 5 34St Peters’ Catholic School 3 16The Ravensbourne School 2 7

Total 96 565Review Team 185Miscellaneous use other than by pilot institutions 60

Total 810

The above LAMS usage figures on the number of sequences created should be further interpreted in the context of known LAMS pilot activity. Some of the sequences created were probably created during training sessions or for practice or test sequences. Furthermore,

September 2005 http://www.becta.org.uk page 35 of 180© Becta 2005 Research reports


multiple instances or versions of the same sequence might exist for several reasons. Once a sequence was scheduled, it could only be modified if users saved a different version of that sequence. Before the Preview function was available (February 2005), the only way to test a sequence was to schedule it. If, after this testing, the sequence had to be modified, users had to save a new version of the sequence. The numbers reported in the previous paragraph are likely to be over-estimates of the actual number of completed sequences ready for delivery as opposed to experimental and test versions. Therefore, the data at this level of interpretation may be said to represent the user activities of experimentation and practice with LAMS sequence authoring (either at training or privately), previewing sequences before February 2005, as well as delivery-ready sequences. The rest of this section attempts to discover what evidence exists in the system data for separating out these different types of sequence and finding out how many are ‘real’. Section 5.2, which deals with the number of sequences delivered, may indicate more accurately still how many of these sequences were complete and intended for delivery.

The most obvious evidence available was found in sequence titles. Table 8 shows that of the 565 sequences saved in LAMS, 451 were uniquely titled. However, this does not mean that each of these uniquely-titled sequences was a complete and ready-to-deliver object and it is immediately possible to filter out working-versions, previews and experiments. When teachers work in LAMS and modify their sequences, the system prompts them to save the sequence using a different title. The current automated prompt is to offer ‘Copy of [sequence title]’ i.e. if the sequence is called ‘Bullying’, the system prompts the author of the sequence to save the modified version as ‘Copy of Bullying’. Utilising this characteristic, ‘Copy of’ titles were deleted. This yielded 324 uniquely-titled sequences saved by the 26 institutions.

It is possible to further filter out sequence duplicates by examining the remaining 324 uniquely-titled sequences for explicit versioning information. This was done by looking for repeated sequence titles with an additional numeric version identifier, possibly signalling working versions of the same sequence, although equally these may represent copies of sequences indicating re-use or adaptation (see next paragraph). A count of uniquely-titled LAMS sequences after this filtering process was 224. It is important to note that, as this count was done purely on a basis of titles and not the content of sequences, it must be regarded as a tentative estimate.

6.1.1 Reuse and adaptation

One of the major anticipated benefits of using LAMS was the capability to quickly and easily re-use and adapt one’s own or other people’s subject sequences. The LAMS server data offered an opportunity to explore the extent of use of this potential. The server data recorded who had authored each LAMS sequence and whether the sequence versions were created by the same person or different staff members. By restoring the numbered versions of sequence titles (giving a total of 324 uniquely-titled LAMS sequences) it was found that 108



sequences were adapted by the person who originally authored them yielding 298 occurrences in the database. The implication is that one-third of the total unique LAMS sequences were further worked on and adapted by the same person.

Finally practitioners were able to access sequences created by other people through the common areas (public or institutional). The statistical evidence shows that 36 titles were re-used, i.e. saved and worked on by someone other than the original author of the sequence itself. These 36 titles were worked on by another 46 practitioners.

Table 8 LAMS sequences created in LAMS: adaptation and re-use

Data from apps1 and apps2 LAMS servers on 7/7/05LAMS sequences created by schools/colleges 565Uniquely-titled sequences (unfiltered) 451Uniquely-titled sequences ('Copy of' titles discounted) 324Uniquely-titled sequences (numbered versions discounted) 224LAMS sequences adapted by original author (n=324 titles) 108LAMS sequences re-used (saved by person other than original author, n=324 titles) 36 These 36 sequences were reused by a number of people other than author 46

Practitioners were able to save their sequences to three locations within LAMS: 1) the private area was available to the practitioner only; 2) the institutional area allowed teachers from the same schools to share sequences; and 3) sequences saved to the public area were accessible by anyone. Table 9 shows a breakdown of sequences and the location to which they were saved. Out of the total 571 sequences (N.B. these data were gained from the server a week later, on the 14/7/05, hence the slight difference in the number of total sequences created), 352 were saved as private sequences (62%), 189 as institutional (33%) and 30 as public sequences (5%), indicating a preference for saving sequences at the institutional level and therefore with potential for sharing within school. Teachers were more likely to offer their sequences to others within the same school rather than offering them as public sequences. This could be explained by a need for confidence and in-house proofing before releasing a sequence publicly or that the departmental links are likely to be stronger in any future aspirations for sharing learning designs.

Table 9 Sharing sequences: private, institutional and public LAMS areas

Private 352 62%Institutional 189 33%Public 30 5%Total 571 100%

*Data from apps1 and apps2 LAMS servers on 14/7/05

There is some uncertainty about the above statistics in that versioning information was derived from the data by visual inspection and inference rather than being captured by the



system, but it does signal that the potential of LAMS for re-using and sharing sequences is already manifest, to some extent.

It would have been interesting to look at subject specific use, i.e. what subjects and key stages were utilised more often or lent themselves to re-use. Such systematic data are not currently available from the system itself. Users are prompted to give their own descriptions for each sequence as they wish, but the only information available to the review team was the sequence title.

6.2 Learning sequences run in LAMSDuring the pilot, practitioners could ask the UK LAMS team to set up a class list for their students. Once they received a series of student usernames and passwords, staff members were able to schedule the sequence and make it available for students to access via the monitor function. For brevity, this process is called 'running a LAMS sequence'. Data on these sequences (e.g. sequence title, start date etc.) were extracted from the LAMS database.

The availability of the Preview function may potentially have skewed these statistics. Before the Preview function was available in LAMS (2 February 2005), practitioners had to schedule their sequences via the monitor function to test how they would be displayed to students and whether they were working as intended. With the Preview function available, teachers were able to test their sequences from within the author function without the need to schedule them. The majority of sequences scheduled before 2 February 2005 may well be ‘test’ sequences as a part of the authoring process, as opposed to genuine sequences run with students. Sequences that were run by the Review Team during workshops or used by the LAMS team for testing purposes have been separated from the pilot participants’ data.

Table 10 shows the total number of sequences that were run in LAMS between November 2004 and July 2005. As the above discussion of the pre- and post- Preview schedules has shown, this number is probably over-represents the number of actual live LAMS sessions. The name of the class was also recorded in the server data, so it was possible to make a judgement in most cases as to whether the class comprised students, staff members or workshop participants (e.g. students classes were usually titled ‘[School name] year 9’, staff sessions ‘[School name] INSET’ or ‘[School name] Staff’). So the data below give a fairly reliable overview as to whether the sequences were part of staff training sessions or classroom sessions. Where the type of class was not evident, the sequences were marked as type ‘not known’.

Altogether 23 institutions scheduled 397 LAMS sessions during the one year of the pilot (see

Table 10):



Slightly less than a third of the LAMS sequences (118) were delivered to students. Slightly more than half the sequences (219) were run with staff groups; they were

either test sequences created by the author and ran before the Preview function was available or they formed part of staff training sessions.

14 sequences were scheduled by teachers at the LAMS practitioner workshops, in addition to the 115 sequences that were run at the LAMS practitioner workshops in Bromley and Coventry (either as preparatory materials or demonstration sequences created by workshop participants).

The delivery purpose and target of 46 sequences was not known, and could have been either student or staff sequences.



Table 10 Sequences run in LAMS until 7/7/05

Institutions (data source: apps1-2 servers --- 28/10/04-07/07/05)

Not known Staff Workshop Students Total

Hathershaw Technology College 2 86 35 123

Notre Dame 19 19 18 56

Darrick Wood School 26 26

Charles Darwin School 18 3 21

Queensbridge 2 4 1 14 21

Beaverwood School for Girls 1 7 9 17

Stantonbury Campus 2 14 16

St Peter's Catholic School 15 15

Langley Park Girls School 7 7 14

Kings Heath Boys School 11 1 12

Orpington College of FE 1 11 12

Brayton College 1 10 11

Bromley College of Further Education 4 7 11

Cator Park School for Girls 3 2 1 5 11

Bishop Challoner 5 1 6

Burwood 5 5

Kelsey Park School 2 2 4

St Olave's & St Saviour's Grammar School 3 1 4

Frome Community College 3 3

PRS (Kingswood Centre) 2 1 3

The Ravensbourne School 1 2 3

Mortimer School 2 2

Edmonton 1 1

Total for 23 institutions 46 219 14 118 397

Percentage of total sequences run 11.6 55.2 3.5 29.7 100

Miscellaneous 10

Review Team (e.g. run at workshops) 115

TOTAL 522



The mean number of LAMS sessions run per institution was 17.3 (n=23, total=397). As almost a third of the sequences (123) were run by Hathershaw Technology College, it is worth examining the median value, which is 11. Excluding Hathershaw from these data (n=22, total 274) the mean is 13 LAMS sessions run per institution.

Figure 4 shows the distribution of LAMS sessions during the year of the pilot, including classroom delivery as well as staff training sessions. The busiest months were November 2004 and June 2005. Possible reasons for the uneven distribution could be:

LAMS training sessions and workshops boosted LAMS activities. (Some LAMS training took place in November.)

The school calendar affected space and time for LAMS activities: e.g. exam period in April and May resulted in very low volume of LAMS activities.

The Becta LAMS Review Team visits stimulated LAMS activities. Most of the visits (10 out of 15) were conducted in the month of June, which was the busiest of month after the availability of the Preview function.

Figure 4 Timeline of scheduled LAMS sequences

Number of LAMS sequences run

20

12

96

24

46 47

25

11

20

95

10

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

Date notknown

Oct-04 Nov-04 Dec-04 Jan-05 Feb-05 Mar-05 Apr-05 May-05 Jun-05 Jul-05

Month

Num

ber o

f LA

MS

sequ

ence

s ru

n

Before availability of Preview function After availability of Preview function

Table 11 shows the number of staff involved in running LAMS sequences at each institution. Hathershaw Technology College had 24 staff who ran LAMS sequences, followed by 12 other institutions which had between two and seven staff engaged in LAMS. Ten institutions



had one staff member who delivered LAMS sessions either to school staff or students. Given that the number of staff involved at Hathershaw is much higher than the second most-represented institution in the table, the median value again is more telling than the mean. About half of the institutions had the same or more staff involved compared to the median value which is two, and half of the institutions the same or lower than two.



Each school taking part in the pilot was asked to identify two members of staff who then attended the Kemnal College LAMS training course. Table 11 thus suggests that the year of the pilot was sufficient time for an average of two staff members to become confident in using LAMS to the point of delivering sessions either to their own staff members or to classes of students. It might be inferred that further cascading of LAMS use within a school, getting more members of staff using LAMS, would take more time than was available in the one year of the pilot.

That Hathershaw had a total of 24 staff who ran LAMS sequences between October 2004 and July 2005 was a result of their institutional adoption strategy which is further discussed in Section 7.2. Looking at other examples where more than two staff members were involved, it was learnt through communication with the individual schools concerned that Charles Darwin, Beaverwood and Bishop Challoner were all schools where a departmental cascading strategy was planned. This is the likely explanation of why more than two members of staff were involved in running LAMS sequences. Orpington College did not deliver LAMS sessions to students as they attended one of the Becta LAMS workshops in June. Stantonbury Campus, although having had LAMS as a long-term plan on their teaching and learning agenda, was involved in finding an institutional VLE and had not delivered LAMS to students. The Review Team was not able to make contact with Darrick Wood school to find out their adoption strategy.

About 17 schools out of the 40 pilot schools are not represented in Table 11. (Kemnal College, the 41st institution did have a number of staff involved. The exact number has not been identified but, through a staff interview, it is known that at least five staff were involved in delivering LAMS sessions to students). The schools not represented in the table had either opted out of the pilot at an early stage (e.g. eight schools discontinued the pilot by March 2005) or having been trained in LAMS, and perhaps creating trial LAMS sequences, had not got to the stage of delivering LAMS to students in the classroom or of showing the potential of LAMS to other staff members in the school (four schools – compare with results of Table 7).



Table 11 Number of staff involved in running LAMS sequences

Institutions (data source: apps1-2 servers --- 28/10/04-07/07/05)*

Number of staff who ran LAMS sequences

Hathershaw Technology College 24Orpington College of FE 7Darrick Wood School 6Charles Darwin School 4Stantonbury Campus 4Beaverwood School for Girls 3Bishop Challoner 3Cator Park School for Girls 2Kings Heath Boys School 2Mortimer School 2Queensbridge 2St Peter's Catholic School 2The Ravensbourne School 2Brayton College 1Bromley College of Further Education 1Burwood 1Edmonton 1Frome Community College 1Kelsey Park School 1Langley Park Girls School 1Notre Dame 1Pupil Referral Service (Kingswood Centre) 1St Olave's & St Saviour's Grammar School 1Total number of staff involved at 23 institutions 73

Table 12 shows the mean number of sessions (n=397) delivered per staff (n=73) which was 5.4. These sessions could have been staff, student or workshop sequences.

Table 12 Mean number of LAMS sequences run during the pilot

Data source: apps1 and apps2 servers, 7/7/05 Per institution Per staffn=22 n=73

Total number of sequences run before Preview = 178 8.09 2.44Total number of sequences run after Preview = 199 9.05 2.73Date of schedule not known 20 0.91 0.27Total number of sequences run 397 18.05 5.44

Table 13 shows those institutions where LAMS sessions were run with students only if this was directly evident from the class name given to the run of the sequence in LAMS. There may have been more student sessions, i.e. those included as ‘not known’ in the above table. Altogether 11 institutions ran LAMS sessions in the classroom (and 12 including Kemnal



College for which data are not available) which is about every one in four of the institutions which joined the pilot. The mean number of sessions per institution was 10.7, median 9.

Table 13 Student LAMS sessions up until 7/7/05

Institutions (n=11) Student sessions run*Hathershaw Technology College 35Notre Dame 18St Peter's Catholic School 15Queensbridge 14Brayton College 10Beaverwood School for Girls 9Bromley College of Further Education 7Cator Park School for Girls 5Charles Darwin School 3Kings Heath Boys School 1Bishop Challoner 1Total for 11 institutions 118

* excluding those where class type was not known.

6.3 Discussion of user statisticsThis section interprets and discusses the quantitative user statistics gained from the LAMS database using the apps1 and apps2 LAMS server data for the period of 28 October 2004 to 7 July 2005. Due to hardware changeover, no user statistics were available for Kemnal Technology College, and although it is known that they created and delivered LAMS sessions, it was not possible to include this major user in the data set. Data presented here refer to 40 pilot institutions. The number of sequences created in total (565) was much higher than those run with actual classes (397).

Figure 5 Snapshot of LAMS activity (n=40 pilot schools)

2623

1114

17

29

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

Created LAMSsequences

Scheduled LAMSsequences (e.g. stafftraining and students)

Scheduled LAMSsequences w ith

students

Num

ber o

f sch

ools

Yes

No



Of the 40 institutions involved in the SST pilot, 26 created LAMS sequences and 14 did not, 23 delivered LAMS sessions (including all types of sessions such as staff and student classes) and 17 did not, and 11 ran sequences for students while 29 did not (Figure 5). This means that approximately one in four institutions completed a whole cycle of LAMS activities from training to delivering sessions to students. During the pilot, staff members had the opportunity to be trained in the use of LAMS as well as experimenting with creating LAMS sequences, but far fewer people reached the stage of running sequences in the classroom with students. Possible explanations for this have already been posited and are further explored in Section 7.5 ‘Original objectives - Barriers and enablers.’

At the majority of institutions which delivered LAMS, one or two staff members were involved. This is consistent with the number of staff participating in LAMS training. The mean number of LAMS sessions run per staff was 5.44 but it is important to note that these could have been practice as well as real sessions. The number of staff involved also depended on the school’s adoption strategy. For example, Hathershaw adopted a whole-school approach and therefore had the highest number of staff involved. Other schools, by the end of the pilot, already showed evidence of cascading LAMS expertise to other members of staff within the school.

All these LAMS activities happened during a relatively short period of time, within a school year, taking place amongst the usual busy periods of schools' schedules, including GCSE and other exams. Summer and late winter seemed the busiest months for LAMS activities, whilst the exam periods had the least volume of LAMS activity. It was also observed that the schedule of LAMS training sessions as well as the arranged LAMS visits by the Review Team may have boosted LAMS activities.

One of the potential benefits of LAMS, as perceived by the schools themselves (see Becta LAMS Interim Report – March 2005) was that it allowed re-use of LAMS sequences. User statistics were examined to explore whether and to what extent this benefit had materialised during the pilot. Out of the 565 LAMS sequences saved, 451 were apparently uniquely-titled. A closer match for unique titles was achieved by combining sequences which were created using the automated versioning method of LAMS (i.e. deleting ‘Copy of’ from a sequence title yielded its original copy) which resulted in 324 uniquely-titled sequences. A further method combined sequence titles under one title if they had some explicit versioning in their titles (e.g. numeric version value or ‘new version’ etc.), so the number of uniquely-titled sequences following this process was 224.

Re-including the user-versioned sequence titles then out of the 324 titles about one-third were saved by the person who originally authored them; 36 titles were re-used by a different person with the involvement of 46 users who were other than the original author. These data suggest that users evidenced a willingness and desire to exploit LAMS’ ability to allow



sequence re-use and adaptation, albeit, at this stage, predominantly meaning re-use of LAMS sequences by the same person. The above data were derived in manual ways as versioning information is not currently available through LAMS. There are no data available on re-use by subject area and this may have an impact on the searchability and re-use of sequences. Further research in a longer scale study is suggested to gather evidence regarding LAMS’ potential for re-use and efficient retrieval of learning activity sequences.

The above data represent the quantity of LAMS activities during the pilot in a raw estimate form i.e. the data possibly overestimate activities as compared with actual LAMS sessions due to the reasons mentioned above. These LAMS usage statistics would be meaningless without the review data collected directly from practitioners which are able to present the quality of teaching and learning activities made possible with the introduction of LAMS. The next sections summarise these direct experiences gained from practitioners and grouped under the themes and sub-themes that emerged from the qualitative data collected.



7 LAMS pilot: Objectives and achievements of participants

7.1 Initial pathways and incentives to participation in the LAMS pilotRoutes by which schools came to the LAMS Pilot have been examined for their potential significance in influencing the success of any aims and objectives over the course of the pilot. These pathways were usually at least partly revealing of a school’s motivation for taking up LAMS as well as indicating a management strategy and the meaningfulness of a school’s engagement with the LAMS pilot.

A range of routes was found by analysing: responses to the question: ‘How was the decision reached to pilot LAMS in your

school and who was involved in the decision making?’ from ‘LAMS Pilot: Contact Person Questionnaire 1’.

interviews with managerial staff responsible for strategic decisions

These routes can be seen to fall into three broad categories, often combining in different ways in each school:

1) High-level management initiative such as an LEA project available to schools and offering an easily accessible, low-risk route.“We needed a couple of people from…school to go along to the training, so science and business have agreed to trial it out.” (Teacher no. 23)“Initially it was offered to everybody across the authority so we were going to have to get in and have a look. Because [teacher name] and [teacher name] have been so enthusiastic and taking it on, I think where it will go is that they will now become the leaders and they will train others in the school.” (Management Personnel no. 4)

2) Interest in LAMS either from a management or staff individual enthusiast or ‘champion’ prompting a school to seek out and ‘buy-in’ to the pilot to explore the benefits of investment. “We saw LAMS first of all in an SST publication and then there was quite a lot of stuff on the website, and discussions and looked through all the stuff that was happening in Australia, and how it was being used in various places. It seemed like a tool that we could use because we were keen to have some sort of forums…and that was the thing that attracted us to it.” (Management Personnel)

3) LAMS pilot/training being in some way convenient to a school’s immediate needs.

It was observed that, where a school had at least one management or staff enthusiast/champion to engage with and support LAMS development, then positive achievements would generally be made in that school. There was a high-level of crossover between the first two categories – i.e. a strategic initiative coupled with an in-school



implementing enthusiast - often combining very successfully, albeit generally on a small-scale.

7.2 Trends in managing LAMS adoption during the pilotTwo general approaches to the adoption of LAMS by a school during the pilot were identified by analysing the following data sources:

1) Responses to the question, ‘Please describe how LAMS was/will be introduced at your institution. (Please refer to training, phasing, number and staff involved, if relevant)’ from ‘LAMS Pilot: Contact Person Questionnaire.’

2) Information from ‘LAMS Pilot: Teacher Questionnaire.’3) Information gained during visits from interviews with managerial staff responsible for

strategic decisions.4) Information from telephone interviews with a contact at schools not completing

questionnaires or visited.

These approaches are described as 'exploratory' and 'incubatory'.

a) The ‘exploratory’ approach took the form of an exploration of the functionality, potential and applicability of LAMS within a personal or departmental context (What can LAMS really do in my school? How can I/we/the school use it? Does the school have the right resources/skills/will to use it?) The intention of this approach is to make a judgement on any or all of these questions and from this position, develop a more considered LAMS adoption strategy over a longer term than the year-long pilot. This may of course have included discontinuing any involvement with LAMS, or postponing activity until the right factors might cohere. This category includes a range of experimental styles from ad hoc and sporadically timed (most often encountered where a school’s route to the LAMS was via an easily-accessible, low-risk route) to those more focused and usually encountered where an enthusiast/ICT champion had sought out the LAMS pilot. Two schools whose stated method of LAMS adoption placed them in the exploratory category had not created any sequences by 07/07/05.

b) The ‘incubatory’ approach is used to describe the strategy of those institutions already convinced of the benefits and ‘fit’ of LAMS either prior to or very early on in their involvement with the LAMS pilot. They were likely to have developed a strategy for introducing LAMS as a teaching tool and encouraging its uptake amongst teaching staff. Generally, the pilot period saw most activity for such schools focusing on the introduction of LAMS to staff through cascaded training and the lead-by-example of individual or departmental champions. It is important to note that the actual extent of LAMS adoption in such schools might be small-scale. Generally the school strategic vision extends a number of years beyond the current pilot phase with serious, cross-curricular, integrated adoption of LAMS as a teaching tool as an intended outcome at a point after the end of the current pilot.



It is with these two approaches in mind that any measurements of achievement should be made, that is:

a) To what extent has the school utilised the pilot phase to assess to their own satisfaction the benefits, potential and practicalities of LAMS and so formed a strategic assessment of and future vision for the tool?

b) To what extent have schools managed to achieve their incubation strategy in the pilot year and in what ways has this influenced their long-term aims with LAMS?

With the data available it was possible to categorise 23 schools. (The remaining 18 schools either did not respond to any medium of data gathering on the issue of LAMS pilot plans and objectives, or had formally withdrawn from the pilot or had not begun any LAMS activity or made any plans beyond attempting activity in the new school year.) (Table 14.)

Table 14 LAMS adoption in the LAMS pilot institutions

Number of schools %

Incubatory 6 15

Exploratory 17 41

No reported activity 12 29

Withdrawn from pilot 6 15

Total 41 100

This prevalence of ‘exploratory’ schools over ‘incubatory’ schools indicates that there may be a preference for this approach to the trialling of LAMS by schools. Significantly, it was more likely that a school which had joined the LAMS pilot as a result of management or staff strategic/ enthusiast interest would have taken the ‘incubatory’ approach to the pilot. Schools taking a low-risk route into the project usually adopted an ‘exploratory’ approach.

A preference for low risk and exploration may be related to other issues in piloting the LAMS software which are more fully explored in Section 7.5, ‘Original Objectives - Barriers and enablers’. One further important factor may be the fact that LAMS is usually a school’s first encounter with learning design software and this conceptual step up from pre-packaged ‘content solutions’ may predispose them to a more tentative approach. Finally, it may also be a consequence of a low-risk (and low-stakes) route into the LAMS pilot that also meant LAMS was considered a low priority and thus managed as an incidental and perhaps isolated school experiment.



7.3 Objectives of pilot schools active during the pilotThe review team elicited the aims and objectives of schools partaking in the pilot by analysing:

1) Responses to all questions in ‘LAMS Pilot: Contact Person Questionnaire 1’.2) Information gained during review visits and interviews with managerial staff responsible

for strategic decisions.

It should be noted that the data presented in this subsection were obtained from schools at the beginning of the review period and did not extend to asking schools to assess the extent of their achievements. Therefore they are kept separate from Section 7.56, ‘End of pilot - Final questionnaire assessment of achievements’, as this asked schools towards the end of the review period to identify and rate the extent of achievement of their objectives in adopting LAMS. Furthermore, a different set of schools responded to each questionnaire.

It was possible to discover the objectives of eight schools that joined the LAMS pilot and that were active over the review period. There were three further schools that provided the review with objectives in joining the pilot but which postponed any activity until at least the next school year (2005-2006) and so obviously could not indicate any degree of success in relation to these original aims. These three schools are examined in 7.4.2, ‘Schools postponing LAMS pilot activity’. The questionnaire and interviews asked schools to state their objectives in four key areas, namely objectives for:

a) the schoolb) the staffc) the studentsd) other groups, such as parents.

‘Exploratory’ and ‘Incubatory’ schools are presented separately in order to distinguish any similarities or differences between the two groups.

7.3.1 ‘Exploratory’ schools’ objectives – for the school

LAMS was sought out by schools looking to, “use ICT as a tool to enhance teaching”, and a, “better way to deliver our teaching across the curriculum”. Three schools shared this objective for LAMS adoption, where management had an interest and, “Remit…to enhance teaching and learning using ICT.” One of these schools, in parallel to a recent OFSTED inspection, recognised that they needed to develop their ICT provision, “both ICT curriculum and effective ICT use across the curriculum.” It is in this area that the adoption has taken the most recognisable steps towards success, albeit on a small scale so far for this group of schools. Only one school considered the possibility of improved attainment a factor in their



adoption of LAMS in that LAMS, “might help students develop their own study skills…this could mean better results” although this is a very tentative objective.

On the issue of home-school links, two schools mentioned the possibility of, “Out of school learning”, with one of these schools anticipating, “a way of increasingly supporting youngsters who for different reasons might be out of the curriculum and so the idea that youngsters who because of other challenges, crises in their lives are not accessing the mainstream classroom, might be able to use LAMS.” It cannot be said that any kind of home-school link had got beyond the planning stage and been achieved in these or any other schools in this group.

Three schools were interested in, “being able to reuse resources”, and anticipated that, “resources will be shared between staff”. Again, schools did not progress sufficiently in their LAMS adoption to be able to achieve this reusing and sharing but in the long-term, sharing of resources within and between schools is a highly desirable outcome, “My hope would be that we are well networked enough with others to be able use LAMS in a real variety of ways: to use other people’s resources as well as our own”.

7.3.2 ‘Exploratory’ schools’ objectives – for staff

Most schools identified that a major potential benefit and therefore objective for the school in adopting LAMS would be the, “Time saving” aspect of having sets of shareable, adaptable sequences. This sharing capability figures in the objectives for many schools, with one viewpoint emphasising the personalised, creative aspect possible, “The opportunity for teachers to develop rich resources that we share broadly and we benefit one from another is certainly what we’ve bought into” whilst another school emphasised the convenience and time-efficiency of being able to access a set of ready-planned lesson sequences. “Other teachers would find beneficial an already planned lesson to deliver through the use of LAMS.”

Schools envisaged that LAMS would liberate staff from the previous strictures of delivering ICT as part of their curriculum from a purely content-based approach to that of allowing teachers to be “involved in the process of learning, not just delivering content, and using technology to improve the teaching and learning.” Schools wished to help staff improve the quality of ICT sessions for their subjects in a way that does not make excessive demands on their time, and LAMS is planned to fulfil this function, “enabling them to have a more enriched lesson…and say to others, it isn’t more work, and it does enable you in the classroom rather than hold you back.”

Finally, schools in this category planned that staff should benefit from the potential LAMS has for, “Tracking progress of students”.



7.3.3 ‘Exploratory’ schools’ objectives – for students

All schools expressed the objective in adopting LAMS of motivating students but the vision of how LAMS would achieve this objective differed from school to school. One school stated that LAMS as a novel means of delivering the curriculum would in itself encourage motivation, as for their students the, “New medium increases motivation.” Another school planned, “Increasing learner motivation and engagement” to be achieved through, “Personalised learning according to ability” and “Learner autonomy.” A third school identified that LAMS would increase motivation through “Access to material outside curriculum” and by providing the structure to use those materials in an engaging, motivating way.

Schools in this group planned that students should benefit from LAMS’ communication tools at several levels. All schools valued and wished to harness the capacity of LAMS to promote whole–class discussions, “the quiet ones…can now put their point of view without worrying, or that someone’s going to laugh at them.” This communication is seen as an important objective for ICT use in general, as a means of breaking away from the current model of students absorbing content in isolation, delivered through pre-constructed software, “One of the things that I like most about LAMS and some of the reasons that we’ve wanted to use it here is the fact that its structure causes pupils to interact whilst using ICT.” Another significant communication objective for LAMS adoption focuses on, “…students and teachers us[ing] technology to communicate with each other.”

Schools wished to target and develop students’ learning skills through the adoption of LAMS with many schools keen to foster, “independent learning”, and harness the potential benefits of LAMS guiding, “students through activities at their own pace, and those activities can be differentiated.” Schools considered the possibility of students, “extending their own learning”, but none had made any firm plans for this. Only one school mentioned that for them LAMS could be aimed at promoting, “Greater confidence and self-esteem,” for students and, furthermore that this might lead to, “better results.” This, however, was a very tentative suggestion and this school has yet to pursue and look into this objective.

7.3.4 ‘Exploratory’ schools’ objectives – for other groups

Schools in this group do not seem to have objectives for any other groups, other than one school tentatively mentioning that parents might, “…perceive the school as forward thinking?.”

7.3.5 ‘Incubatory’ schools’ objectives – for the school

One obvious difference between the ‘incubatory’ schools in this group and the ‘exploratory’ schools in the previous group is that the incubatory schools tend to express their objectives for students in terms of overall school strategy. These schools also have more considered vision for how LAMS will be used with groups other than staff and students than the



exploratory schools. Perhaps this is a result of pilots at exploratory schools generally being in the charge of enthusiast practitioners and therefore the focus was on their own teaching and the significance for their own department and students. In contrast, incubatory schools might have a broader roadmap, on which the school is planning and making significant changes in teaching structures and pursuing improvement in practice and performance, with LAMS seen as one important element of being able to achieve some of the aims envisioned on that roadmap.

The first school in this group was interested in LAMS because, “We were interested in e-learning, and how to develop a pedagogy to support new developments” and in particular to support the restructuring of the school’s curriculum. The communication possibilities of LAMS had interested the school at a strategic level as, “It seemed like a tool that we could use because we were keen to have some sort of forum…and that was the thing that attracted us to it” as the school was initially interested in the conferencing potential for students and staff alike. The school also saw LAMS as being a means of enabling the, “Introduction of a new technology to support our target of developing lessons that are engaging, challenging and that involve working with others” throughout the whole school. In order to achieve this, the school’s objectives for the pilot period were for a small-scale start-up phase broadening into the objective for the following year that, “we should have four departments who are pretty well geared up with the lessons planned, available on either our Intranet or Extranet…and that LAMS will become a part of the teaching structure for some of those lessons.” The focus of their current activity is the restructuring of their curriculum which will adopt the Accelerated Learning method of teaching as their main teaching route. In this pilot phase, the technology department and science department would be working on incorporating LAMS into these Accelerated Learning structures in their lessons. This will then be cascaded to the music technology department whose lesson structures have been identified as suitably similar. The school’s adoption strategy is careful and controlled, with management wishing to make LAMS appear to staff as a valuable and successful teaching tool that will help them in part negotiate the radical changes that the restructuring policy will bring about. Therefore, LAMS is deliberately kept small-scale at the moment so that it does not get lost in a welter of initiatives and changes, “There’s so much going on that it needs to be structured and rather than saying, ‘Right, everybody’s going to do it’ we need some people doing it so well that other people are saying, ‘I want to do some of that.’” The school has achieved this aim in that their current trialling of LAMS is highly effective and generating interest within the school, and the school is spending the summer planning and implementing their curriculum restructuring.

The school is also investigating the integration of MOODLE3 with LAMS and considering its potential for starting their accelerated learning programme and ultimately, sharing with other schools as a means of pushing LAMS more quickly into other schools. This possible move is as yet undecided and forms part of their longer-term ambitions for LAMS. Finally, another

3 www.moodle.org


http://www.moodle.org/


very interesting objective the school held for their LAMS adoption was looking at ways in which LAMS could be utilised for interacting with their partner school in South Africa. This would be of benefit to the whole school staff and students in exchanging cultural information as well as teaching practice. Their current area of concern was how to enable their South African partner to link up with them.

The strategic vision of the second school in this group positioned LAMS first of all as, “an opportunity to bring excellence back” to the institution, in terms of their overall ICT strategy and they saw a specific long-term strategic value in adopting a tool such as LAMS. “If we were going to push on our e-learning (and I still see e-learning as being the key factor and also the way that the curriculum of the 21st century is going to be delivered) then we require things to do. We need software that’s been designed specifically for use in the classroom…and I saw LAMS doing that.” The school is actively pursuing new tools and new practice and wants to utilise their ICT resources in more productive ways. LAMS as learning design software represents to this school an opportunity to break out of the 'passive-learner-absorbing-content' model of ICT use, as well as the well-worn routes of students being asked to use Word and PowerPoint as the ICT aspect of their non-ICT subjects.

This school emphasised that their commitment to and plan for LAMS was to achieve LAMS adoption across all subjects and that LAMS should become a standard teaching tool, not just, “a couple of enthusiasts working in one department…that that will not have the effect we want at the school. We want these things to be totally inclusive.” In terms of the extent of the achievement of this objective, the school reported that, “every member of staff knows, understands what LAMS is. Every faculty has had a chance to see a LAMS sequence and then it’s up to people to dip into it and say well I’ll have a go at that. I do know we’re at the stage now where if somebody feels they’ve got to put on a showpiece lesson they’ll have a go…I’d be telling you blue sky stuff if I said it was being used all the time because people are still at the stage where they think ‘Oh that’s a lot of preparation.’”

A further long-term ambition held by this school is that they will become “…a focal point for LAMS training allowing us to network with leading practitioners and exchange good practice.” Again, this evidences their first objective for LAMS in that it will position the schools in networks where excellence in practice is disseminated. This goal is yet to be acted upon although the school has taken advantage of the networking opportunities available to them so far, and has made valuable contributions to these.

The last school in this group had been involved with LAMS for a longer period of time than the other two and were able to offer a more mature assessment of the degree of success of their original objectives, as well as describing those objectives that they wished to fulfil in future LAMS development. The school’s principal objective had been that LAMS would “…become an integral part of teaching.” From an initial, successful pilot involving practitioners



from five departments (Science, ICT, Geography, Maths, Design and Technology) they decided that here was sufficient value in LAMS to extend LAMS to all departments and train all staff so that all teachers would be familiar with and feel sufficiently confident to see LAMS as a tool at their disposal for their everyday teaching, where appropriate. However, over the course of the pilot year this objective has, “not worked out quite how we intended.” Not as many staff used it as had been hoped and whilst, “All the staff have been through a training session”, it is estimated that in this school, “about half the staff I would say are capable of using it,” with some departments simply not interested in the software (such as PE) or whose teaching habits are firmly entrenched and do not extend to much ICT utilisation, although the school's advocates see a place for LAMS in every subject area. They have reached a point where they cannot force staff to use a tool such as LAMS and so they could look to new intakes of staff and encourage adoption of LAMS through the school induction programme and general summer training.

The long-term objective at this school remains that LAMS should be one of a range of tools that will be integral to the teaching strategies of the staff. They are also very interested in using LAMS outside the classroom, “not necessarily for homework but maybe for using especially with people who may have been excluded or who are not attending school…also to use with people not in the same room or same place.” Holding them back currently from this objective is the issue of home ICT access with 75-80% of their pupils having computers at home, then only 35-40% of those having Internet access with just 20% with broadband. They need a strategy to deal with this problem, whether it be funding Internet cafes or other such initiatives, before LAMS can be used for home-working, particularly for poor attenders. One final objective for LAMS is to see it integrated with their newly-developed VLE as this will make it easier for staff to access and manage LAMS and encourage more widespread adoption.

7.3.6 ‘Incubatory’ schools’ objectives – for staff

Many staff objectives were bound up in the school’s overall objectives for LAMS adoption although some individuals' specific objectives can be separated from these and are presented here. Common to all three schools is the aim that staff regard LAMS as a tool for their habitual teaching practice and not as an exclusive solution or ‘special event’ software.

In the first school’s stated objectives for staff, the general aim was expressed that staff might develop, “New skills, new ways of working that we hope to utilise in support of both school and community objectives in our next specialist phase.” That is, LAMS is seen as a part of the process of changing the way that the school works and LAMS will aid staff in developing the competencies that will be necessary to take their place in this changed school culture. The school also sees a direct objective for staff in using LAMS as a part of their training processes and the fact that LAMS will have a role in the way they change the delivery of CPD. LAMS, “would be useful for staff forums…the best way of training is training each other



and we’re thinking that there are possibilities for people creating papers on different issues which people can read and contribute to within the forum.” This model of CPD, integrating LAMS, had yet to be established by the end of the review period.

The second school in this group emphasised that their objectives for LAMS adoption with their teaching staff would be that staff understand that LAMS represents a more effective way of using ICT, that it is not a ‘magic box’ ICT solution, and that it will become one tool amongst a range of tools available to them, suitable for certain teaching challenges. “I am looking for it to sit with other similar initiatives so that staff have a range of these…so that staff along with picking the resources will pick which of these is the best vehicle to deliver their effective teaching.” The school admits that LAMS is at an early stage of adoption in their case but that the value of sequence reuse has been recognised widely amongst staff, which is very encouraging. “The penny has dropped that if people prepare sequences, they’re there, and they can take them back, they can pull them out again next year, they can shift stuff round that didn’t work well, they can improve them.”

The last school in this group also emphasised that for staff they wanted LAMS to be perceived as, “just part of that little package of tools that will help and it becomes part of a teacher’s whole range of things, just like the bunch of worksheets that they’ve got in the filing cabinet and the interactive CDs that they’ve got. It’s just a part of the whole system and that’s the way it has to be seen and then fitted in when it is appropriate,” particularly for the areas of discussion and reflection in which LAMS has been most successful and valued in this school. This vision has not, so far, been realised as successfully as they had hoped, but the time that LAMS has had to bed down in the school has still been relatively short. LAMS will continue to form a part of the CPD at the school and it is planned that teachers new to the school will be more likely to adopt given the examples of successful use by the current practitioners in the school.

7.3.7 ‘Incubatory’ schools’ objectives – for students

A school’s aims for students with LAMS were often expressed in higher-level strategic terms for the institution, and specific objectives were formulated by teachers involved in the pilot and gathered in the sections in this report detailing the benefits of LAMS for pupils. However, each of the schools had general objectives for the teaching practice of their schools that they saw LAMS being able to encourage and improve.

In the first school, the values of LAMS for students that they wished to promote were, “New ways of working with other people, development of new skills, enjoyment of lessons, independent learning within a structured lesson.” As already mentioned the school would like to use LAMS to run, “lessons involving students from [the school] and our link school in South Africa working together,” which would greatly enrich both sets of students’ cultural worldviews.



The second school also cited an objective to promote LAMS as, “another useful tool for developing independent learning.” This, “different way of learning” for students would also allow, “everyone to take part in lesson - particularly the reluctant orator.”

The third school in the group saw the role of LAMS for students across the school as being an ideal tool for encouraging “people to reflect on what they’re doing and…get them to discuss it and I think that’s the key point of LAMS. It doesn’t matter what subject it is, if you’ve got an area where you want the pupils to reflect on their work or to discuss it with other people then LAMS is an ideal tool for that.”

7.3.8 ‘Incubatory’ schools’ objectives – for other groups

It is significant that two of the schools in this group had produced LAMS objectives for groups other than staff and students which indicated that in these incubatory schools, LAMS was perceived as becoming a part of the cultural fabric of the institution, finding a place at many different levels.

In the first school, as well as forums for staff training, and use of forums for students in the curriculum, it is an objective that the school investigate whether there is any, “potential for parent forums as well, when we want to discuss specific issues, we could ask parents to be part of a forum,” with models of deployment for these already sketched out, such as a discussion of the changes coming to the school day, where the parents would be able to follow a sequence of activities that, for instance, linked them to the SST website for certain information, that presented video clips to watch and think about, and then asked parents to contribute their opinions to a forum. The school also would aim to look at ways in which LAMS could be used to make links with primary schools in their area, potentially for the master classes that they conduct, with ideas based around holding video extracts in LAMS sequences. This is a tentative proposal at the moment.

The second school has already looked more widely at the potential applications of LAMS with other groups and cite an existing success where, “Learning supervisors are using LAMS to reinforce good behaviour. We have an excellent example of LAMS being used for a stop smoking group.”

7.4 Schools discontinuing pilot – AnalysisAs revealed by the usage statistics in the previous section, 14 of the 41 pilot schools created no sequences and a further four schools that did create some sort of sequence did not then go on to schedule a sequence during the pilot. While this might initially suggest that these 18 schools left the pilot or did not find anything of value to pursue in LAMS there were in fact a range of reasons for this apparent lack or discontinuation of activity which has been captured



through Initial Contact Questionnaires, telephone conversations and e-mail responses. (Telephone interviews and e-mail correspondence took place with schools that did not feel sufficiently confident to be able to complete questionnaires or allow visits but which wished to indicate their situation re LAMS.) Sometimes these schools did not see a place for LAMS in their teaching toolkit; other schools had simply not been able to find time to develop LAMS sequences and were still interested in the software; some of the schools were planning to renew their strategies for LAMS in the next school year (therefore outside the period of the official pilot). This range of responses, including any original aims and objectives when joining the pilot is explored below. It is also the case that some schools that created and scheduled a sequence have decided to discontinue their involvement with LAMS, as LAMS has in some way failed to meet a school’s criteria for success against their original pilot aims and objectives, and again, these reasons are explored below.Up to 07/07/05:

Of the 14 schools that had not created or scheduled sequences there is information on the reasons for this from 8.

4 of these 8 schools have definitely left the pilot. The other 4 were not yet organised to implement LAMS and so not ready to embark on the pilot.

5 of the 14 schools not creating or scheduling sequences joined the LAMS pilot via a high-level initiative/low-risk route.

9 of the 14 schools not creating or scheduling sequences joined the LAMS pilot via the enthusiast/management champion route.

Of the 3 schools which created but did not schedule sequences, there is information available for 2 and both have left pilot.

6 schools have definitely withdrawn from the pilot, 2 of which had created sequences.

7.4.1 Schools discontinuing LAMS pilot activity

Six schools indicated that they had definitely discontinued with the LAMS pilot; two created sequences but did not schedule any LAMS sessions. The remainder did not create or schedule any LAMS sequences.

One school created but did not schedule and fed back on some of the reasons for discontinuing. It was felt that the literacy level required by LAMS for their students (as a special needs school) was too high and so they will not take the pilot any further as their students would need something much more visually orientated. They also raised concern about chat activities for their students, conversations and arguments, which could cause discipline problems. There was a further concern that staff would not be able to pick LAMS up easily. Finally there had been technical problems during official training and a sequence had got lost (not saved) which had been demotivating.



Another school did not create or schedule sequences and withdrew citing circumstances beyond their control. They maintain an interest in LAMS, however, and state that they would be interested in future involvement in the pilot. A third school did not create or schedule sequences and withdrew, stating that they had decided to pursue another project. They also maintain an interest in what happens to LAMS.

The fourth school in this group cited lack of access to ICT facilities for subjects other than ICT as the first reason for discontinuing with the pilot but more significantly, they do not believe LAMS to be an “effective method of delivery”, for any, “practical subject” and specifically music. The chat activities were not valued and class discussion was felt to be more suitable and that to bring LAMS into their teaching would be to use, “ICT for the sake of it.”

The two discontinuing schools did not give reasons for discontinuing with the pilot. None of the schools in this category gave any aims or objectives for joining the LAMS pilot in the first place.

7.4.2 Schools postponing LAMS pilot activity

Sometimes schools might have created and scheduled a small number of sequences (most likely at training sessions only) and then ceased any LAMS activity in the pilot. Six such schools responded to the review to indicate that they had found obstacles to continuing with LAMS activity in the pilot period but were keen on LAMS and planning to resume activity in the next school year.

The first school in this category stated that two barriers had stalled their use of LAMS, namely 1) that ICT rooms were taken up to teach ICT and so access for other staff was problematic and 2) LAMS demands a lot of effort on their part to set up. The science faculty was seen as being the department most likely to take up LAMS in this school as they have lots of IT software and are keen to use ICT. However ICT rooms are the major issue and staff will be reluctant to make the effort if they can’t get access to these. The school plans to increase provision over the summer (a new room or laptops) so LAMS use will be restarted as and when this occurs in the next school year.

The second school in this category was only just getting round to introducing LAMS to the school staff since joining the pilot late and needed more time to offer any other responses to LAMS. They had prepared a set of aims and objectives for using LAMS but these were as yet untested. In essence, these were, “Better sharing of teaching resources. Offering our family of schools a virtual learning environment. Offering the wider community the chance to become a local academy.”



Significantly, they were keen to seek advice on what the best way to present LAMS to staff might be and so encourage wide-scale adoption.

The third school had offered a set of comprehensive aims and objectives for involvement in the LAMS pilot. Following a period of substantial investment in ICT resources they were looking to, “develop more effective ways of incorporating ICT into subject-based teaching and learning. We are also trying to promote opportunities for independent learning. LAMS seemed to be an interesting option that may help tie together some of our aims.”

The school also had clear strategic objectives for adopting LAMS, namely, “Collaborative planning opportunities. Use of LAMS to deliver CPD within school and beyond. Cross curricular work. Opportunities for staff from different subject departments to share ideas and plan activities.”

Finally, the school’s aims for their students were that students would benefit from, “On-line group work and discussion, develop thinking and communication skills.”

These aims were frustrated firstly by late involvement in the pilot and significantly, by technical difficulties in setting up user accounts. A further stumbling block has been that despite these pilot objectives, the staff involved subsequently in driving LAMS in the school were not in management positions or positions of strategic influence. This school plans to re-launch in the next school year with their ICT department on board and once their technical difficulties have been resolved.

The fourth school postponing their involvement was concentrating its efforts on finding a suitable VLE or content-management system. They also found that LAMS did not match some of their original objectives and found other concerns, particularly with the maturity of LAMS as a software product. One of their original aims was that, “Either on its own or in conjunction with a full VLE, LAMS will give a framework for managing students’ learning. Staff can cooperate with others in setting up and saving learning sequences. When integrated with a MLE it will give a tool to manage individual students’ learning – managing record keeping, assessments and other records.”

However, this set of objectives was not met as the school’s immediate concern was that LAMS could not structure the rich tasks and testing and assessment for Y7 pupils starting in 2006 that they had envisaged. They had further discovered that LAMS is not suitable for their students who have difficulty with reading and that LAMS lacks customisability. However, LAMS is still envisaged as having a place in their long-term plans, sitting inside a VLE or alongside a Content Management System, with the main benefit of LAMS in their new curriculum structure being for cooperative working. “It will give a framework through which students can learn. It will allow a degree of independent learning. The students will better be



able to manage their work within the trans-disciplinary rich tasks envisaged. Particularly when students themselves can set up and manage learning sequences – a tool to manage cooperative tasks.”

The fifth school here cited ICT room access problems for LAMS trained staff and that LAMS use was only envisaged for next year at best.

The last school in this category is the only one that did not create or schedule a sequence but were planning to get involved with LAMS at the later end of the pilot phase and beyond. Initial training had yet to be completed here.

7.5 Original objectives - Barriers and enablersThe interviews and questionnaires produced a rich body of evidence illustrating the factors that have influenced the progress of schools with their aims and objectives. Analysis reveals an emergent set of generic conditions under which it is most likely that schools will achieve these. Each factor is briefly examined in the following subsections.

7.5.1 School ICT provision

The substance of this subsection is generally applicable to many educational software applications. If a great effort must be made to get access to ICT facilities with sufficient hardware provision for the class size, at a time and sufficient frequency to use LAMS effectively, with adequate technical support and reliable machines, then School ICT provision will more likely be a barrier to widespread LAMS adoption and LAMS sessions will remain a ‘special event’ for classes, if used at all. Even in the best-provisioned schools there are issues of booking rooms and equal access for all subjects and using a computer room is a relative novelty for some subject classes. Teachers are concerned that access to software such as LAMS should be consistent for all students and benefit all groups in the school, not just some privileged classes. Without this equality of access, some staff will be less willing to make a wholehearted commitment to LAMS adoption.

In all the Review Team visits, however, the lessons observed demonstrated what could be achieved with the resources available, and some of the exciting and innovative ways that lessons can be run. Observed usage included dedicated computer suites, mixed use computer rooms and classrooms operating wireless networks with laptops and interactive whiteboards.

7.5.2 Staff skills

The levels of ICT skills and ICT confidence can be an important enabler or barrier, “It is a bit frightening and if you are not okay with IT and think ‘Oh my God, I can’t do it’. It’s user friendly really, isn’t it? Once you get over that hurdle or we can teach others how to do it then



as well. Have us all do it!” (Teacher no. 13) Related to this confidence is a certain degree of staff entrenchment where longer-serving staff see little to be gained in adopting a software tool under development when their current teaching practice achieves the desired classroom outcomes. To this end it is also worth highlighting that newer or younger staff are more open to utilising a tool that will support and structure their still-developing teaching practice.

7.5.3 Time

Time is an obvious limiting factor but it should be acknowledged that LAMS requires an investment of time for learning the software, of varying extent depending on a teacher’s prior ICT skills and ICT confidence. Sometimes that first step requires an understanding of the ethos of learning design software, as some teachers are liable to dismiss LAMS as being devoid of content – their immediate need – and their ICT wish-list prioritising ready-made content solutions. Assessing what LAMS is best for in a curriculum area, creating a first sequence based on this, trialling, delivering and reflecting on the full effect of monitoring, plus self-review activities can be very time-consuming. The support and time available may be sporadic and variable across schools.

Investment of time for individual sequence development can appear onerous to the new LAMS developer, although the repayment in reuse opportunities is usually acknowledged and staff would welcome a bank of pre-existing sequences that they could draw on and adapt. As has been observed in the usage statistics, development and delivery activity appeared to be associated with peaks and troughs linked to training, workshops and review visits.

7.5.4 Other resources

The review encountered some schools which provided exceptional resourcing for their LAMS pilot activities, so providing a level of support to staff which boosted their levels of confidence and saved their time in effective ways. The most striking example of this was the dedicated development officer in post at one Technology College. “When we introduce something like LAMS, we don’t just leave the staff to develop it themselves. We actually support them…we’ve appointed someone we call ‘Development Officer’…and so he’s got great talents in producing resources, so that the staff can use his services to produce the resources that I think brings LAMS to life.” (Management Personnel no. 1) In this role basic sequences were enhanced by the officer to include websites that had been researched on behalf of the teachers and further enhanced and adapted with their coding skills. Other multimedia resources were integrated into sequences and furthermore, suggestions for extra sequence activities or how to deliver sequences differently or more effectively were also part of the remit. This development resource officer was a powerful resource and enabler in this school.



Another exceptional resourcing involved the teacher piloting LAMS in one school being given one day a week to work solely on their LAMS activities, their time being paid for and cover lessons arranged. Coupled with the exceptional ICT facilities available to this teacher, LAMS adoption for their pilot has been successful.

7.5.5 Management strategy

The management vision and strategic focus of a school for LAMS has been a great influence on the success of the pilot and as a consequence, for the relative uptake and adoption of LAMS in a school. Positive, replicable strategy has been identified in both the exploratory and incubatory schools. In summary, it is apparent that in the exploratory approach and where individuals were less closely supported by management, there was a greater challenge, and so less likelihood of significant, cross-curricular LAMS activity. Schools with a management commitment to school change and improvement in their teaching practice and quality of learning experience offered to students are more likely to look at LAMS and implement a strategy to assess its worth. There is a stated need by some management for support in communicating to staff what LAMS is and can do and at the other end of the relationship there is a stated need by staff that they need some support in persuading their management that LAMS is something that should be widely available in the school as a teaching tool.

7.5.6 Networks – inter-school and other

Networks are perceived by staff involved in the pilot and by management as being crucial to the success of something as embryonic as LAMS. This includes established inter-school strategic networks where excellence and innovation in practice is shared and can thus drive the adoption of LAMS across schools and promote sequence sharing. It also covers the formation of new networks of LAMS practitioners as a powerful inspirational and motivational spur for those getting to grips with the software. When the Review Team encountered a practitioner lacking confidence in their achievements with LAMS, this could usually be attributed to their sense of working in isolation, particularly in schools where they might be the only person involved in the pilot. This scenario highlighted a need for such networks. Furthermore an outcome of the BETCA workshops was the stated desirability of school staff who were beginning their involvement with LAMS to remain in communication, visit each other and so contribute to the growth of each others' expertise and confidence. The formation of new networks like these might be through email lists, dedicated websites or workshops with new and reconvened groups. Presented below are some example models of current networks through which schools are or will be pursuing the development of LAMS.



Model A - LEA and Partner Schools NetworksIn this model the school represented something of a flagship for ICT developments and innovations in the LEA and the LEA would follow closely the progress of the pilot and contribute to an assessment of how, “this project may take off beyond pilot.” (Teacher no. 4)

The school also participates in a network of partner schools where senior management meet and there is a recognition and desire that, “that the success that happens here can be replicated in their schools.” (Teacher no. 4)

Through these networks they will disseminate strategy and advice on the current success with their LAMS pilot, and demonstrate with their own more widespread adoption throughout the school that the achievements currently made in modern foreign languages, “can be replicated to other subject areas” (Teacher no. 4)

Model B – Leading Edge partnershipIn this model the school was engaged with three other local schools with the principle that, “We all share good practice” (Teacher no. 1) LAMS was seen in this model firstly as a way of uniting the schools and as starting point for developing and sharing good practice (alongside other ICT developments). A long-term objective of this network is that sharing of sequences will be driven by the fact that there will be a richer source of these made possible through the partnership all creating sequences. LAMS will be one medium through which their goals of team-teaching and exchange of excellent practice can take place.

Model C – Partner Schools and Link SchoolsIn this model the school was a leader and innovator, certainly in terms of LAMS, amongst the schools in their partnership. The way their partnership works is that their school offers other partner schools Master Classes and also shares curriculum teaching at other sites, and therefore, by achieving some of this through LAMS, then they feel that LAMS will be spread into partner schools.

Finally in the context of networks, international networks were also anticipated by interviewees on several occasions as being of potential value, seen particularly as advantageous to students, encouraging a deeper cultural understanding of the world and their own place in it, as well as sharing teaching practice between countries.

7.5.7 Introducing and cascading LAMS amongst school staff

The manner in which LAMS is introduced and presented in a school to staff, how the LAMS message is fed through the networks within a school, can be a critical enabler of LAMS adoption within the school. The review team encountered different ways of attempting to disseminate information and generate interest in LAMS within schools. One approach was to hold voluntary meetings for all staff to present LAMS. These large-scale meetings



consistently created an initial widespread interest, but where there is little further incentive or support, LAMS adoption can be left drifting amongst competing priorities. Another approach is to engage heads of department to explain LAMS and how it can specifically benefit their staff. This is a more powerful strategy as a strategic imperative and commitment in individual departments across a school encourages the provision of some of the support that the practitioner needs to spend time developing LAMS sequences and also lends confidence to staff in the belief that their work is valued.

The more successful strategies of disseminating information and enthusiasm for LAMS within a school involved individual champions or champion departments leading by example, with strategic management support and thus building up a body of expertise, experience and practice that can then be demonstrated and replicated throughout the school.

Most schools preferred to follow this ‘small seeds’ approach in tandem with the general management strategy of experimental LAMS adoption. This small seeds approach generally took either the form of one or two enthusiastic individuals or a department being trained in LAMS, introducing LAMS into their own practice and then being in some way responsible for raising the profile of LAMS in the institution, demonstrating the benefits and improvements to their own teaching practice and the positive achievements with their students. A selection of comments from staff involved in both the departmental and individual champion strategies are presented below.

Individual as champion

“I think I have had really good opportunities throughout this year using LAMS. I have been a good person to talk to and train other people into using LAMS, because ICT is not always the way I deliver my lessons so if I can use it effectively then other people feel that they can use it effectively and it works well for them.”

“What’s going to happen is that my colleague and I will then pass on what we have learnt to other people... I kind of went on planning my lessons, tend to show everyone in the staff room, so they are aware of what it is and how easy it is to use. And we have already shown it to the Teaching Excellence Group which is a group specially set up to look at new initiatives in teaching….I was the first person in the school to teach it, using it, and will be able to pass information to colleagues.”

“…if I want to up the profile of the LAMS scheme which has been made available to our school, I need to use it more often...so I can start saying to people, I have been doing this, it’s great, look at what I produced. If that goes well, the headmaster will say ‘That’s very good. Make everyone else do it’.”

“…he’s quite new to the school and definitely a leader…we thought maybe because he was younger and keen that other people would be interested in following his lead, and he would be able to cascade it to other interested people.”



Department as champion

“Once it’s up and running and we have ironed out the spots, and would say, ‘Look, here it is’, she would quite happily adopt it and use it and with enthusiasm, I think. So as an IT department, we are probably fairly into it. And as a department from across the school, we are probably having more input into it than other departments. Because there are three or four of us that are actually keen on it.”

“We will feed back to the school to decide whether to cascade it to other faculties or not but that decision hasn’t been made yet…So until some of the staff has trialled it with classes until next year probably we won’t know whether the whole school will be trained or not.”

7.5.8 LAMS Issues – functionality, interface, applicability

The interface of LAMS can be a barrier to some schools or staff adopting LAMS, in particular those whose concern is LAMS’ heavily text-based nature. Some staff expressed concern that their students will only respond to very multimedia-driven software. This is their expectation for ICT lessons, and they may assume that LAMS is too plain and lacking adaptability to cater for such students, although there is a recognition that despite, “One of the great criticisms is that it’s pretty dull… it’s the quality of resources that you can build into LAMS sequences that really…give it life.” (Management Personnel no. 2)

Other issues here include password management and known current software bugs that have been listed elsewhere and which the LAMS team is working on.

Far more teachers find that the interface is suited to their teaching needs and that the majority of their students have a sufficient ‘ICT maturity’ not to reject LAMS on the basis of it lacking the multimedia excitement of many content-ready packages, “The majority of students will engage with it because they’re not worried about the layout as much as what they’re actually accessing and doing. E.g. forum - not how nice it looked but responding to each other." (Teacher no. 19)

7.5.9 LAMS support

This factor refers to the level of support that teachers can draw on from outside the school. All schools value the excellent technical support available over the LAMS pilot, with technical queries and problems resolved swiftly and to the satisfaction of teachers. This has been a great and valuable enabler for LAMS adoption. Workshops offered during the pilot were also seen as valuable support opportunities. LAMS practitioner networks also act as support enablers.



7.6 End of pilot – Final questionnaire assessment of achievementsAs a final review activity every pilot school was sent a questionnaire (Final LAMS Review Questionnaire) to assess the extent to which they felt their institutional LAMS aims and objectives had been achieved over the course of the pilot. About 95 questionnaires were emailed as well as posted to schools participating in the pilot. An opt-out questionnaire was sent to those who had discontinued the pilot. Altogether 16 respondents returned a completed form from 14 schools (return rate under 20%). The data from this low return rate, although not necessarily representative of the whole pilot population may not be misleading in the context of the usage statistics described in Section 5.2 which showed that only 12 schools delivered LAMS sessions in the first year of the pilot.

School staff were asked to quantify their sense of achievement in the pilot period as compared with anticipated benefits that LAMS would bring to their institution, the staff, pupils and other groups (e.g. parents). So that unanticipated benefits of LAMS use could emerge, the questionnaire adopted an open-ended approach and teachers were asked to write in rather than select from a prepared list of benefits. These were then grouped under emerging headings. Respondents were asked to rate each anticipated and emerging benefit on a seven-point scale where 1 was ‘benefit not at all materialised’ and 7 ‘benefit completely materialised’. The comments were anonymised, but it was considered important to record whether the responding teacher had delivered a LAMS sequence yet (‘delivered LAMS’), whether they had only attended a practitioner workshop (‘attended workshop’) or the LAMS training session (‘trained on LAMS’) as these would indicate their level of LAMS activity to date.

The reported achievements of the LAMS pilot were wide-ranging and comments have been listed in the tables below. Each benefit has a slightly different focus, so all the comments are quoted verbatim in the tables. Generally, those with less exposure tended to identify various LAMS benefits but they gave a low rating as to how successful those achievements were. E.g. those who had already delivered LAMS sequences and identified a benefit were comfortable in rating it as 7 (‘benefit completely materialised’), while those who had taught fewer LAMS lessons may have given it a lower rating (e.g. 3) as they did not feel there had been enough evidence to support that the benefit materialised. Those who had only training or attended the practitioner workshop may have given the benefit an even lower rating e.g. 1 (‘not at all materialised’) because they felt they did not have evidence to support it from personal experience. Given this context, it was decided not to calculate mean ratings for each group of benefits.

Table 15 shows benefits of the pilot that did not sit under any of the other major headings. Opportunities for differentiation, revision, self-paced and collaborative learning received high ratings in terms of materialised achievements.



Table 15 Pilot achievements: General

LAMS progress of teacher

LAMS benefits rating (1=7)

Delivered LAMS Basic sequences could be used at a basic level mainly visual and quizzes to check understanding.

7

Delivered LAMS Helping with the students' revision. 6Delivered LAMS They work at their own pace and it can be just like a one to one

lesson.6

Delivered LAMS Collaborative learning. 6Delivered LAMS The immediate feedback which can encourage students in their

studies.5

Delivered LAMS Pupils will be able to keep a better record of their progress as they can easily identify how far they have progressed through the lesson.

5

Delivered LAMS Behaviour management. 4Trained on LAMS Greater confidence and self esteem, better results. 2Delivered LAMS Parents to become involved if can use at home. 1Delivered LAMS Possible to use at home in future i.e.: for homework etc. 1Attended workshop School is promoting e-learning. 1Delivered LAMS Use for emotional/spiritual development. not ratedDelivered LAMS Emotional/spiritual development particularly in RE. not ratedAttended workshop Gains to be had in personal and social development of pupils. not ratedAttended workshop Limited effect on attainment or achievement in external

assessments in ICT.not rated

Rating: 1=not at all materialised, 7=completely materialised

Table 16 signals potential impact of LAMS in the area of assessment and raising attainment, albeit with not much evidence.

Table 16 Pilot achievements: Assessment and attainment



Delivered Greater level of understanding. 5Delivered There is clearly much scope for summative assessment in

Lams which is accessible and therefore may be useful for action planning.

3

Delivered Improved examination performance. 1Trained on LAMS Assessment. not rated


Using LAMS to support different ways of teaching was reported by a number of teachers, with two finding that they were able to create more effective and varied lessons. Naturally, some (e.g. those attending the workshop), saw the potential but had not had the chance to try LAMS out yet in class (Table 17).



Table 17 Pilot achievements: Different way of teaching



Delivered Creating more effective lessons 6Delivered More varied classroom activities 6Delivered A better way to deliver our teaching across the curriculum 5Workshop Different way of teaching subject 1Workshop Creativity in delivery of subject 1


The idea of LAMS promoting engagement and student motivation received high ratings (5 or over) in a number of comments (6) (Table 18).

Table 18 Pilot achievements: Engagement and ICT as motivation



Delivered Learning through ICT. 7Delivered The students enjoy using IT and it motivates them more. 6Delivered Motivating students. 6Delivered I see LAMS being effective in my lessons as it will be a

motivational tool for them in lessons.6

Delivered Increasing learner motivation and engagement. 5Delivered Motivated students. 5Delivered Providing quieter pupils with ‘a voice’ in discussion. 3Workshop Engaging in material being taught. 1Workshop Motivational. not rated


A comparatively large number of teachers indicated that LAMS not only had the potential to promote independent learning, including guidance and structure to help students along, but also thought that this achievement materialised during the pilot proved. This is confirmed by the high number of ratings of 5 or over (Table 19).



Table 19 Pilot achievements: Guidance and independent learning opportunities



Delivered Students will be able to focus more on the subject content of the lesson as they will be guided through the lesson using LAMS.

7

Delivered Opportunity to learn ICT skills through their learning and encouragement of independent learning.

7

Delivered LAMS will mean that students have more structure and guidance in lessons so I am less likely to have to deal with ICT problems and be able to work with students on subject knowledge. This should therefore raise attainment in my subject area.

6

Delivered Learner autonomy. 6Delivered Independent learning. 6Delivered Promoting independent learning. 6Delivered Independent learning. 5Delivered Still in the beginning phase of introducing LAMS to students.

Benefits, learning is independent and fun.3

Delivered If attainment in reading rose, it would encourage more independent working.

3

Delivered Independent Learning – only at a minor scale due to pilot nature of the project.

3

Workshop Independent learning. 1


A few teachers felt that LAMS supported the development of metacognitive skills and those few that did, thought that these benefits materialised at a high level (Table 20).

Table 20 Pilot achievements: Metacognitive skills



Delivered More interaction and readiness to make a judgement as opposed to the normal classroom situation.

7

Delivered LAMS gives students more ownership over the lesson and so far they have produced work which is far more reflective when they have used LAMS.

6

Delivered [Using LAMS] as a means to gain student interaction, look at hierarchical thinking and source analysis. The main idea would be to get students to raise issues from it as opposed to singular learning.

6

Workshop Getting pupils to reflect on the views and inputs of other and how their inputs vary from those of others

not rated


Table 21 shows that the LAMS 'monitor' function that helps teachers to follow students’ progress brought some benefits to teachers. Perhaps the lower number of comments in this category may indicate that not all teachers used or were aware of this function’s full potential.



Table 21 Pilot achievements: Monitor



Delivered LAMS will ensure pupils can monitor their progress during a lesson and therefore they can work at their own pace and I can easily monitor this.

6

Delivered Excellent for finding out exactly how each pupil if performing, or whether they have fully understood objectives set.

4

Delivered Provides good evidence to assist the tracking of attainment 3Workshop Easily able to monitor pupils progress. Can use variety of set

tasks within a lesson, e.g.: quiz and survey.1


Teachers reported that LAMS offered benefits for students with different abilities and experiences and supported different learning styles, with various extents as to whether these achievements had materialised (Table 22).

Table 22 Pilot achievements: Personalisation and differentiation



Delivered Visual resource for deaf students. 7Delivered Personalised learning according to ability. 6Delivered It allows differentiation without pupils realising that they have

different materials.4

Delivered It allows pupils to draw upon a range of learning styles and allows good progression through activities.

3

Workshop Different way of learning and accessing. 1Workshop Different presentation of learning 1Trained on LAMS Different presentation of learning not rated


Few achievements actually materialised over the review period with respect to reusing and sharing sequences amongst staff but this remains an objective for schools (Table 23).

Table 23 Pilot achievements: Reuse



Delivered Other teachers would find beneficial an already planned lesson to deliver through the use of LAMS.

5

Trained on LAMS Might help students develop their own study skills, resources will also be shared between staff, this could mean better results

2

Trained on LAMS Time saving 2Delivered Sequences can be shared/share resources. 1




Parents were one of the stakeholders that teachers felt LAMS could benefit, e.g. being able to help and monitor homework. One teacher commented that using an innovative tool such as LAMS potentially enhanced the image of the school in parents’ eyes (Table 24).

Table 24 Pilot achievements: Benefits for parents



Trained on LAMS Parents perceive the school as forward thinking 3Delivered Parents can see what their children have been working on. 1Delivered If it could be used for homework parents could help at home so

they know what their students are learning and improve communication.

1

Delivered Parents - but only because we have not introduced this element.

1

Workshop Parents able to monitor child's progress 1Delivered Not used this facility as yet. 0Delivered With improved IT at the school, it could be used to collect the

views of parents about issues. not rated


The Final LAMS Questionnaire also elicited information concerning the difficulties pilot schools and teachers encountered during the pilot (Table 25). Reported difficulties concerned technical issues such as the chat not working within the school’s network and the problem of accented letters in foreign languages (special characters) – these were rated as causing very great difficulty. Lack of time was also found to cause difficulty during the pilot, with one teacher finding it difficult to master the authoring tools. LAMS being heavily text-based and not supporting images was also a source of great difficulty to some schools due to their learners’ characteristics (see Section 7.4 for more on the causes of some schools opting out of the pilot).

Table 25 Difficulties encountered during the LAMS pilot


LAMS difficulties rating (1=7)

Technical issuesDelivered The chat room facility does not work through our firewall. 7Attended workshop Coming in late to the pilot, trying (and currently failing!) to catch

up.7

Delivered Chat room – filters will not allow access 7Delivered Cannot use chat rooms 7Delivered Accents is a big problem 7Delivered Design still not as appealing as it might be 4Time and trainingDelivered Time to do it. 5Trained on LAMS Time factor involved 5Delivered Mastering the authoring tools 4




LAMS difficulties rating (1=7)

Attended workshop I think school need time to properly prepare staff and to make sequences

not rated

Lack of multimediaDelivered The program is not easily accessed by poor readers. 6Delivered Having to get help to import pictures already made as a word

worksheet.6

1= Very small difficulty, 7 = very great difficulty

This section has provided a limited quantitative overview of the pilot’s achievements as reported by the Final LAMS Questionnaire’s respondents. The small scale feedback, coupled with the complexity of schools being at different phases of their pilot activities did not make it possible to offer a quantified snapshot of achievements but rather indicated the main areas of LAMS achievements with varying rates of materialised benefits. These achievements were in offering pupil motivation and engagement, opportunities for independent, personalised and differentiated learning, development of metacognitive skills and for staff members, the capability to monitor student progress and the reuse of sequences. The next section looks at the qualitative data gained from practitioners in order to offer a more detailed analysis of what these benefits really were and how they came about.



8 Pilot achievements: Benefits of LAMS Interviews with staff members collected during the LAMS practitioner visits recorded a broad range of qualitative evidence relating to individual objectives achieved by staff for their own practice and with students during the pilot. This was typically expressed as the benefits anticipated and (some unanticipated) benefits achieved. This section offers a summary of teachers’ feedback on these LAMS achievements which are grouped into two, occasionally overlapping, views on the identified themes; firstly from the point of view of the teacher and their teaching practice, and secondly from the point of view of the pupil and the learning process. Section 8.1 discusses the benefits LAMS brought to teachers and their management of teaching and section 8.2 relates benefits for pupils as perceived by teachers. Pupils' attitudes to LAMS are discussed in Section 9. Each teacher has been allocated a numeric identifier when quoted; where heads of departments or managers were involved in delivering LAMS sessions, they were identified as teachers rather than as managers in the teaching/learning context. Pupils were identified by their year group.

8.1 Teachers’ perceived benefits of LAMS

8.1.1 Structure and guidance

LAMS offers teachers a structure on which to build their lessons. LAMS, “provides you with the first stage of planning your lesson…provides you with a structure” (Teacher no. 11). The structured support offered by LAMS is in close harmony with the Key Stage 3 Strategy4 in rigorous target setting, i.e. teachers guiding students to achieve lesson objectives and keep students focused on the tasks:

“It’s a tool to enable you to completely structure the lesson when you’re using ICT, for yourself, for the kids…and you do get at the end what you intended to do.” (Teacher no. 11)

“I think it’s quite good practice for the staff…[LAMS’] main strength is that you have got to plan a very structured lesson.” (Teacher no. 23)

Writing a LAMS sequence means that teachers need to make their teaching explicit through the structure of LAMS and this process requires them to think about how they build a lesson. This can benefit all members of staff, but especially those new to the profession.

Teachers felt that LAMS, because of its step-by-step approach, was ideal for curriculum areas in which students needed more guidance than usual, or for classes with mixed or lower achieving groups. Instead of the one-to-many teacher guidance of the traditional class set-up, the in-built learning design allowed teachers to guide students in a ‘one-to-one’ format. A teacher, who, with the aim of developing students’ thinking skills incorporated LAMS activities in which students were interacting, sharing and trading ideas, observed: 4 http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/keystage3/aboutks3/strategyguide/


http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/keystage3/aboutks3/strategyguide/


“…when we have asked lower sets to use this type of learning, they need a lot more guidance. And that’s where I think LAMS will be needed more. Because it’s very difficult to get round a largish class and give them all the guidance that they need. And they can fall by the wayside, they can become off task. Because they find it too demanding. Whereas LAMS will give them that framework.” (Teacher no. 15)

The sequence structure in LAMS can also facilitate the design and delivery of the lesson by different people. The person delivering the lesson does not necessarily need to be a subject expert thus making a case for using LAMS for cover lessons. The LAMS sequence is the online lesson plan in this case, left behind for the cover teacher to implement:

“You could still run the sequence … without knowing what was on the lesson plan. You could look at it as you went through.” (Teacher no. 21)

8.1.2 Pupil engagement

The majority of teachers found that LAMS played a part in increasing pupils’ level of engagement in the classroom. Working at the monitor focussed students, even those who in normal classroom sessions might have become bored and inattentive as the lesson progressed. LAMS encouraged them to concentrate. There was a sense that the closed learning sequence with a clearly defined and visible set of learning activities deterred students from wandering off and searching for other websites, which would be a normal occurrence in other ICT-based lessons. In some cases the teacher pointed out that students did not realise they were able to open another browser window should they be tempted to wander off task; in other cases, teachers knew that although students were savvy enough to know they can open a new browser window, students were somehow deterred from this extra click, and instead stayed on task:

“One of the good sides of LAMS is that when students are working, they do feel trapped into it, they don’t feel they can go onto other websites.” (Teacher no. 1)

One teacher reported that, as they used LAMS, students had been the, “most…focussed all year” (Teacher no. 11).

This case was an example when engagement seemed to be closely linked to motivation, which in turn was related to the pedagogy used by the teacher. This maths lesson, was about selecting the best theme park on the basis of various numerical data. After the lesson finished, the teacher overheard students as they continued discussing their choices on the corridor: “‘Well what did you choose?’, ’Oh it was White Water Valley because it was cheaper.’, ’And what did you choose?’” (Teacher no. 11 quoting students), so the teacher knew that the students went away with his lesson objectives achieved.



At the other end of the scale, one or two teachers talked of certain students for whom LAMS would not be necessarily more engaging than another classroom lesson would: “… it just depends on the actual kids, if they’re not turned on to anything then it doesn’t matter if it’s that [LAMS] or not.” (Teacher no. 22)

LAMS also provides mechanisms that get, “every child to come up with an answer” (Final LAMS questionnaire) thereby promoting engagement for the whole class. That through LAMS all students can have a voice in a “private”, unthreatening environment (e.g. through anonymous contributions) often means harder-to-engage pupils or those lacking confidence in normal classroom contexts are more likely to make contributions. One teacher observed that he used LAMS to, “level the playing field slightly more” (Teacher no. 10), encouraging students to be involved in discussions, e.g. by using chat activities to freely express their ideas.

Teachers also welcomed the possibility of being able to engage the quieter and more reserved students who, in turn, gained confidence in seeing that they were not, “worse than anyone else”. (Teacher no. 19)

8.1.3 ICT as motivation

Teachers generally reported greater levels of pupil motivation than in traditional classroom lessons. This was partly due to LAMS’ ICT delivery medium.

“They are quite motivated in the ICT room. That’s a change to what they normally do in science. Yes, they are motivated just due to the fact that they’re going to an ICT room.” (Teacher no. 23)

An abundance of research has reported that using ICT in subject lessons can itself be a motivating tool for students; ICT can motivate disaffected students and increase self-confidence.5 A teacher contrasted pupils’ behaviour in normal lessons with a LAMS lesson:

“[Pupils] tend to get very loud when they’re in a classroom and they are asked to do a lot of writing.” (Teacher no. 5)

Another observation was:

“They are a lot quieter in the computer room, so they get through more work, simply because they’re there and they’re focussed, and they’re working individually, it’s just all there at their fingertips.” (Teacher no. 5)

The teacher also linked the speed of getting through a computer lesson with students only having to work at the keyboard as opposed to writing into books, which her lower ability groups found more difficult:

5 See e.g. ‘What the research says about ICT and motivation’ published by Becta ICT Research, 2005, at http://www.becta.org.uk/page_documents/research/wtrs_motivation.pdf


http://www.becta.org.uk/page_documents/research/wtrs_motivation.pdf


“And I think that’s the reason they get through much more…they’re tapping away and tapping away, confidently, rather than having to figure out the title and the date and how many numbers do they need down the side of their page.” (Teacher no. 5)

The teacher capitalised on students being motivated in the ICT room and combined LAMS lessons with writing tasks because she found that:

“[when pupils] have to do a writing task after every LAMS sequence … they never complain. You ask them to write in the classroom and they complain. So if I want to get some good writing out of them, I give it to them in the computer room.” (Teacher no. 5)

LAMS was motivating not just because it was a technological tool used in lessons but, more significantly, because it allowed coherent, structured and integrated use of ICT for teaching. Teachers found that the way LAMS sequences were delivered to students motivated them. Students were able to see on the left hand side (see Figure 8) where they were up to in the sequence. What motivated them was that they knew that, “they should be able to finish it by the end of the lesson. So that there is a need to go through quickly.” (Teacher no. 1)This contrasted with traditional lessons when there are no visual clues for individual students as to their progress. If the teacher is able to show the outline of the lesson, by using a PowerPoint slide for instance, there is no tracking attached to it. Whole class progress can be tracked, but not at the level of the individual student. LAMS was supportive in helping students to control their own attention to the task and monitor their progress both in relation to lesson time and the educational objectives set by the teacher.

8.1.4 Developing cognitive and metacognitive skills

The activity-focussed nature of LAMS, as teachers found, not only offered a more meaningful ICT-based lesson but also contributed to the development of various cognitive and metacognitive skills. In the first instance, teachers contrasted previously implemented ICT lessons with LAMS lessons. What they found was that when they typically asked students to produce PowerPoint slides on some topic during ordinary ICT lessons, pupils were just “copying and pasting from the Internet”, while, “LAMS stops them doing that, and makes [students] actually work for themselves”. (Teacher no. 1) The explanation for that difference is to be found in LAMS’ activity focus. When teachers created a sequence in LAMS, they were explicitly asking students to do work through a set of well-defined activities with learning objectives. This process, “shouldn’t be about getting kids to produce a poster of ‘Support Henry and His Actions’ or whatever. It should be about getting kids to develop good analytical skills, which is what LAMS does and that’s the joy of it really.” (Teacher no. 19)

As another teacher affirmed:

“the opportunity to group-work and share opinions [in LAMS] encourages students to develop essential subject skills such as analysis, evaluation and synthesis.” (Final LAMS Questionnaire)



Metacognitive skills include students’ ability to plan their learning, being able to monitor where they are up to and conduct self-evaluations to measure how well they have done against a set goal. Teachers approached the development of such skills in different ways using LAMS (see Section 9). Activities that support the development of metacognitive skills include modelling, group interaction, reflective and peer-assessment activities. Such activities were well promoted in LAMS as teachers revealed in their reflections on their LAMS experiences.

Modelling – The step-by-step nature of LAMS sequences allowed teachers to model, for instance, the steps comprising the process of evaluation, deconstructing it into manageable chunks: “all the different steps that they have actually gone through to get to the evaluation point and on the way through the sequence using voting, them able to see other pupils’ voting, make them use the notebook, writing down just simple points of things that they managed to achieve well.” (Teacher no. 15)

Group interaction – LAMS activities such as Chat and Forum are based on students communicating with one another online and these interactions are essential in constructing and checking meanings and developing skills for argument: “If I was to get thirty students in a classroom and ask them to argue a point, they couldn’t…it would take a great deal of coaching to get them to realise yes, you can have a full-blown argument with somebody in the classroom regarding history. But because we are talking about an environment where they’re responding to each other but within the confines of a computer, they’re happy as Larry to argue over things.” (Teacher no. 19)

Peer- and self-assessment – The Question and Answer activity is particularly versatile. It includes two steps: students are asked a question and they have to respond by making a written contribution. Once this contribution has been made, the students are shown one another’s answers. This two-step approach gets students to reflect on their own learning experience and then compare it with their peers’ contributions.

Reflection – Peer- and self-assessment can be further formalised using reflective activities. In LAMS this can be achieved with the individual activity types or a combination of the activity with the Notebook.

The advantage of using LAMS was that all students completed the sequences individually so every one of them was involved in learning. They did not have to wait to be called by the teacher as they would have done in a normal classroom setting. Teachers felt that pupils with different levels of achievement were able make their contributions when they got to the activity in the sequence at the time it suited them, and were not put on the spot. Typing their answers gave students some extra time to think and amend their responses if required. Class size was not an issue either, as LAMS accommodated and displayed everyone’s



response – something that would have been difficult, if not impossible, to achieve in a normal classroom setting.

The sequence of activities involving questions and answers in the classroom would typically be:

1) Listening to the teacher’s question, student has an idea. 2) If called by the teacher, student expresses and formulates idea verbally. (If not called

by the teacher, student may not formulate an idea.) Teacher may or may not immediately comment upon or judge the idea.

3) Teacher calls other students who in turn give their ideas. Only a limited number of students are able to respond in the classroom setting.

4) Teacher may focus on key ideas or misconceptions or ask further questions. Students may reformulate and compare their ideas in the light of peer and teacher comments.

In LAMS, there are similarities and differences to classroom delivery, enhanced by some advantages that are brought about by the delivery medium itself. This is especially true when using the Question and Answer activity. LAMS deconstructs the thinking and reflection process:

1) Student has an idea after reading the teacher’s question and thinking about it.2) Expressing the idea – formulating the idea in writing by typing it at the keyboard.3) Sees own idea expressed – reading the Noticeboard with the list of responses from

the whole class.4) Compares ideas – reading and comparing ideas from the list. Teacher can use offline

and online ways of contributing to and managing the activity.

The new ingredient that LAMS adds is the capability of having an overview of everyone’s ideas at the same time, which is a tangible benefit both for the teacher and the students. (A more detailed comparison between the traditional classroom and LAMS strategies in the use of question and answer activities is provided in Gibbs and O’Sullivan, 2005). A more subtle effect is that the visual presentation, listing all pupil responses, in itself suggests that all contributions are equally valued, letting the teacher and pupils make their own minds up about the quality of contributions. This empowers and engages both parties in the process of reflection, self- and peer-assessment.

The arguments above can also be used to show how LAMS promotes the development of analytical and thinking skills in a “student-friendly” way (Final LAMS questionnaire). LAMS supports teachers in getting pupils to, “think for themselves” (Teacher no. 15). One teacher commented how LAMS was ideal in supporting pupils’ coursework. The flow of activities in a sequence spells out the steps of the thinking process, thereby unobtrusively guiding the students:



“Coursework is having to do research, having to work it out, having to understand it, having to explain themselves and having to prove what they think by producing results.” (Teacher no. 15)

Given LAMS’ support for developing cognitive and metacognitive skills and the fact that pupils are guided through a LAMS sequence at their own pace, teachers can use the system to encourage students’ independent learning.

8.1.5 Monitoring pupil progress and contributions

One of the most frequently cited benefits of LAMS from the teachers’ perspective was the capability of monitoring and tracking students’ progress and contributions. Teachers have access to the monitor function in LAMS and once they have scheduled a LAMS sequence with a class, the following four views (accessed through tabs) of sessions are available live and following the session:

A. Session information – gives the details of the name of the class, start and duration of LAMS session, number of students who started the sequence and enables administrative functions such as deleting or archiving the session;

B. Sequence – quick class overview screen showing the flow of activities with green dots representing each student’s location within the sequence.

C. Learners – each learner is represented by a line bisecting a series of boxes, each box representing an activity, the colour of the box telling the teacher whether the activity has been completed by the student or not. Teachers can click within each box to reveal the student’s contribution for the given activity.

D. Contributions – whole class contributions are compiled for each activity and presented in one unit with student names. Similar activity types are grouped together.

These different views assist teachers with various aspects of teaching. During observed lessons, some teachers used the online monitoring function and some did not. In most cases, teachers who did not use the monitoring function admitted that this was due to their lack of training, experience and confidence in LAMS whilst admitting that they would like to learn how to use it as they appreciated its application. Only one teacher said that he preferred walking around and watching over pupils’ shoulders to offer help and support.

If they had access to interactive whiteboards, teachers frequently projected the monitoring screen for the whole class. This use of the interactive whiteboard served as a classroom management tool, letting pupils know that the teacher was aware of what they were doing, which kept pupils on task.

“[students] know that I can see what they are doing. Which is a really good thing. Very similar to language labs in the past.” (Teacher no. 2)



Another cited positive strength associated with this class/individual surveillance is that struggling students can be picked up using Monitor by a teacher without the student having to ask for help publicly, and students know this.

The Sequence view was used by teachers to check class progress against the time schedule of the lesson, i.e. whether students were progressing through activities as predicted and planned. The advantage of this visual tracking was that teachers were able to assess quickly whole-class progress and amend the flow of events as required. Teachers could also call attention to pupils who were either rushing ahead in the sequence or lagging behind and guide them to the appropriate action:

"Some children will just run through the activities, finish them really quickly and not really think about them." (Teacher no. 20)

Many VLEs claim to offer student tracking functionality. Normally, this consists of recording whether students have logged on or not, what pages they have accessed and what contributions they have read. LAMS builds on these basic administrative indicators to offer the ability to track contributions from two perspectives, a) that of the sequenced activities and b) that of the individual student. With teachers being able to monitor the content of contributions, LAMS quickly transforms into a tool that is able to support the formative assessment of pupils. Teachers commented that they were able to see quantitative results such as scores for multiple choice tests and results of voting exercises and make assessments as to how much students had learnt:

“and I think then it’s useful, you can assess what they have learnt by looking how they did in the multiple choice quiz. And you also get them to vote and see what they also thought as the most popular [site]. So I think it went quite well.” (Teacher no. 20)

By checking the individual contributions that presented students’ ideas (such as Chat transcripts and student responses) teachers were able to offer formative feedback, e.g. by calling the individual’s name in class and saying to them, “‘Look, you forgot an accent’ or ‘That was not quite what I wanted’” (Teacher no. 2). Teachers are also able to view the contributions after the session and reflect on the extent to which lesson objectives were achieved as well as individual students’ progress:

“You can actually see how well they did, what their responses are. You can take it away, you can build on their lack of knowledge, or what they do and don’t know.” (Teacher no. 21)

"Each individual has got a specific, tailor-made answers and feedback to their work. [Students] find that very good, and I myself can know every single one of them of what progress they are making. That immediate monitoring and afterwards is good as LAMS does it for me." (Teacher no. 2)



An added bonus was that the contributions were digital so teachers were able to copy and paste student feedback and comment on this electronically, therefore saving time as compared with taking home workbooks and marking them by hand:

”What I do when I am at home I collect all the information I have got in the monitoring thing, and then give them a piece of paper saying that was wrong and why, so you get immediate feedback.” (Teacher no. 2)

Another advantage was that teachers were able to log on to LAMS at any time and anywhere and check students’ progress: “it’s there I can see it wherever I am.” (Teacher no. 2)

With LAMS’ sequence structure helping students to keep on task and offering ready access to resources, teachers could concentrate on teaching their subject area and be less occupied with monitoring and managing classroom behaviour. Keeping track of pupil progress is taken on by the online monitoring aspect of LAMS which can provide a quick snapshot of where individual students are in their sequence as well as providing a visual image of the whole class’s progress.

“… you also have the back up of the monitoring…it’s very clearly stated who’s where, who’s doing what, who’s typing what, so in terms of discipline you’ve got instant backup. And that’s what you need…the backup…that give[s] you the freedom to go round everybody and focus specifically on the technical information of the lesson rather than behaviour.” (Teacher no. 11)

8.1.6 Immediate feedback

Teachers found the immediate feedback offered to students beneficial from a teaching management point of view. Activity types such as Multiple Choice include feedback that automatically appears to the student, telling them whether their answer was right or wrong, and optionally prompting the correct response. Students can also retake the assessment. LAMS offers the option to display the best scoring students’ names at the end of this activity, which can be used to motivate and praise students if used judiciously:

“Everybody loves doing multiple choice … [Students] get kind of absorbed in that. It appeals to the[ir] competitive side ...” (Teacher no. 22)

Indirectly, other LAMS activity types can act as automated feedback tools in the sense that feedback is provided by peers or the teacher online. These include the Question and Answer, the Chat, the Forum and the Survey activities:

“What I wanted to do was give them the ability to chat about these points, so they could have immediate feedback. So I used the forum format and grouped it together. So that you have a group of five or six kids in a forum putting down their views on the various topics.” (Teacher no. 22)



At one observed lesson, the teacher asked students to vote ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ on a controversial historical issue and the summary of results was then displayed on the interactive whiteboard using the monitoring function so the whole class was able to see the outcome of their vote directly.

Immediate feedback helped teachers. “I don’t have to think about going away assessing it, it’s instant.” (Teacher no. 21)

8.1.7 Administrative support for pupils’ work

The fact that all activities done online in LAMS were available in electronic format offered some administrative support for teachers as well as providing a 24/7 point of access to students’ contributions online.

Section 8.1.5 on monitoring discussed the facilities available to teachers to retrieve whole class and individual responses online. Teachers commented that the digitally produced LAMS work was easier to mark and return to students. One teacher copied and pasted students’ responses into Word at home, then, “cut little bits of paper and say that’s what [the student] did wrong and why.” (Teacher no. 2)

The Submit activity was considered by teachers to be a feature that provided administrative support by gathering pupils’ work in one place. For instance, one teacher asked students to submit a PowerPoint and she was surprised to find out that the submitted mails came directly to her email and she was able to, “look at them … it was so fantastic” (Teacher no. 2)

8.1.8 Allows subject ICT-skill integration

Teachers commented that LAMS is an excellent tool by which non-ICT subjects can integrate the use of ICT in a seamless, meaningful way. Teachers are required to integrate ICT within their own subject area, “as much as possible … [using LAMS] is one very easy way for me to do that.” (Teacher no. 10)

A teacher expressed the view that LAMS, because it offers a variety of teaching tools and teaching strategies, “taught me a great deal about how to make more creative subject specific ICT lessons” (Final LAMS questionnaire).

This sentiment was shared by other teachers:

“…when I go to the computer room [and use LAMS], I teach my subject, I teach geography in the computer room, as opposed to typing up some geography work in the computer room that you did in the classroom.” (Teacher no. 1)



“I think one of the problems regarding History and ICT, or quite a lot of subjects, is that your ICT co-ordinator basically has this thing where he wants ICT skills taught in your lesson. I’m a historian, and if you’ve got ICT skills you’re lucky. It’s all about using the technology to enhance student learning. Whereas nine times out of ten in an ICT lesson in history we might be using a PowerPoint or looking at a webpage or making some kind of Word document or Publisher document, here [with LAMS] it’s about cognitive learning. That, for me, is what it should be about.” (Teacher no. 19)

The consensus expressed by these teachers was that LAMS allowed the teaching of their own subject area with the development of subject skills and knowledge moving to the foreground, whilst the more purely ICT skills moved to the background. LAMS lessons, therefore, were less about using and enhancing skills in Microsoft packages such as PowerPoint and more about curricular development e.g. nurturing pupils’ analytical skills. One teacher pointed out that this shift of emphasis needed to be explicitly recognised both by teachers and pupils, but that LAMS was supportive in this process:

“[Students] are used to seeing typically Office applications. When they see something like LAMS, it’s just totally different. ... But once you can get over that, you can see the benefit of it.” (Teacher no. 24)

The idea implicit in the above quote was that the benefits of LAMS may need to be spelt out for those to whom it was not evident at first glance. But perhaps more importantly, it pointed to the power of LAMS in facilitating the change in individuals' own teaching practices.

A teacher trainee at pre-qualifying level observed that her students really appreciated that the LAMS lesson she taught was very well structured, and after delivering lessons with LAMS, she commented that she, “can’t imagine how better to structure an ICT lesson. I don’t know any other way. I have never been taught, ‘This is how you teach history in an ICT room.’” (Teacher no. 20) To this teacher, of the available strategies for integrating ICT in subject lessons, LAMS seemed to offer a structure on which she could confidently build her lessons. The teacher’s comments suggest that considering LAMS to be included at training level e.g. for PGCE teachers may make sense, widening the horizon of approaches available to trainee teachers.

8.1.9 Re-use and adaptation

Section 6.1 indicated the extent of sequence reuse derived from system usage statistics. There was evidence of teachers adapting their own work as well as teachers re-using other people’s work, with the former being much more frequent. Teacher interviews also confirmed that they saw the potential of re-using LAMS sequences. During the pilot, teachers were able to access sequences created in the public area, in their institutional area and those put on the SST LAMS pilot website or some created by LAMS workshop participants. (Sequences



not visible to anyone else were stored in individuals' private LAMS space). Teachers found merit in the fact that LAMS sequences could be saved electronically and then used and used again. As one teacher commented, “you’ve got it for life once you’ve saved it.” (Teacher no. 11) Teachers found that adapting a previously written LAMS sequence was very easy. A LAMS sequence can be imported or exported into an individual's private LAMS space.

Efficiency gains through re-use were recognised by schools that, in turn, had planned a strategy for developing and sharing subject sequences within departments. Teachers had varying attitudes to LAMS and time saving. Some had thought that creating a sequence in LAMS did not take longer than creating a normal lesson plan. Some thought it was faster and some found it took an inordinate time to create a sequence. Attitudes depended on the nature of activities involved, the resources readily available to them, teachers’ ICT skills and their access to the Internet out of hours.

“Yes, we share them. Because that was my concern … You could spend at least half an hour up to an hour writing your sequence and that’s not practical to do that on a regular basis.” (Teacher no. 23)

What teachers understood was that having sequences shared by departments would reduce their workload in the longer term:

“Once you have done the sequences, anybody can use them, of course, and adapt them if they want to, then make a copy and just change a few things for different level of abilities because that’ s possible.” (Teacher no. 2)

The above quote concisely summarises the power of LAMS for re-use of lesson plans: LAMS facilitates both the re-use and the adaptation of sequences seamlessly. It is easy to import or copy an existing sequence, or to change a few instructions, re-order activities or adjust the content of the actual activities within LAMS.

Various approaches were adopted with regard to storing these sequences for shared use. Some individuals used the institutional shared space within LAMS, others stored sequences within the school network outside LAMS. One teacher pointed out that they adopted the latter strategy because they were able to store sequences by subject area, while LAMS only offered a limited way of storing sequences, in a long unsorted list, which made it difficult to find sequences.

One school which decided to take on a departmental approach identified that if they were to create ten LAMS sequences across the department with all staff contributing, those ten sequences would serve as the basis for future re-use. An added benefit of sharing was that delivering the same sequence across the department would ensure a consistent teaching approach:



“You make a collection of sequences, you make everyone aware of them, you put them in the schemes of work so even new staff then, when involved with the training, will know how to access them and know where they’re going to be used. And then we use those.” (Teacher no. 23)

The above approach encapsulates the whole intention of introducing learning design systems, namely shared, adaptable and reusable pedagogies and resources.

Another benefit of sharing surfaced in a Special Needs Unit in one of the pilot schools. A communicator for hearing impaired students mentioned the importance of providing access to the same kind of teaching for hearing impaired students as is provided in mainstream classes. The unit developed various hard-copy and electronic resources for the hearing impaired students based on the lesson plans of the relevant teachers e.g. in mathematics and biology. These resources were adapted to suit the needs of hearing impaired students.

“If they’ve used LAMS in Maths and we have got the sequence from [the Maths teacher] and we want to do the same topic… to reinforce it, then we could modify any sort of LAMS sequence” (Teacher no. 12)

Personnel in the unit appreciated that they would be able to make these adaptations in LAMS relatively effortlessly and, for instance, they could, “cut [the LAMS sequence] down a bit” or, “pick up the main point” (Teacher no. 12), thereby building up a bank of LAMS resources that could be used by other special needs children:

“It’s just going to save a lot of work, I think…we will all have a good bank of sequences like that. That will be really good.” (Teacher no. 13)

Most literature on re-using e-learning resources has raised the issue of institutional and professional cultures which may demonstrate reluctance to share between practitioners. Evidence of this reluctance was indicated in the JISC LAMS evaluation study (Masterman and Lee, 2005). A trace of this attitude was mentioned by one teacher, although she did not experience this at their own school:

“You get odd teachers in schools who are very protective of what they have made… But we have not encountered that here really…" (Teacher no. 12)

Some pilot schools were working together as part of a network and participation in the LAMS pilot was one element in this new way of working together. Two schools used LAMS for team-teaching a personal and social education activity between their schools in which students learnt about setting up a cyber-café. Another school had plans for linking with schools outside the UK with two classes of children accessing the same sequence. Clearly, teachers realised the benefits of using LAMS for collaborative teaching across geographical boundaries.



Teachers were aware that there would be differences between schools in the student characteristics as well as the way subjects were taught (e.g. different schools might use different text books for French): “I don’t think sequences will be used wholesale because they will be particular to the school.” (Teacher no. 4)

Another teacher saw that, in such scenarios, LAMS sequences would require to be adapted to some extent:

“In the future that’s what we are hoping to do, is create sequences jointly and then run the two together, so that both schools use the same sequence, although we appreciate that there might be little bits to change because obviously, the two schools are slightly different.” (Teacher no. 1)

The LAMS community site (being launched at the time of report writing) aims to provide a public forum for the LAMS community to promote re-use. Further investigations, e.g. in the form of longitudinal studies, examining the impact of the community site as well as school-based practices, are suggested.

8.1.10 Cross-curricular advantages

LAMS is “inclusive”. This point was made at the Coventry LAMS workshop by one of the pilot school's staff. LAMS does not divide teachers but can foster inclusiveness, irrespective of what subject they teach. The sense was that in the past, certain staff members were put off by software that was available to teachers teaching a different subject whilst unavailable to them. Teacher interviews confirmed this more inclusive view of LAMS with teachers frequently commenting, “this can be done in any subject”.

LAMS is able to offer support for various teaching strategies and permits the individual teacher to decide how they are best utilised in their own subject area – ample examples are given in Section 9. Further, there are generic, cross-curricular skills that teachers can promote through LAMS, such as analytical, critical thinking skills.

8.2 Benefits to pupils – Teachers’ perceptionsThe LAMS practitioner visits recorded a broad range of qualitative evidence relating to individual objectives achieved by staff. This section offers a summary of teachers’ feedback on these anticipated and unanticipated LAMS benefits for pupils as perceived by teachers. Some of the benefits were confirmed by students themselves in the course of focus group interviews. Before reviewing the sub-themes in the next sections, here is one teacher’s summary of why he thought LAMS benefited pupils:

“I think that what makes [LAMS] work well is that, first of all, it’s different. It’s different than the way they normally learn in a classroom. It keeps them engaged, it gives the pupils focus on what they are doing, on the task that they’re doing. There’s nothing to take them away from that… there’s no



bright colours, no interactive things, no fancy Flash things that actually can distract people. It is laying it straight to the point and they know exactly what it is that they’re trying to achieve. I think as well that pupils also see what their outcome is. They can actually see what they’re achieving themselves so…that’s why it works, that’s why it’s successful.” (Teacher no. 9)

8.2.1 Guided structure to progress

Section 8.1.1 described how LAMS supported teaching by offering teachers a lesson structure. The same benefit was observed by teachers from the point of view of students. They had found that LAMS offered a guided structure for students to progress through learning materials.

“They could see what they were doing, they could actually see the progression through their lesson which maybe is not so clear in normal classroom lessons.” (Teacher no. 9)

“Year 9 said ‘This is very well structured, I knew what I was doing, went through it bit by bit’, …Children like to know what they are doing.” (Teacher no. 20)

The presence of guidance was linked to motivation, as one teacher pointed out:“they can see down on one side, what activities they have got to do, they can see how far they are with a sequence and it is motivation.” (Teacher no. 1)

Pupils confirmed that they welcomed the step-by-step approach in LAMS: “It’s good as well ‘cos it’s all set out for you and when you finish one thing you just go straight on to the next thing.” “You don’t have to ask the teacher what to do next.” (Year 7 pupil)

Not only was it easier to go through the lesson from one activity to another, learning in different steps but this way of scaffolding learning increased recall and confidence:

“And LAMS helped us …we thought that we didn’t know too much about evaluations but the LAMS programme helped us like to see that we did know quite a bit.” (Year 9 pupil)

Students also connected the sequence with some unspecified attribute that kept them on task as opposed to normal lessons when such shepherding was not present:

”It’s not as set. With [LAMS] you have to do what it tells you to do. But you can get diverted in the [normal] lesson and diverted in the lesson and go off and talk about it one thing.” (Year 12 pupil)

8.2.2 Seeing whole class ideas

Teachers used a variety of approaches in LAMS, such as collaborative and constructivist learning activities. Tasks that presented students with ideas and responses from the whole class (such as the Question and Answer, Chat, Voting and Forum activities) were particularly valued. These tasks ensured that all pupils participated in discussion and, “not just the usual ‘leaders’ within the group.” (Final LAMS questionnaire) One teacher, who was considering



the involvement of pupils from other schools accessing the same forum as his students, envisaged that it would create a competitive atmosphere and, “might make my kids work harder…they want to have a bit of one-upmanship.” (Teacher no. 19).

More generally, these activities on the one hand valued each student’s view by presenting it to the whole class, and on the other hand, offered students a range of different views:

“It is excellent in that [students] can instantly see their work being recognised and that they can absorb views that they may not have been party to before.” (Final LAMS questionnaire)

“So actually, by sharing, they are in a sense coming up with best practice because they can share all their ideas and then see that maybe someone else has got a different perspective on it which is actually more appropriate and relevant than they had themselves.” (Teacher no. 24)

One impact of using such LAMS activities was that students came to value the chance to contribute ideas as well as seeing each other’s ideas:

“I like the forums because you can actually talk to people over the Internet…and link up to people rather than having to talk to the teacher who‘s then gonna have to pass on to other people, you can just speak directly to them.” (Year 7 pupil)

“I liked seeing who put what and how many people said 'no' and how many people said 'yes'.” (Year 7 pupil)

Students were able to make judgements as to how their response compared with other people’s responses (self-assessment), compare other pupils’ responses against the learning goal (peer-assessment) and evaluate how they could improve their own responses (reflection). This whole-class view of responses might have been particularly helpful to lower achieving pupils who were able to see what their problems may have been. In the traditional classroom, the teacher may ask a question and students respond by putting their hands up. As teachers and students pointed out, LAMS offered extras to this face-to-face scenario in terms of the number and volume of contributions that were handled and managed by LAMS. Students found that they were all able to contribute in LAMS without, “the teacher to pick you to say something” (Year 7 pupil), and in the case of forums, respond to anyone they want to, “not by shouting out but writing on the computer.” (Year 7 pupil) In normal classroom situations, there were obviously occasions when students had a really good idea but were not able to tell anyone when they were not picked, while in LAMS, “you can just say it any time without being asked.” (Year 7 pupil)

Had all students been invited to contribute to traditional classroom tasks, there could have been a logistical issue in managing the volume of feedback (i.e. avoiding students talking at the same time, or recording all contributions on the board). LAMS allowed the volume of



feedback to be registered, while at the same time managing it in a way that did not overwhelm students or the teacher, separating and putting them together in a virtual space.

LAMS allowed not just ideas and views to be shared but digital resources as well. One teacher used the Share Resources activity. Students were able to upload websites which were then discussed with their peers. This upload facility kept resources controlled within that activity, although in this case the teacher saw it more beneficial to have this task as a small group activity rather than allowing 30 websites to be listed. But the benefit of digitally managing this process was much appreciated, as having to write 30 website addresses on the board would have been too lengthy a task as well as one prone to errors.

8.2.3 Anonymous contributions – mockery and bullying

The Question and Answer tool is unique to LAMS. Depending on the teacher’s choice, it allowed anonymous or named contributions, with the majority of teachers opting for the former, bringing with it numerous benefits. From one perspective, LAMS was able to provide a window onto other people’s contributions in a neutral way:

“The question and answer tools are very, very useful. I find those more useful than probably any of the other tools because I think that, by getting them to look back at what everybody’s said without actually knowing who’s said it, I think that’s the crucial part of it.” (Teacher no. 9)

“And it’s kind of voyeuristic, you are looking into someone else’s mind without fear of being caught. [Students] quite enjoyed that.” (Teacher no. 22)

“ … you can poke your nose into someone else’s stuff, but in a sharing way so that all the information was there for each of them to see. But again, it was discreet sharing so it wasn’t able to point fingers at anybody who put something daft or silly. Or even the ones who are very bright are able then to actually help the ones that are struggling with the ideas.” (Teacher no. 15)

Both teachers and pupils found that the anonymous contributions as well as the neutral computer-student interaction obviated the possibility of overt mockery and bullying that might be associated with exchanges in traditional lessons. One teacher talked of a particular pupil who was very bright and who used to contribute to classroom discussions until he started to get bullied:

“If you are in classroom situation, he tends to now sit back and not get involved quite so much, because he is actually quite embarrassed of being quite a lot more intelligent verbally than the other kids.” (Teacher no. 1)

With LAMS, the teacher commented, the pupil was able to make contributions even if his answers could have been attributable to him. In a focus group interview, students discussed the fact that they liked the Question and Answer activity as it didn’t give away who was saying what:



Pupil 1: “And then they won’t know, it’s you saying it, [you won’t] get beaten up [laughs]…”Interviewer: “How would that happen? …”Pupil 1: “Because sometimes, if you, like, say something in class then other people will disagree with you and start an argument. If you say it, it might cause and argument or cause a fight.”Pupil 2: “And sometimes if you act too clever…”Pupil 1 [in background]: “you get bullied”Pupil 2: “…or if you just speak too much, or ask too many questions, you get bullied and called a swot.” (Year 9 pupils)

Using LAMS was recognised to benefit another student group, those who were naturally shy or reserved when it came to classroom discussions. A teacher commented that LAMS allowed: “even the shyest and most timid pupils to compare what their thoughts are with the rest of the group in a … discreet way.” (Teacher no. 15)

Pupils also cited examples of other shy students whom LAMS benefited. One said LAMS made quieter people work: “There’s a quiet person in our class and she was replying to everyone today. She won’t usually talk but she’s been quite good.” (Year 7 pupil)

The anonymous contributions had the potential to prevent students, e.g. lower achieving students or indeed students at any level of performance, feeling embarrassment should they, “say something wrong” (Year 7 pupil) or make, “a silly question”: “it’s not as if everyone will start laughing at you” (Year 9 pupil)

Through increasing the engagement of a range of students groups (lower as well as higher achieving pupils), teachers felt that one great advantage of LAMS was that it created a non-judgemental environment in which the negative potential to ‘make mistakes’ was turned into a positive. Students felt that their contributions, whatever they might be, were valued: they were all part of the learning process.

8.2.4 LAMS nurtures confidence

Teachers held the view that LAMS nurtured the confidence of students and this benefit had various facets, e.g. that students would become confident in sharing ideas:

“Indirectly will boost their confidence, make them feel ‘my opinions were just as good as other people’s’.” (Teacher no. 15)

Using ICT for writing also boosted confidence as compared with hand-writing skills. One teacher talked of a student who was more confident when typing on the computer possibly because it looked neater. With computers students didn’t need to commit to an answer, e.g. they were able to change or edit their writing or the options they chose:

“Generally, and it’s not just LAMS, the computers take away the scariness of having to commit to an answer or to writing on the page.” (Teacher no. 12):



Answers could be constructed in private and this was particularly useful with hearing impaired children who had confidence issues:

“…and if you have got one [student] that’s particularly shy, not bothered because you don’t have to put your hand up and sign it, maybe getting it wrong and being embarrassed. So they can do it on their own and nobody has to know if it’s right or wrong. So again, that’s more of self-esteem and getting the confidence up and working more independently.” (Teacher no. 13):

With LAMS, students were not being put on the spot:“You are trying to draw their information out of them and make them think for themselves a little bit, but it is a form of bullying to some extent. Because they are sitting in a classroom, they want to learn but they feel like they are under pressure. So with LAMS, none of that exists.” (Teacher no. 15)

Lack of peer pressure eliminated inhibitions:“The kids that I’ve used it with, they’re enjoying much more because it’s a new technology for them, but also because they’re able to respond without feeling peer pressure about it, which is one of the big issues, big inhibitors to learning.” (Teacher no. 19)

8.2.5 Self-paced

Students were able to go at their own pace, benefiting both low- and high-ability students:

“… sequences guide students through activities at their own pace, and those activities can be differentiated. I think that’s motivating to students. The tracking definitely is motivating, because it becomes, in the gentlest possible way, a race.” (Teacher no. 4)

“I felt very much that they can work at their own pace. It increases their ability to work independently.” (Teacher no. 20)

This advantage was also confirmed by pupils:

“You can work at your own pace. You can do as much as you want or as little as you want.” (Year 9 pupil)

Pupil: “We can work at our own pace, don’t have to wait for anybody else.”Interviewer: “Why is that good?”Pupil: “Because I am pretty fast on the computer but some people might be slow.” (Year 8 pupil)

8.2.6 Continuously working

Students were continuously working when using LAMS, it kept them on task:

“Normally, the class, when you do traditional methods, a lot of the students lose attention, quick, because some parts are due to the special needs, and sometimes the kids just don’t want to be



there. But today the kids were really on task and at the end of it we saw figures coming out…kids were saying, ‘Why’s that your best theme park?’ ‘Because we’ve got it’s only 60.6 miles away’, that’s what you like to see as a teacher, whereas…if you give them handouts and things, they wouldn’t have been on task as they could have got disturbed…but the fact that they’re on a laptop and it’s structured, that really does help.” (Teacher no. 11)

This advantage also emerged from a different perspective. Students also found that using LAMS helped them concentrate:

Pupil 1: “It’s better than the teacher sitting there and talking and everyone listening because you could start daydreaming but…”Pupil 2: “Yeah, you lose concentration.”Pupil 1: “But you always do something on the Internet with this [referring to LAMS].”Interviewer: “So you lose concentration normally. Why is it different with this LAMS?”Pupil 1: “Because everyone always enjoys the computers.”Pupil 3: “It’s more fun than listening to the teacher.” (Year 11 pupils)

8.2.7 Immediate resource

The ‘Share Resources’ activity allowed teachers to give a rapid point-of-access to the materials whether Internet sites or other digital files. It also eliminated students’ needing to spend time searching and locating digital resources via the web:

“It’s just all there at their fingertips.” (Teacher no. 5)

“On the actual LAMS you can set your objectives out and then you direct them straight into the website.” (Teacher no. 11)

“You can direct the girls to work that has been downloaded for them to read or direct them to an Internet site; [GCSE] Bitesize for example. Because they are not involved with surfing, they are more likely to reach their destination.” (Final LAMS questionnaire Teacher no. 21)

An added advantage of LAMS is that Internet research can be very controlled and guided, therefore more efficient:

“Whereas if I give them a task sheet and get them to do their own research, especially with the lower ability group, they find it difficult to search on the Internet, they find it difficult to filter through the information that they get. So if I ask them to search about tropical rainforests, because of the phenomenal amount of stuff that they’ll get up there, they can’t actually work out which website is going to be best and which information is best and they’ll just randomly copy everything. Whereas with LAMS, I can take them to a specific website and I can also, as the instruction tells them, which pieces to read, which pieces to select, so they know what actually they are looking at. It’s much more guided for students.” (Teacher no. 1)



8.2.8 Instant feedback

Students benefited from instant feedback whether it was the automated feedback e.g. in the multiple choice tool or seeing the whole class ideas of other students:

“That feedback, either the spontaneous or in the next lesson, has an impact on their learning, because if they know straight away that there is something wrong with their answers or they haven’t constructed a sentence properly, they will make progress from that point and saying 'Yes, I can see what’s wrong with their answer', so it has an impact on their learning in a better way.” (Teacher no. 2)

“And the multiple choice I think is great because…at the end of it they come back with the answers and we can write comments specific to that particular question ….” (Teacher no. 11)

From the students’ perspective, instant feedback was also reported to be beneficial since as one student pointed out, bad answers didn’t stick in one’s head as on the computer these could be corrected, whilst in an exercise book there was no immediate feedback:

“When you’re working out of an exercise book and you’re answering questions and writing them down, well, as soon as you write them down it doesn’t tell you whether you’re right or wrong so that answer that you wrote it stays in your head and you think that’s right, but if you’re on the computer you can click the answers and correct them.” (Year 9 pupil)

Students added another advantage to teachers’ comments, i.e. that they were able to try their answers again:

“It’s just good, because you can see what you have done wrong and they tell you why or they tell you or they go on to explain why you have got it wrong. Give you a chance to go back and do the ones that you got wrong again.” (Year 12 pupil)

8.2.9 ICT as motivation

The fact that LAMS allows teachers to use ICT as motivator was confirmed through teacher and pupil interviews and observations:

“They are quite motivated in the ICT room. That’s a change to what they normally do in science. Yes, they are motivated just due to the fact that they’re going to an ICT room.” (Teacher no. 23)

Certain pupil groups, as teachers commented, were attracted to computers more. For instance, boys or pupils with attention deficit problems or hearing impaired students “who actually like going on the computers.” (Teacher no. 12)



8.2.10 Active and independent learning

Teachers found that LAMS promoted active and independent learning, nurturing study skills through the use of its in-built activities. It also lent itself well to exploratory and discovery learning where students had to do research using digital resources, whilst eliminating the ‘copy-and-paste’ culture of previous ICT subject lessons:

“If I was doing an ordinary lesson, it would be a PowerPoint presentation or it would be a word document. And again, you’d always tend to find that at least two or three [students] would just be copying and pasting from the Internet and LAMS stops them doing that, and makes them actually work for themselves.” (Teacher no. 1)

“The pupils are active in learning, because they are doing things on the computer” (Teacher no. 2)

At times teachers incorporated interactive resources in their sequences to enhance active learning opportunities:

“They liked the grammar exercise which I embedded from another link to another site which they quite liked this because it’s interactive.” (Teacher no. 2)

LAMS supporting independent learning was a particular benefit for hearing impaired students:

“When you are actually supporting a hearing impaired child, they are completely dependent on you all the time to make sure they have understood the questions, make sure that they have got the right answers. They can be quite under-confident, can’t they, saying, ‘Is that right?’, checking all the time, ‘Am I right? Am I right?’. And LAMS, we are hoping that LAMS will stop some of that. You do part of it and say ‘You do this on your own, you work independently’. And I think that was shown today, that they can actually work independently without constant checking. There is more scope for it, because you can leave them to it more.” (Teacher no. 12)

8.2.11 Teacher control, with pupil autonomy

Teachers believed that LAMS allowed them an unobtrusive authority during the session. From the teacher’s perspective, this benefit was evidenced in a way that, in contrast with the traditional classroom scenario where the teacher is at the front directing the students, the teachers’ parading authority in front of the class is unnecessary, yet at the same time, LAMS allows teachers to stay in charge:

“… although [students] don’t feel that I am in control, I am actually in control of how the lesson is going, because they are working through it in the way that I want them to.” (Teacher no. 1).

For the student, the benefit of LAMS was that the teacher’s support was implicitly present in the LAMS sequence (i.e. through the learning design), guiding them through their learning. In complementary fashion, students felt a sense of control as active, autonomous learners. This



may be particularly important in an age cohort that is examining adult authority in relation to personal identity, control and independence.

“Because they felt, because it’s sequenced, they are actually following an order of doing it… Although they don’t feel that I am in control, I am actually in control of how the lesson is going, because they are working through it in the way that I want them to.” (Teacher no. 1)

Not only teachers but pupils believed that LAMS moved them into the foreground of teaching and learning interactions which they described as:

“You’re actually doing it for yourself and figuring answers out for yourself instead of the teacher actually telling you them and you having to learn them. You’re learning as you think about the questions and answers.” (Year 9 pupil)

“I think you concentrate a bit more on it ‘cos when you’re sat for ages just listening to the teacher it gets kind of boring but…you can take your time on computers, you can just like have a little break and then carry on with what you’re doing.” (Year 7 pupil)

8.3 Personalisation and differentiationOne of the review’s aims was to explore LAMS’ potential in offering support for personalisation. Personalisation was interpreted in different ways by practitioners:

1) Personalisation features at the technical level e.g. ability to change font size and colour (accessibility options).

2) LAMS supporting different learning styles.3) LAMS supporting differentiated pupil ability, experience, and achievement levels

including special needs.

These different aspects of personalisation are discussed below.

1) LAMS offers a limited although improving level of personalisation at the interface level and the highly textual nature of the system rules it out of teachers’ consideration for certain groups of learners (e.g. for those with literacy problems). Some students would have liked a bigger font size, an option which was not available in LAMS.

2) Teachers have supported pupils with (assumed) different learning styles by building appropriate resources into learning sequences. LAMS is not yet friendly to auditory or visual modalities as it has a manifest lack of integrated multimedia capabilities. Teachers tended to use interactive websites or multimedia files to overcome this limitation.



"At [our school] …they do learn a lot better with visual stimulus. Whereas at [another local school], because they might have been [in the studied foreign country] themselves, they don’t need that extra bit of support and guidance," (Teacher no. 1)

During focus group interviews, students also indicated certain preferences for different learning styles:

“I liked the roller coaster ‘cos it’s a lot better and easier to understand than a load of writing and it had pictures and just the simple explanation of who he was and why they were there.” (Year 7 pupil)

One student commented that she favoured a combination of online and offline discussions:“But then people that are loud like me and [pupil name] think it’s better to talk and write at the same time so it’s kind of good in the way that you can all chat to people by writing but I need some talking in it.” (Year 7 pupil)

3) Teachers saw the potential of LAMS to offer differentiated experiences. Teachers believed that LAMS sequences were easily adaptable for different academic achievement levels as the following two quotes demonstrate:

Simplifying sequences for lower attaining pupils:“But then weaker students that I used it with, because the way you can phrase the questions, because they are shorter, much more kind of focussed questions, they feel more successful … And for more able students, I don’t have to give that much guidance, I can just say, go to the search engine. There is a lot of flexibility, it depends on the ability of kids you’re teaching.” (Teacher no. 1)

“You can create a sequence as a basic sequence. But once it’s there and it’s typed up, you can just change bits out of the sequence and create a second one that obviously incorporates the differentiation. You could have rephrased a question or swapped the question with a multiple choice.” (Teacher no. 1)

or setting extension tasks for high ability students:“So we had to catch these youngsters who are coming without any knowledge and these other people who are clearly well ahead so they come under the maybe 'able and talented' children, so they may need some extension tasks. So you ...foresee how you might design another lesson to follow on.” (Teacher no. 21)

One teacher was not convinced that differentiation with LAMS was necessarily a good idea, as pupils would lose out on collaboration, the learning from peers in a mixed ability setting.



One teacher viewed LAMS as not suitable for those with literacy problems e.g. one dyslexic student insisted on typing his answers in Word first, as he did not want to be seen making mistakes in LAMS. Personnel supporting a hearing impaired unit found that it benefited their students provided sequences had lots of visual resources in them:

“If you are not hearing information, you might not necessarily then form a picture in your mind about it. Like we hear things all the time, so we pick up incidentally grammar and form pictures of things because we can relate it to a particular thing. Whereas the deaf children can’t. So we might be introducing a new topic, and talk about a mountain, but they might not know what a mountain is. Because they haven’t seen the word before, they haven’t heard about it, and they won’t know the spelling of it. And they might not know that there are different mountains and where they are. So, that’s why it’s so important to have pictures because they miss so much.” (Teacher no. 13)

The review showed that there was evidence, albeit limited, for the personalisation and differentiation of sequence structures. Awareness of the potential was in greater evidence than its realisation.

8.4 Home-school linksTeachers saw the capability of LAMS in offering opportunities for out of school learning although there is no evidence of any model of home-school learning revealed in the course of the review. Schools considering this issue cited inequalities between households in the level of ICT provision available (lack of broadband access being the most consistent problem) with the implication that not all students would be able to complete out of school tasks.

Although the practical application was not yet in evidence, respondents revealed their vision of LAMS potential:

“That’s a fantastic aspect of it that they can continue with it [at home] because it’s open. They can go and finish it if they want. We would always encourage them to finish something. The fact they wanted to go home … may be a novelty aspect to begin with. But on the other hand, it may be that they are doing some research and setting some work over the holiday, two week-period. And they could actually submit it to you. I haven’t done that yet. … Again, that’s something for the future which I might try.” (Teacher no. 21)

“…we do have difficulty setting homework that they can work on independently. And we think that it would be quite a good tool because it would be like a reinforcement on what they have already learnt. They could go home and use it at home on their own and we could monitor what they have done.” (Teacher no. 12)

Another teacher pondered whether giving homework tasks on the computer may mean that pupils would be more motivated to complete it:



“They are more likely to do it if it’s on the computer. And they know that it will be monitored and marked. And hopefully it will give them more enthusiasm to work as well.” (Teacher no. 13)

Home-school links emerged from the pupils’ perspective as well. Students were pleasantly surprised at focus groups to find out that they could use LAMS at home:

Pupil 1: “Can we go on it at home? … Miss can probably set us some homework on it and things like that.”Pupil 2: “Yeah, we haven’t done that, it would be quite interesting to do that.”Pupil 3: “Yeah, that would be good.” (Year 12 pupils)

One student commented:

“I suppose, it would be like having a teacher at home using the system. But just quite a limited teacher.” (Year 12 pupil)

From the context, it is possible to elaborate this student's observation. What the student meant was that the LAMS sequence set out for their independent work had guidance that would help her complete at home, whilst she also appreciated that the possibility of completing the sequence at home would not replace the teacher.

Other reasons for using LAMS for out of school learning included coping with absence, illness and excluded pupils. LAMS, with its focus on collaboration, would eliminate the feeling of isolation which is normally associated with self-paced computer learning:

“We would see [LAMS] as a way of increasingly supporting youngsters who, for different reasons, might be out of the curriculum and so … [those] not accessing the mainstream classroom, might be able to use LAMS. One of the things that I like most about LAMS … I think for too many youngsters working at a computer … using web-based…the idea [is] that LAMS can have a youngster working in isolation but still working in relationship to others through the chatroom idea or the extent to which pupils interact. That’s quite powerful for me.” (Teacher no. 6)

Staff were also encouraged to find out that, “they can write their sequences at home” (Teacher no. 23).



9 LAMS classroom practice and pedagogyIn this section observations and data relating to emerging pedagogy with LAMS are examined. Firstly there are practical issues that arise when actually running LAMS sequences and these apply generally across all subjects, from introducing LAMS to students to effective means of using some LAMS features such as the monitoring function and chat activities. The second group of data presents the review findings on emerging pedagogies specific to the curricular subjects observed in LAMS sessions during visits and reported by practitioners during interviews. The presentation of this practice and pedagogy represents a tentative step towards the building of a best practice guide for using LAMS.

9.1 Attaining confidence as a LAMS practitionerThe review identified a number of common strategies (and relevant advice) that teachers deployed in stepping from initial LAMS training on to developing confidence beyond that basic technical knowledge. Experimenting, rehearsing, technical preparation and networking with other professionals were consistently pointed to as important elements of building confidence as a LAMS practitioner.

Experimentation, playing around with the system to understand its limits and idiosyncrasies, is generally seen as a major step in attaining LAMS confidence, although this may be a time-consuming process, “It takes a lot of playing around with to realise what you can do with it, and what sort of things you can produce to use in a lesson and use effectively in a lesson.” (Teacher no. 15)

Having the opportunity to look at sequences that have been delivered from the public area and examining them at the activity level is cited as inspiring confidence as well as helping the creation of further sequences, “Look at the sequences that are there – look through and see what options they have used.” (Teacher no. 20)

Interestingly, one teacher explained that part of their route to attaining confidence to use the system was to get other professionals to look over the sequences that they had created and delivered, suggesting that this is a valuable two-way process that would form an element of collaboration within networks of LAMS practitioners:

“So that’s really helped me in terms of building up my confidence, talking about it and using it effectively. And then, because people have seen my lessons and seen sequences that I have created, it’s helped me with my planning, so I know that actually, I am planning it well, because I know the kids are going do it and I am planning it well, because other staff are going to look at it and they are going to criticise it or pick things out of it that are good and bad.” (Teacher no. 1)



This observation of LAMS in action, placing the sequence in the context of the classroom for people new to LAMS, and the need for human networks of support, is highlighted by other practitioners as good, rewarding practice,

“People need to meet with people that are beginner learners, perhaps with somebody running a session. Because they need to feel that they are not the only ones out on a limb. They need to hear other people’s experiences.” (Teacher no. 21)

Other, common-sense, strategies include the advice that one should, “Preview the sequence and make sure it’s working.” (Teacher no. 2) It is important that, “the links work[ed]” (Teacher no. 17) and that, “the wording [is] self-explanatory.” There are great benefits to be had from rehearsing the first sequences that are made as, “…once you practise one and have done one, and you have seen it up and running, it all becomes clear… It’s so different; you can’t think how it’s going to work.” (Teacher no. 13) Ideally, the rehearsal should be in the room that the sequence will be delivered as this will unearth any logistical or technical problems at the point of delivery such as discovered by one teacher after a last-minute room change, “…problem number one, [was] finding that my room didn’t have Flash” (Teacher no. 17)

Finally, picking a class with which to pilot the first few ‘real’ LAMS sessions can help to build confidence with using LAMS in the classroom, whether a class is picked for its general amenability to new teaching styles or experimentation, or, as with this teacher,

“I deliberately piloted it with my Year 12 because I have never taken that class in an ICT room before, and I felt, this is a new system that I wanted to be confident with so I want to make sure there is no behavioural management issues.” (Teacher no. 20)

Giving careful consideration to each of these issues when moving from creating sequences to their first delivery was consistently indicated as contributing to the confidence of staff in using LAMS.

9.2 Introducing LAMS to studentsA picture emerged from observations and interviews of effective ways of introducing LAMS to students. It was apparent that where students had had prior instruction in what LAMS was, how to negotiate some key activities such as chat and what standards of behaviour were expected (‘netiquette’ and the presence of monitoring) then these particular sessions were focussed on the tasks rather than the processes of LAMS activity and so this area of potential disruption was avoided.

A major benefit of LAMS is that students, generally, find LAMS very easy to use, and that once logged-in they can start using a sequence without much trouble. However, whilst this is true of high-level interactions (such as navigating through a sequence, knowing the minimum necessary to click through an activity) meaningful engagement with a complex activity (such



as Chat or Forum) requires clear guidance and purpose and this may include an element of coaching, “Go through a training session with them, with your students, so that they get used to the format of it before they actually try and access actual lessons.” (Teacher no. 19)

It should be added that if a teacher is unsure of how a particular complex activity should best be deployed in a session and relies on students to understand what to do and how to behave, then a certain degree of jeopardy is built into the session and their uncertainties and fears might well be borne out. In an unregulated chat session, for example, with no guidance or an explicit set of behavioural rules, the results can be chaotic.

In some cases, depending on the age and ability of classes, staff found that introducing and explaining LAMS activities sequence by sequence allowed the students to become comfortable with the LAMS environment at their own pace and level, “At first…I won’t introduce everything just yet. We will make sure they know something before they use it. So everyone likes it and everyone is happy.” (Teacher no. 13)

For a younger or lower achieving class, more complex LAMS activities might, with advantage, be introduced on a stepped basis. For example, one history teacher with a lower achieving class explained that the first LAMS sessions had been very simple, with the activity interactions being Question and Answer and Multiple Choice. Once happy with those, she had moved onto more complicated interactions such as accessing the Internet, in subsequent sessions. The same history teacher also described how the school was establishing a routine for the way it wanted pupils to behave in a LAMS session, from finding passwords and logging in, to integrating other materials with the session, to the demands of each type of activity, “The routine of having the photocopy, and having the written resource, and logging straight in is now embedded so they’ll have to get into the routine of using perhaps a web link, and then after that perhaps a chat forum. We’ll just build it up slowly with them.” (Teacher no. 5)

Finally, part of the training of students should include an explanation of the monitor function and the fact that activities such as chat are not unregulated as they might be in other contexts, “Train them up on it…make sure they know you’re watching. There’s nothing better than being able to go on the monitor screen and say, ‘I can see where every one of you are and I can see what you’re doing.” (Teacher no. 19)

9.3 Integrating LAMS with pedagogical intentionsAnother area of practical concern is when to use LAMS, what modes of use are possible in a lesson and what the timing implications are. Whilst often these questions find subject-specific answers, there are some generally applicable starting-points that can inform initial thinking and are observable as emergent practice across subjects.



The mode of use of LAMS in a session is a fundamental issue to consider for staff building their LAMS confidence and expertise. Staff who have delivered several sessions and experimented with when and for what they use LAMS, report that they can use LAMS with some flexibility, “You can use it half the lesson, part of the lesson, introduction, plenary, I don’t find it a problem at all.” (Teacher no. 11)

Thus on first encountering LAMS, it can be natural to think that if LAMS is used for a lesson then that entire session must be LAMS-based. Thinking in this way will restrict the range of possibilities described by experienced LAMS practitioners. “Initially, when we got LAMS, people weren’t too sure of how it would work. They thought ‘Oh this…the whole lesson is LAMS’ and if you noticed it isn’t, the whole lesson isn’t LAMS now, it’s just a tool, it’s part of a lesson, an activity…[teachers A&B’s] lessons weren’t purely LAMS…[Teacher A]’s it was just the introduction to the lesson…in [Teacher B]’s it was the evaluation.” (Teacher no. 18)

LAMS can be used for component parts of lessons as much as a whole session and some of the most effective uses of LAMS by teachers observed by the review team offered the students a mix during the lesson, “…I’ve tried to incorporate the new technology of LAMS but also traditional teaching techniques, getting everyone back around the tables, going through what people have put down, developing the next point and letting them back on” (Teacher no. 19)

Experienced LAMS practitioners advise others to think carefully about when and what might be the most suitable and rewarding use of LAMS for one’s own teaching and subject area and to approach this thinking with flexibility, “I think the main thing is not to just do LAMS, but to look at which lessons could be improved by using LAMS. You don’t have to be in the IT room all the time. You can use your LAMS things and then you can go back to the classroom with the results.” (Management Personnel no. 3)

This flexibility in thinking can also be applied during the running of LAMS sequences in a lesson and it is important not to feel locked in to a sequence so that every activity must be followed doggedly, and instead be prepared to miss out some LAMS activities in a sequence. Sometimes this is related to timing issues. LAMS being a new tool means there will be some necessary experimentation with how long activities take for the students to complete satisfactorily, and things may take more or less time than expected, “Try and think about how the activities that you have will work time-related, and don’t be afraid to say just because you’ve got these sequences, or activities, you’re going to be able to do every one of them…The first few times you might get it horribly wrong.” (Teacher no. 19)

Again, the message is that LAMS is a flexible teaching tool, not an inviolable content sequence that must be delivered in a predetermined and mechanical manner.



The frequency of using LAMS as a part of habitual teaching practice is also an issue that teachers are keen to describe. Frequency of LAMS use is as much a matter of individual choice as of the demands of any subject-specific curriculum. The review team encountered a range of deployments, from LAMS being used at the end of every half term: “You don’t use LAMS every lesson…LAMS is a tool…I use it, for example, to conclude schemes of work…to round up in a multimedia sense everything that we’ve studied here in the classroom”, (Teacher no 10) to LAMS being a weekly session building on work done in the classroom earlier in the week.

9.4 Classroom management support function of LAMSAnother highly-valued aspect of LAMS was identified in the impact it can have on classroom management. In part this is due to the fact that LAMS harnesses some of the motivational aspects currently inherent in ICT and channels these energies into meaningful activities, particularly for non-ICT subjects. Partly it is because LAMS allows teachers to tailor activities to precisely the level and needs of their student groups but it is also because of the class management capabilities that the teacher is given by the monitor function. The following two sections explore firstly those aspects of the monitoring function that teachers report as most useful and some of the emerging strategies deployed in classrooms for the most effective utilisation of this function, and secondly, how LAMS was reported as being used to contribute to the management of classroom behaviour.

9.4.1 Using the monitoring functions

In none of the LAMS sessions observed by the review team was the full functionality of the monitor role exploited, although awareness of its potential was frequently reported by interviewees, and individual aspects of monitoring were utilised extremely effectively. This may suggest both that utilising the monitoring facility belongs to a higher (likely to be later-acquired) set of LAMS skills and also that different teaching styles currently determine only certain functionalities as useful to immediate needs. It also suggests that different applications of LAMS require only a limited use of the monitoring role. Some sessions observed were run without the teacher using the monitoring function as at their early stage in LAMS adoption, they preferred to ‘patrol’ classes and see what was being written over the shoulder of students and engage with difficulties and problems as they found them. Teachers who had delivered several sessions were very keen on being able to monitor student progress from their own machine and thus target more effectively such problems, “Yes, the monitor functions are partly the more successful sides of [LAMS]…you can see who is racing ahead, and clearly it doesn’t always mean that they are answering in depth…you can also pick up the strugglers in the monitor function. You can say, either 'Move on now, don’t worry too much. Press finish and go to the next piece.' Whereas normally, you wouldn’t see who was doing that.” (Teacher no. 21)



Quite often, if a teacher was using the monitoring function and there was an interactive whiteboard in the room, they would use it to display the monitoring screen so that pupils could see that their progress was being followed and that the teacher could examine the detail of their answers. Pupils in the relevant focus groups reported that they were aware of this ‘power’ of the teacher and showed appreciation that it had positive aspects as well, namely that if they were struggling, then the teacher would come and find them without them having to put their hand up and draw the attention of the rest of the class to their problems.

Teachers reported that they felt the dynamic of the teaching room, the relationship between teacher and students, was positively altered when they used the monitoring facility in a session. As they would have set up each activity, they knew what exactly should be seen on each screen. They would be secure with the sequence content, purpose and structure. When that security is coupled with monitoring of progress and individual responses, then that teacher feels some of the burdens of managing an ICT classroom are relieved (who is doing what? what progress are they making? what is the quality of their answers?) and they can enjoy a greater freedom to focus on teaching, “The way the management is taken off you …it’s very clearly stated who’s where, who’s doing what, who’s typing what, so in terms of discipline, you’ve got instant backup. And that’s what you need…the backup…that give[s] you the freedom to go round everybody and focus specifically on the technical information of the lesson rather than behaviour.” (Teacher no. 11)

9.4.2 Behaviour management

Another interesting review finding is that some staff report improvements are possible in classroom management of student behaviour both as a result of the structured nature of LAMS and the effective use of monitoring functions. This covers matters such as dealing with low-level disruption to lessons, ensuring that students are on task and engaging meaningfully with the materials and sometimes getting work done that might not always get done in the non-ICT classroom, particularly written work, as this history teacher explained, concerning a lower attaining class, “They tend to get very loud when they’re in a classroom and they’re asked to do a lot of writing” (Teacher no. 5) and that in the observed LAMS session the class had been quiet, focussed and completed a writing exercise. The predisposition of most students to engage with ICT materials partly underlies this change in behaviour. The visible LAMS monitor screen at the front of the class can also contribute quite powerfully, “The sheer presence of a computer monitor in front of you is quite a pacifying experience, I find, because from a behaviour management point of view…I don’t have to do eye contact with all these kids to get them to behave, it’s now…been taken over by the role of the monitor…” (Teacher no. 10)



9.4.3 LAMS encourages new ways of teaching

Teacher interviews reported various benefits which LAMS brought to their teaching practice. The natural question that arose was whether LAMS was inspiring new ways of teaching, or whether these benefits could have been experienced with no exposure to LAMS. One teacher tentatively reflected that, using LAMS once a month on average, she thought LAMS did not transform her overall teaching but, “has shown me a different way of doing reinforcement sessions…” (Teacher no. 2)

What was also telling was what teachers did not say during the interviews: they did not mention any other e-learning products that would have competed with what LAMS was trying to do. (The uniqueness of LAMS is further explored in Section 12.) One teacher thought that he could provide web links and other resources without LAMS, but what LAMS added was involvement of all pupils in responding to questions, and the capability for him to monitor their progress.

Other teachers appreciated that LAMS would operate as part of their teaching repertoire rather than replacing all their teaching tools. They saw the potential of LAMS in particular curriculum areas. In this case the important process is the selection of the topic, i.e. choosing LAMS for lessons in which it would really enhance their teaching. This use was more about enhancement and integration within normal teaching practice. As one manager observed:

“You don’t have to be in the IT room all the time. You can use your LAMS things and then you can go back to the classroom with the results.” (Management Personnel no. 3)

For other teachers, LAMS did offer the possibility of different ways of teaching, whether it was to do with the subject area, ICT skills integration or behaviour management:

“But I try now to make the emphasis much, much more on their work …because if you give them a blank canvas first, they think that the presentation side of things counts more than the actual content.” (Teacher no. 1)

“Definitely, yes. I didn’t have to shout. I didn’t have to discipline anybody. The kids were focussed. My time was solely spent on helping the children to understand. ... whereas in normal classroom you are constantly trying to manage the behaviour or the talking levels…there was none of that.” (Teacher no. 11)

Evidence of the potential of LAMS to modify or transform the teaching/learning interaction was also indicated. More than one teacher commented on LAMS promoting a more collaborative learning atmosphere which was replacing the ‘chalk-and-talk’ type of delivery:

“Yeah, it’s something for the future definitely, working away from the teacher working at the front and learning from each other. I am trying to do that a lot with them.” (Teacher no. 2)



LAMS acted as a catalyst for change within certain school practices. One school piloted LAMS within a local network of schools, looking at innovations, and found that through using LAMS, they picked up new ideas for their teaching practice and developed new ideas in tandem:

“And planning it between the two schools kind of pulled in loads of different resources, and it gave us a different way of thinking, because you don’t necessarily appreciate ideas that are successful in another school, you might not have thought of them here, so we picked up lots of ideas from each other, so it’s been very useful.” (Teacher no. 1)

Another example showed that the online work with LAMS stimulated other ideas, such as not only having teachers from different schools working together, but having children offering instruction and support to their peers and communicating with other children through LAMS:

“.. leading learners … could be student teachers, but they could be students as well. They could be year 11 students working in a forum with year 7 students.” (Management Personnel no. 3)

9.5 Using LAMS for subject teaching: Case studies This section describes the pedagogical practice surrounding LAMS use in the individual subject areas. Due to the relatively small scale of LAMS activity available to the review team, the sample was purposively selected, based on the available LAMS practice at the time and schools which were ready to be visited by researchers. The case studies cover a range of subjects, year groups (year 7 to year 12) and student achievement levels.6 Table 26 shows the foci of the observed lessons with regards to their LAMS use grouped by subject areas. It can be seen that although sequences were subject-specific, there was also considerable common ground in terms of pedagogy.

6 Year 7 = 11-12 year olds and Year 12= 17-18 year old students.



Table 26 Range of LAMS uses

Humanities including GeographyVisit Subject Year Key LAMS lesson focus03 History 9 Developing confidence in historical research – using Internet sources to

learn about D-day in World War II.05 History 7 Revising the bubonic plague using multimedia and discussions.10 History 7 Developing analytical historians and decision makers – using a forum to

discuss how Elizabeth I resolved problems of her reign and voting to decide whether Elizabeth I should execute Mary, Queen of Scots.

11 Politics 12 Doing independent research – getting to know Internet resources on the US presidential election 2004 to be used at AS2 level for US Politics.

01 Geography 9 Integrating ICT within geography: promoting self-directed discoveries – comparing countries using different web resources.

13 Religious Education

9 Challenging beliefs – using the forum to share ideas about what beliefs we have and where our beliefs come from.

02 Modern Foreign Languages

9 Revising French language – directions and grammar using question and answer and existing language resources, Other options for using LAMS for MFL included using forum/chat and resources for acquiring cultural skills.

12 English 9 Opportunities for instant and individualised formative assessment – eliciting students’ ideas on literary texts.

Science, Maths and ICT07 Science 11 Promoting confidence of hearing impaired students – using LAMS with

visual resources for revision.08 Science 9 Evaluating a scientific experiment – guided self- and peer-assessment

of team contributions in the hydrogen fuel mixture rocket project.14 Science 11 Ethical issues in science – experimenting with a range of strategies to

achieve lesson objectives (using chat, multiple choice and Internet research and presentation)

06 Maths 9 Decision making using Maths – analysing theme park statistics04 ICT - Applying knowledge to a real life situation – discussing and

demonstrating the safe setting-up of a PC for a night club.09 ICT 8 Cover ICT lesson – guided website evaluation.15 Business 12 Seeing different perspectives, sharing ideas and learning to support

arguments – the purpose and uses of balance sheets as a management tool.

Of the fifteen practitioner visits, seven are discussed below in more detail: five Humanities, one Science and one Maths session. Each observed lesson is grouped under a subject area including the rationale for using LAMS, the aims and objectives of the lesson, the pupil characteristics, summary of the LAMS sequence and the pedagogical fit of using LAMS for the given subject as seen from the teacher’s point of view. The quotes used in each case study are from the teachers whose classroom session was observed unless otherwise noted. Where possible, a snapshot of the LAMS sequence has been included.



9.5.1 Using LAMS for teaching History: developing confidence in historical research

Rationale for using LAMS The teacher in this lesson was not a history specialist and was delivering a cover

session. She was looking for something well-structured for her low attaining group so it, “seemed the next logical step to give LAMS a go”. LAMS helped her focus on the lesson.

LAMS’ step-by-step structure allowed the teacher to develop more advanced skills in history for low attaining groups, such as interrogating and analysing online and offline evidence, making connections between causes and events relating to D-day.

Aims and ObjectivesTo learn what happened on D-day and how it helped win the Second World War.

Pupil characteristicsLower set (4 out of 5) year 9 pupils at an inner city mixed-sex comprehensive (Birmingham) with a high proportion of pupils for whom English was not their first language.

The LAMS sequenceThe LAMS sequence contained a number of short activities. Activities combined interrogation of online as well as offline resources. For instance, students had to find out from a web resource what D-day stood for then share it with their group using a Question and Answer task, or they had to find answers to a question using handouts from the text book, e.g. who the Allies were by 1942.

Short Multiple Choice questions and the Notebook exercise checked pupils' understanding of the resources read.


Hard copy materials were used alongside LAMS.


At the end of the lesson, students were asked to complete a task sheet in writing, summarising what they had found out during their online research.

LAMS pedagogical fit

The teacher was able to balance collaborative classroom work on Tuesdays and individual computer work using LAMS on Thursdays, with the LAMS session being a continuation or a round-up of the previous classroom session.

Through the LAMS activities, students engaged in independent historical research. They, “have got to look at sources, they’ve got to extract information from the sources, decide how valuable that information is, and … they’re doing that in front of the computer…”

The LAMS session offered a structure, leading students step-by-step through the lesson activities. They conducted historical research, looked at information resources, located relevant information and summarised the evidence, “What they’re doing is actually, I suppose, it’s quite complex. They’re reading a question over on the computer screen. They’ve got to find their answer on a piece of paper, so they’ve got to read through everything, and they’ve got to take that and type it back up so picking it apart that’s quite a complex skill for a lower ability year 9 group.”

The teacher found that this group responded better to writing tasks when in the computer room, “I think they’ve just got this ‘Oh, we’re writing in a classroom therefore we must be learning’; ‘Oh, we’re writing in a computer room, it must be fun.’” Students were more motivated working on LAMS than in classroom sessions.

Typing on the computer was also a confidence booster for students, some of whom had low literacy levels or English as a second language. Students also typed faster than when handwriting so produced more work.


Teachers could support pupils remotely and directly.


LAMS also offered a time-saver in the form of the Share Resources activity: students did not need to type in the URL of the resource, sites were just, “one click away”, pre-selected by the teacher.



9.5.2 Using LAMS for teaching History: revising using multimedia and discussions

Rationale for using LAMS LAMS provides good opportunities for revision supported by a sequence of activities that contains multimedia resources and collaborative activities (e.g. chat) used to consolidate historical knowledge.Aims and objectives To revise what was learnt about the bubonic plague. To prepare a PowerPoint presentation for the public to recognise the symptoms of the

bubonic plague.

Pupil characteristics Year 7 mixed-ability pupils in an all boys’ Technology College in Bromley.

Sequence descriptionStudents were asked to look at various resources, including images portraying people suffering from bubonic plague. Pupils created PowerPoint presentations in which they had to inform the public of how to recognise the symptoms of the bubonic plague, searching independently for images on the web. Although this particular sequence did not contain a Chat activity, Chat is an activity frequently used by this History teacher to promote discussion for revision purposes.

LAMS Pedagogical fit The teacher of History uses LAMS for concluding schemes of work every half term. Prior

to the observed session, students were learning about life in the Middle Ages and the causes and symptoms of the bubonic plague.

The LAMS session reinforced students’ knowledge by using visual resources depicting people infected by the bubonic plague. The session fitted the statutory ICT requirements for Key Stage 3 historical enquiry in that students used a range of appropriate sources of information including artefacts, pictures and photographs as a basis for independent historical enquiries. The teacher found that visual reinforcement was effective with this group of students.

Following the guided resource discovery, students had to use the Internet to search and locate images for a poster, which was to call the attention of the public to the symptoms of the plague. This LAMS activity promoted students’ skills in presenting and communicating ideas in different formats.

With LAMS, existing resources were easily incorporated into the lesson. LAMS is like a, “coat hanger…the master structure programme and from that you can link onto it all sorts of other little things…for example in my bubonic plague LAMS session there I had linked it to a website that runs little animations on how you actually get pneumonic and bubonic plague”.



Using a chat activity at the end of a LAMS lesson helped consolidate pupils’ knowledge through interactions. For instance, children learning about Richard III putting the princes in the tower have, “obviously got to find what the reasons for it was, the reason why he did that. What were his real intentions? What kind of a guy was Richard III? That sort of thing. And the kids kind of pull in all this evidence, all the things that they’ve learnt for the last couple of lessons into this one chat room, and they can start hammering out opinions, and it really gets quite animated and enthusiastic.”

The model of LAMS being, “1 on 1 instead of 1 on 30”, that is, 1 pupil working in front of a monitor, instead of 1 teacher talking to 30 pupils, helps the teacher to manage classroom behaviour effectively. This is especially relevant to history which is about, “interactions between people, events, and situations of the past”, and so classroom communication is important for learning. With the chat activity being online classroom noise can be kept to the minimum, the teacher can monitor the online discussions, “and I don’t have to break them up, it’s all in cyberspace.”

The teacher found that LAMS and working on the computer enhanced the engagement of boys; pupils contributed more to the lesson than in normal lessons.

9.5.3 Using LAMS for teaching History: Developing analytical historians and decision-makers

Rationale for using LAMSLAMS offers a range of tools that allow the teacher to foster the development of analytical historians as well as good decision makers.

Aims and objectivesTo discuss whether Elizabeth I successfully solved the problems that beset her during her reign.



The LAMS sequence1. Share resources: students complete an online lesson that highlights the religious turmoil in Tudor times represented by a rollercoaster using an interactive Flash animation.

2. Q&A: Students read a page of the text book and imagine that they are a member of the Privy Council. They need to write a response telling Elizabeth I what to do regarding any marriage to Philip II of Spain, including their reasoning. Students’ responses are then shared with the whole class online.3. Forum: students are asked to contribute to one or more threads of the forum:

a) Did Elizabeth’s actions work? Elizabeth’s response of keeping the peace could be said to have worked yet religious terrorism continued. Therefore can she be judged to have succeeded or failed?

b) The impact of Bloody Mary – Mary caused a great deal of problems to Elizabeth. If you read pages 58 to 59, you can see the reasons why but is it really Mary’s fault or is she just someone pinned with the title and the blame for the religious problems of England?

c) A country cannot be safe until there are two countries – William Cecil. What do you think William Cecil meant by this statement? “Those who differ in their service of God, can never agree in the service of their country.” Was he right or was he stirring up more religious hatred?

4. Survey: based on a text book question, students vote whether Elizabeth should execute Mary, Queen of Scots or not.


LAMS was used to complement more traditional text book methods.


5. Notebook: students are asked, as an optional activity, to record their reasons in choosing their answer in the survey.

Before each LAMS activity, the teacher assembled the students in a horseshoe shape in the middle of the classroom, away from the computers, to summarise the previous task and introduce the next activity and what was expected of students and how the LAMS activity would work:

“I’ve tried to incorporate the new technology of LAMS but also traditional teaching techniques, getting everyone back around the tables, going through what people have put down, developing the next point and letting them back on. I think if it was totally isolation, in the computers and away, some students would still struggle with it…” (Teacher no. 19)


Although working individually, pupils were aware of the teacher's presence and the Monitor overview on the interactive whiteboard.


LAMS Pedagogical fit The teacher had already used the interactive online resource on the religious turmoil of

the Tudor period. The resource was easily and efficiently reused by linking it within the LAMS sequence. The drag-oriented nature of the resource (students dragging a rollercoaster along its up-and-down path to reveal the Protestant-Catholic shifts) complemented the click-oriented nature of LAMS and suited those with an appreciation of a visual or action-focused learning style.

Students were asked to formulate arguments and reasoning to historical questions and learn from one another’s responses. Pupils' answers to the question, ‘Should Elizabeth I marry Philip II of Spain?' are shown in Figure 6. The quality of responses ranged from a simple “don’t marry” to more advanced arguments that highlight and connect historical events and actions in Elizabeth’s reign.

Figure 6 Pupil responses to “Should Elizabeth I marry Philip II of Spain?” (Year 7 History lesson)


LAMS activity was often blended with traditional class discussions.


Online forums seem to offer a productive mode to support the development of analytical historians. Students may be more likely to argue a point online than in the face-to-face in the classroom. The teacher found that it was easier for students to say that someone else’s opinion was wrong to the computer than in face-to-face discussions:“With History being an analytical subject, it’s good to get argument, discussion…The students are getting involved with that. Nine times out of ten, if I was to get thirty students in a classroom and ask them to argue a point, they couldn’t…it would take a great deal of coaching to get them to realise, yes, you can have a full-blown argument with somebody in the classroom regarding history. But because we are talking about an environment where they’re responding to each other but within the confines of a computer, they’re happy as Larry to argue over things, and I can see these students developing these skills and really being able to become much more analytical historians by the end of Key Stage 3.”

The teacher made online contributions to the forum, eliciting and guiding students in their responses and this guidance remained there for others to see. Figure 7 below demonstrates how such a forum was used to discuss the impact of Bloody Mary. Each student’s response is represented by a colour; the teacher’s comment is signalled with red. The forum was used for discussion in this case as it allowed a much more directed use and greater teacher control than the chat. Forum contributions were also picked up by the teacher in subsequent discussions, sustaining dialogue and continuing with building pupil confidence e.g. by valuing individual contributions, “That’s a nice point”.

Figure 8 Historical arguments: using a forum activity (Year 7 History lesson)*



*teacher’s comments marked by red rectangle, the rest are student contributions

LAMS offered tools to enable students to acquire skills in decision making on the basis of historical evidence. In this case, the Survey activity was used and students were asked whether Elizabeth I should execute Mary, Queen of Scots. The even-split result (in this case) was displayed by the teacher on the whiteboard. The teacher was impressed that ten people chose NOT to execute Mary even though historically it happened, they saw that there was no evidence. The teacher liked to use the voting and survey tools for teaching history, “because it enables historians to become critical decision-makers. For these students, if all they do is write down the narrative and don’t explain what the most interesting point was, or the most important point, they don’t really get to score high levels; high levels where you can explain every point and make a critical decision at the end.”

9.5.4 Similarities and differences in LAMS use in the 3 History case studies

The three case studies described above show three different approaches that worked well with the observed student groups. The table below summarises similarities and differences in the approaches.

Table 27 Using LAMS to teach History: similarities and differences of the three observed sessions

Case study1 2 3

Year Group Year 9 – low attaining Year 7 - mixed Year 7 - mixed

Key lesson focus of the observed session

To enhance confidence in individual research work in history.

To revise evidence and communicate historical arguments to peers.

To develop analytical skills using a forum and supporting decision-making skills.

Frequency and role of LAMS in curriculum

Once a week, complementing classroom session.

Once a month, consolidating and revising current topic.

Some regularity e.g. once every two weeks.

LAMS integration in lesson

Work on PCs combined with offline resources e.g. handouts and worksheets.

Work on PCs, including PowerPoint presentation.

Repeats of two-stepped cycles:a) work on PC with some students having laptops, then b) summary in a plenary discussion away from PCs.Offline resources used within the session (e.g. text book).

Rationale for using LAMS includes behaviour

Yes Yes



management?Rationale for using LAMS includes increase in pupil engagement?

Yes

On-line and off-line teacher support and contribution.

Offline – teacher walks around to help.

Offline – teacher present at whiteboard and walks around. Online – teacher contributes to chat.

Offline – teacher summarises at whiteboard and leads class discussions in between LAMS activities. Online – teacher adds forum entries online.

9.5.5 Using LAMS for teaching Politics: doing independent research

Rationale for using LAMS The teacher wanted to increase opportunities for students to carry out independent Internet research but in a directed, controlled manner. LAMS also offered a structure for a politics lesson using ICT:

“I can’t imagine how better to structure an ICT lesson. I don’t know any other way. I have never been taught, ‘This is how you teach history in an ICT room.’ So, to me, [LAMS] makes sense because it is well structured.”

Aims and ObjectivesTo introduce the key Internet resources that will be used during an A2 course on US Politics.

Pupil characteristicsHigh achieving Year 12 students from an all-girls school in Beckenham. It was felt by the teacher that this group was suitable for trialling LAMS as they respond maturely to the teacher trying out new approaches and would offer constructive criticism.

The LAMS sequenceThe sequence started off with a voting exercise, students deciding which resources they found most useful to research UK politics. The majority of the LAMS lesson was spent with directed research set by the teacher. The five resources included the websites of CNN, The Sunday Times, The White House, tutor2u, and the US Census Bureau. Students reported their findings and evaluated the resources using a forum. A knowledge quiz assessed how much students had learnt about the 2004 US election from the sites. The last question asked students to vote for the resource they were likely to use again.

LAMS Pedagogical fit Having learnt about the different types of resources available on UK politics, students

were exposed to sources on current US politics which they were asked to explore,



evaluate and compare. Using LAMS, students were increasing their ability to carry out research independently and learning how to manage their time on the sequence of activities. The teacher was assured that the direction built within the activities provided sufficient structure for students to work with: “The thing about LAMS that I like [that] with the step-by-step instructions when you go into a website, you can say: ‘Go to this bit, go to this bit and now look at this bit, what do you think?’ So you can really direct [students’] use of the Internet quite extensively.” (See Figure 9.)

LAMS provided opportunities for assessing learning. With the Knowledge Test, both the teacher and the students were able to check how much was learnt during the discovery activity on the US elections: “it’s useful [that] you can assess what they have learnt by looking how they did in the multiple choice quiz.”

Given that students were working independently on the computer, the monitor function of LAMS provided the teacher with the ability to view students’ progress, both whole-class and at an individual level. The classroom session was therefore effectively managed. Students were moved on to the next activity when necessary, depending on timing and the lesson objectives.

Figure 9 'Share Resources' activity: directed research of US politics resources

Online discussions encouraged the whole class to contribute to the lesson and not just the, “more dominant, outgoing members of the class”. This was a particularly important benefit of LAMS given the, “discussion-based nature of the subject”. The teacher found that LAMS enabled certain types of students to do better, especially those who tend not to take part in class discussion or those who have particularly good ICT skills.


Step-by-step instruction built in the activity by the teacher


LAMS enabled the teacher to build a professional-looking lesson on the computer without advanced ICT skills. “I am not any ICT whiz-kid…I am purely manipulating a system which already exists and I [can] do so much more than I could do independently because of the system.” It was a confidence booster for the teacher to hear that students did not realise that the lesson was designed by the teacher. The teacher proudly commented that one student revealed in her evaluation that she, “didn’t realise that I created the lesson and this system existed and her teacher had gone on and manipulated it to do what she wanted it to do.”

Using LAMS, teachers are empowered to create effective subject lessons using ICT. One pupil who was normally dominating and chatty in normal classroom sessions completed the LAMS sequence with great focus and said, “Miss, this is the best lesson I have ever had in an ICT room!”

9.5.6 Using LAMS for teaching English: opportunities for instant and individualised formative assessment

Rationale for using LAMS The capability to observe students’ progress and contributions via the LAMS monitor function allows teachers to use formative assessment when it comes to literary knowledge and eliciting students’ ideas which can then be used to tailor the lesson effectively to match students’ achievements and further needs.Aims and ObjectivesTo read The Happy Prince short story by Oscar Wilde, answer some questions related to the story, discuss the idea of morality and evaluate the use of LAMS for the lesson. The curriculum context was short stories and genre conventions.

Pupil characteristicsYear 9 pupils at an all-girls’ school in Beckenham, Bromley.

The LAMS sequence After reading the lesson objectives, students were asked which of the two genres, romance and horror, they would choose as a text to read, and to justify or explain this choice. The next activity introduced Oscar Wilde in the form of a multiple choice question. The Share Resources activity linked the Oscar Wilde short story so that students were able to read through it online step-by-step with questions defined by the teacher during the authoring time. Figure 10 shows Step 3 in which students needed to find the answer to the question as to why the swallow landed on the prince. The next activity asked students to vote on the moral of the story, either choosing from the pre-selected answers or generating and typing in their own. The final Survey activity asked students to evaluate their use of LAMS for the lesson.



Figure 10 Directed reading with LAMS

LAMS Pedagogical fit LAMS and exploration with sharing ideas. LAMS enabled students to discuss literature

e.g. a poem in a way that each student contributes individually but they also get to share one another’s ideas through the Question and Answer activity. “I would like to go in there and do some more poetry appreciation. There is a lot of scope for that [in English] because it’s an interpretative, exploratory subject. And I think [students] could really help each other with that. I think I could really get them to ... do some critical analysis, share it with each other and then move on … to perhaps look at other people’s interpretations about the poem, see how it’s added to their interpretation so you can scaffold it that way … which sometimes you can’t get in a mixed ability lesson.”

The teacher found that, in traditional lessons, students found it difficult to focus on the interpretation of a poem but, “unless they make their own interpretations, they never quite feel that they have ownership of it.” The way LAMS helps is by making sure each student gives their own contribution so they feel committed to their own ideas.

LAMS, “gave you some excellent opportunity” to carry out some formative assessment. The teacher was able to ask an opening question at the start of the class and from the answers she, “can immediately find out, rather than by a show of hands what they actually bring to the session.” She was consequently able to build on what students did and did not know and responses were also shared by the whole class. In the above sequence, students had to give reasons for why they liked a certain genre in preference to another one so the teacher was able to glean how much they knew about the genres.

The use of formative assessment was not just limited to the Question and Answer activity but extended beyond it to include a whole range of LAMS activities, such as Voting and Multiple Choice tests.



Using the monitoring function, the teacher was able to observe students’ progress, who was “racing ahead” or who was struggling. The teacher would not normally spot these students because physically walking round the class room is “actually hard work”. Furthermore, the advantage of LAMS was that strugglers could be picked up anonymously by the teacher, whilst in normal classrooms, “the struggler doesn’t want to say, excuse me, I am the struggler. Some will but very few will say, ‘I need one to one help’ because it points them out, it shows them up”.

The Monitoring function in LAMS gave the teacher a continuous way of assessing not just students’ progress within a sequence but the contributions they were making to the lesson, e.g. who was “not answering in depth”. This identified any students who, “might need more help. So as soon as you know that there is somebody needs more help… you can help raise their attainment by tailoring the lesson or the outcome. And once you have seen the outcome, you can tailor the lesson to suit the next outcome.” So the monitoring facility was linked to formative assessment and in turn, raising attainment. This point was confirmed by another teacher, “Any technology providing formative feedback is proven that it’ll impact positively on achievement” (Teacher no. 4)

Bringing LAMS responses back to the classroom. Students’ LAMS responses on the texts they were reading could be looked at again post the LAMS lesson, “I don’t see why you can’t print off some of those things, take them back to the lesson in the normal classroom environment, and discuss some of those aspects that were brought up in the LAMS session. I think there is lots of scope to be had there, especially in English.”

For the teaching of grammar and language, existing resources such as GCSE BiteSize, could be linked to easily from within LAMS sequences.

Global sharing of good practice. Teachers of English could save time by having access to sequences put in the public area of LAMS which they can quickly tailor to their needs rather than redesigning a whole lesson, “If you wanted to teach an English lesson, you could actually have a look what’s in the public sphere. … And see if there is anything that might be suitable for my lesson. … and perhaps not spend two hours designing it but spend half an hour changing it to my needs.”

9.5.7 Using LAMS for teaching Science: evaluating a scientific experiment

Rationale for using LAMS Students generally find evaluations to be difficult. The structured LAMS sequence was used to guide them through the steps of the evaluation process so that students could come up with their own evaluations which they were then able to compare with those offered by their peers. LAMS helps them reflect and self-assess their strategies, ideas and results.

Aims and ObjectivesTo evaluate students’ own contributions to the team experiment with researching, preparing and launching a hydrogen fuel mix rocket.



Pupil characteristicsYear 9 – top set class at a Technology College in Oldham.

The LAMS sequenceThe session was team-taught between a teacher of science and the Gifted and Talented co-ordinator. Figure 11 shows the sequence in the authoring mode. The stop signs show synchronisation points which were managed by the teacher, i.e. students were not able to progress to the next activity until the teacher released the stop.

Figure 11 Evaluation of an experiment: the LAMS sequence (Year 9)

The sequence started with five voting questions, students were asked to select methods they used for steps of their experiment from a list of options i.e.:1) all the methods used to gather the information to start the task; 2) the main method used to gather the information to start the task; 3) the best method for gathering information; 4) the method that should have been used more to gather information you needed to start the task (see Figure 12 for results); 5) the method students would use the most with the next project.



Figure 12 Question 4: Result of the voting task - the method that pupils thought should have been used more to gather information at the start of the experiment

After all students had completed the five-step review of their information gathering process, they were asked to list five things they did to help their team to complete the project. Once students submitted their answers they were able to see one another’s replies. The next activity asked them to identify the best contribution they made out of the five things they had chosen and explain why it was the best (see Figure 13 for sample responses to this Q&A activity). Then students were asked to reflect on how they could have improved one of their contributions. The final LAMS activity asked them to judge whether they found the best hydrogen fuel mixture to launch their team’s rocket using a voting exercise.

Figure 13 Students’ responses to the Question and Answer activity on what their best contribution was in the rocket experiment group work*

* student’s name obscured

The session closed with the students summarising their findings in a Word document to share with each other.



LAMS Pedagogical fit The Science department was introducing a new type of 'thinking skills' learning to the

class involving independent, autonomous learning with lots of social interactions between students trading and sharing ideas. The students worked in teams, researched, planned and launched their rockets at the previous lesson. In the course of the LAMS session students were asked to evaluate their contributions to the rocket project.

The teachers, knowing that students often find evaluations difficult to complete and that, “it’s very difficult to get round a largish class and give them all the guidance that they need”, decided to use a LAMS sequence for the evaluation part of the project. The advantage of LAMS was that it led students through the evaluation step-by-step and this structure gave them the guidance they needed. “Because it took them through slowly and gradually, and you as a teacher didn’t have to be with that individual pupil to do that, you could literally do the whole class in one go.” (Teacher no. 14)

The result of the LAMS approach was that the teacher was surprised, “that it wasn’t the usual ‘Yes, I did it well.’ Or ‘No, I couldn’t improve it any more.’ [Students] were actually coming up with the full explanations, they were putting in more detail, they were going further than making it a closed answer and they were actually trying to express themselves.” (Teacher no. 15) LAMS not only allowed students to improve the quality of their contributions but, “the number of kids that actually managed to get valued work by the end of the lesson was nearly 90-odd per cent of the class.” LAMS was effective in that the result was achieved in one lesson; the teacher added that, “normally, it would have taken 3-4 lessons possibly to have got the same value of work for that number of kids” (Teacher no. 15) due to not getting round to the whole class to offer individual support.

Peer- and self-assessment – Both the Voting and Question & Answer activities used in the science sequence offered students the opportunity to see other people’s ideas and


Teachers used various styles of interacting with pupils at machines.


compare and share them via the monitor. Students, “could see where they stood with the rest of the class”, their confidence being boosted by seeing that, “my opinions were just as good as other people’s”.

With LAMS, students did not feel 'on the spot' as in normal classrooms when the teacher called them and it was also more suitable for those who found it more difficult to communicate verbally than in writing. “You are trying to draw their information out of them and make them think for themselves a little bit, but it is a form of bullying to some extent. Because they are sitting in a classroom, they want to learn but they feel like they are under pressure. So with LAMS, none of that exists.” (Teacher no. 15)

The use of LAMS can be extended to other areas within a scientific investigation beyond evaluation and self-assessment, e.g. for the initial or middle steps of investigations or for coursework requiring individual work.

Using LAMS for teaching Maths: decision making – analysing theme park statistics

Rationale for using LAMS LAMS structures the lesson perfectly, with the help in the decision phase of the lesson. LAMS focuses all resources in one place, rather than students having to spend time

searching for resources that may be of no use.

Aims and Objectives To develop thinking skills through data analysis. To encourage independent learning and research. To decide upon a solution to the question “What and why is the best theme park to go

to?”

Pupil characteristics


Pupils particularly appreciated being able to view their peers' contributions.


Year 9 lower attaining pupils including some children with special needs, who were supported by classroom assistants or communicators, at a Technology College in Oldham.



The LAMS sequence The LAMS sequence is introduced, after which students play a video on theme parks as

a starting activity. In preparation to decide which might be the best theme park to go and visit, students vote

on what they think is the most important feature of a theme park: a) the price of the tickets, b) how long it will take to get there, c) how many people visit the Theme Park or d) the number of rides. Student can see the result of their votes (as below).

Students then research on five popular theme parks in the UK (Share Resources), using the Notebook to record important information.

Student vote for best theme park out of the five on the basis of information gathered (Voting).

Students are asked to explain what influenced their decision in choosing the best theme park (Question and Answer). (See image below.)



The sequence closes with another video as a fun activity and students are asked to tell the teacher when they have finished the LAMS sequence.



LAMS pedagogical fit LAMS allowed the incorporation of decision mathematics into real life situations using a

sequence of activities, such as voting and share resource, which led students through the decision making process step-by-step, “You could use [LAMS] anywhere, to gather and organise the information.”

LAMS kept students motivated and on task, “I didn’t have to shout, I didn’t have to discipline anybody, the kids were focussed, my time was solely spent on helping the children to understand.”

LAMS helped the teacher structure the lesson, “It gives you the opportunity to provide as you would on a standard lesson plan where you won’t have time to do a normal full lesson plan it provides you with the key elements…of the starter, the introduction, the lesson objectives, main body, then at the end you got the review, in terms of multiple choice or a voting system, or a chat session…It focuses your mind as a teacher.”

The sequence collected all resources that students needed in one place. This reduced the time needed by pupils to search for information as well as helping the teacher to manage the class and concentrate on the learning rather than the behaviour, “they’re on a structured laptop session, they can’t veer off onto a different internet site …You also have the back up of the monitoring…it’s very clearly stated who’s where, who’s doing what, who’s typing what, so in terms of discipline you’ve got instant backup.”



10 Pupils' attitudes to LAMSFocus group interviews were conducted with 67 pupils (37 girls and 30 boys) drawn from Year 7-9 and Year 11-12 (see Section 5.3 for more details on the process of conducting focus groups) to elicit their experiences and attitudes towards LAMS use. In general, pupils’ focus group comments confirmed teachers’ perceptions of the benefits to students. The focus groups were audio-recorded and transcribed; subsequently emergent themes and sub-themes were defined with each comment coded accordingly. This qualitative evidence was analysed for the rate of occurrence of identified sub-themes in order to give a summative, indicative overview of pupils’ attitudes to LAMS. Table 28 presents this overview (single occurrences of sub-themes are not listed).

Table 28 Themes referred to by students in the course of focus group interviews

Occurrence in transcripts42 Exposure to others’ ideas (collaborative learning/sharing ideas/seeing

whole class ideas)39 LAMS interface and usability25 ‘Getting more done’ and ‘learning better’ with LAMS22 LAMS sequence description16 LAMS session as ‘better than classroom’16 LAMS’ ‘fun’ element11 A guided structure to progress with LAMS9 Ability to express opinion in the absence of peer pressure with LAMS8 Independent learning and LAMS8 Instant feedback availability7 General miscellaneous comments7 Extending LAMS use6 Novelty, variety6 Enhancement suggestions6 ICT generally as motivation5 Classroom atmosphere in a LAMS session5 Comparisons with other software3 School/pupil characteristics3 Differentiation and personalization3 Self-paced3 Classroom dynamic no longer pupil versus teacher5 LAMS and active learning2 ‘it's all there'

The theme under which the greatest number of student comments fell was that of ‘Exposure to others ideas’ (42 comments) with groups consistently describing the fact that LAMS enabled the sharing and viewing of whole class ideas. The next most populous category was comments concerning the LAMS interface (39) and its usability, covering a range of opinions. The third highest incidence of comments was categorised under students describing that



they “get more done” in a LAMS session compared to a conventional session in the classroom (25 comments) and that they feel they are working better in some way with LAMS. The next highest number of comments categorised were those which described the LAMS sequence and session (22), evidencing that the LAMS lesson had left a vivid impression in students’ minds or that they remembered well what they had learnt. Similarly, a significant number of comments related to learning with LAMS being “better than the classroom” (16) and being “fun” (16). Students also appreciated that LAMS was guiding them through their learning (11).

The rest of this section picks out some of the more interesting themes from the table above and describes and analyses pupils’ comments in greater detail. Frequent and extensive use of direct quotation is made in this section in an attempt to convey the students' own voices. Where more than one pupil is cited within a quotation, pupils are numbered. (These numbers are not unique identifiers across all the groups but refer only to numbered pupils within each focus group.)

10.1 Exposure to others' ideas(42 comments) The most frequently cited LAMS benefit by students was that of ‘seeing what other people have done’. This means viewing other people’s opinions, answers, voting reactions and so on, and comparing their own responses in the light of these. The Question and Answer and Voting activities were usually the ones referred to by students when talking about the advantages of seeing other people’s ideas.

The pupil quotes below demonstrate various effects of seeing one another’s ideas, including: Capability to compare their own answer with the rest of the group (self-assessment):

“Like when people were voting, a lot of people used text books and my team didn’t. So my team partner said we should use it [textbooks] next time.” (Year 9 pupil)“And we could learn like what each person did to contribute to their team.” (Year 9 pupil)

Making decisions on correctness or quality of others’ ideas (peer-assessment):“Just to remind yourself of how to do it and then just to see if they’ve got it right as well.” “It also means that you don’t have to talk to the person, you can just ask them and check on their answers, so it’s less disruption.” (Year 9 pupil)

Reflecting e.g. how their own answer could have been improved:“I just think it’s good because, if you are unsure, it’s like, looking at other people’s, might give you a better idea of what you’re supposed to be doing.” (Year 9 pupil)“Because, we are doing the rocket project, and like, we had one opinion on it, and then we got to see other opinions on it [LAMS]. And we could think, yeah, actually, I think, that’s it.” (Year 9 pupil)

Getting confidence in general or in seeing that one’s own answer is as good (or bad) as everyone else’s;



“It was good. We learnt a bit about what everyone else thought about it. And how everyone else used the computers to get the information and that. How they collected it all, and who worked in a group and who did most work and that” (Year 9 pupil)

Accepting own and others’ mistakes:Pupil: “You could find out if everyone made the mistake on the same thing or it was just you. You can see if you are left out, if you are lonely.”Interviewer: “Did that happen?”Pupil: “No, I made the same mistake as everyone else.” (Year 9 pupil)

Appreciating different opinions:“[It] make[s] you feel like everyone else is like you.” (Year 9 pupil)

Collaborative learning – valuing learning from peers.“You’re not learning from just the teacher but from people around you who are doing the same things and at the same level.” (Year 9 pupil)“In the textbook it’s just one person’s opinion, the author of it, but then where you can talk about everyone’s opinion and whether they believe in God.” (Year 9 pupil)

10.2 LAMS interface and usability(39 comments) The LAMS interface drew mixed opinions, some suggesting it be made more vibrant and aimed at young people, whilst some appreciated the bland or neutral look of LAMS, which was felt to be a more ‘grown-up’ look and feel, ‘well spaced out’ and not busy with multimedia distractions, “It’s not got loads of icons which you can press. It’s just got the ones you know you can press” (Year 9 pupil)

The Review Team observed some sessions where students were logging-on to LAMS for the first time. They appreciated that they had to get used to a new environment, but were keen to get to know it and get on with it:

“When you do it a lot it starts to get easier and you start to learn your way around and it won’t be too complicated” (Year 7 pupil)

At times, depending on the manner in which teachers introduced LAMS, pupils struggled with a few more complex activities such as Share Resources, in which they see a split window, with instructions at the top and a website or file at the bottom. This at times seemed difficult, especially so without further explanation or practice:

“It was hard actually…confusing with lots of things on it.” (Year 7 pupil)

“It’s a bit complicated when there are loads of different things and you have to press like ‘Finish’” (Year 7 pupil)

Pupil 1: “I personally didn’t like it. I liked the websites, but assisted with LAMS, I really didn’t like it. It just made it confusing to go on what you had to do. Maybe if it’s just been the website I would have liked it a bit better.”



Pupil 2: “I like it but I kept forgetting about the instructions that come up at the top. I kept thinking what am I doing next? And kept forgetting to click to complete and you’re kind of lost, you forget to remember to look up at the top of the screen for the instructions…I didn’t find that very helpful.”Pupil 3: “I thought it was good to have it there. Because if you didn’t know what to do, you had it as a guideline.” (Year 12 pupils)

Other pupils found that the language of LAMS activities was aimed at their age group (not realising that it was the teacher who created the tasks):

Pupil 1: “And [LAMS is for] our age. And all the stuff we need to be doing.”Pupil 2: “And it’s not too hard to use, either.”Pupil 3: “It’s easy to use, sit forward.” (Year 11 pupils)

Others commented that LAMS was easy to use:

“It’s helpful, it’s useful. It’s fun.” “Easy to understand.” (Year 11 pupil)“It’s not complicated to get to the things you wanna get to.” “You just go step-by-step.” (Year 11 pupil)“It’s quite a cool little set-out though…blue.”“It’s quite an easy programme to use as well.” (Year 9 pupils)

Interface suggestions included:

“[Make] the writing a bit bigger because it’s a bit small” (Year 7 pupil)“Bit more colour - make it stand out more” (Year 7 pupil)

10.3 ‘Get more done’ and ‘learning better’ with LAMS(25 comments) Students had the view that they got more done with LAMS than in normal classroom lessons or that learning with LAMS somehow enhanced their learning:

“ I like LAMS because it gives you the same information as a book but it narrows it down and it leaves out the boring bits…in a simple way so it’s better.” (Year 9 pupil)

“We learn more stuff off that than you would normally in a lesson.” (Year 11 pupil)

“You have to quickly think...it sticks in your head.” (Year 9 pupil)

Unbeknownst to the students, it was often the quality of the teacher’s learning design in constructing the LAMS sequence that contributed to a positive learning experience:

“And LAMS helped us like…we thought that we didn’t know too much about evaluations but the LAMS programme helped us like to see that we did know quite a bit.” (Year 9 pupil)



“We did an evaluation which helps us to see how much we have helped and we have improved in our groups and whether we have worked well. Which helps us, that if we do another project like this, then we know what to do next time; whether it’s been good or not.” (Year 9 pupil)

“We were worked how to, like, work in a way that we haven’t really done it before. We were trying to use LAMS to kind of say how, say like what we have learnt from it.” (Year 9 pupil)

Interviewer: “What did you learn today about the plague that you didn’t know before?”Pupil 1: “What colour it was”Pupil 2: “Purple on the neck”Pupil 3: “How big it is [the lump]”[more vivid discussion of the plague]

Pupil 4: “If we do a test on it at least we know what colour it is…”Pupil 2: “At the end of each subject that we’ve done, the Romans and the Plague…we have to do a test and another kid they might not know about them and we do so it might be a bit easier for us” (Year 7 pupils)



Students also welcomed the fact that they were able to move through LAMS at their own speed, not having to wait for others nor being left behind, off the unison pace or when the teacher had to deal with behavioural problems:

“You can work at your own pace. You can do as much as you want or as little as you want.” (Year 9 pupil)

“I learnt more than I do in lessons because [the teacher] is always arguing with someone else or something like that and then he goes out of the room and talks to them so you’re just sitting there like…[exasperated sigh]” (Year 9 pupil)

10.4 LAMS session as ‘better than classroom’(16 comments) That LAMS was ‘better than the classroom’ was often remarked upon, usually meaning the opportunity afforded to work with computers as opposed to ‘pen-and-paper’ writing or that it was a different way of learning from the teacher standing in front of the classroom. Students also found using LAMS ‘fun’. Whilst the argument can be made that this attitude is generally observed with any ICT session, it is important to consider that students are highly ICT literate in general and LAMS is being measured against other ICT experiences (including rich, interactive multimedia) as well as the classroom experience:

“I think it’s good because it’s an alternative way of learning. Nowadays you get bored reading from text books … and kids are more interested in the computer and internet. So I think that’s a good way of learning.” (Year 12 pupil)

“Nice and easy and helpful. A different way of learning instead of being sat in a classroom” (Year 9 pupil)

“Say you’re in lesson and he gives you a textbook and he goes ‘Do the questions’ so you write them out and do the answers, I don’t know nothing, but on the Internet [LAMS] you click on it and it’s like information, questions, do it and then you like talk to your friends about it. It’s a lot better.” (Year 9 pupil)

“It’s doing history but it’s better ‘cos your doing it on the computers and its a bit different from a normal lesson” (Year 7 pupil)

“Using LAMS is a good thing because when people just want to do work on paper they won’t do it but when they want to do it on computer it’s more interesting.” (Year 9 pupil)

“It also means that you don’t have to talk to the person, you can just ask them and check on their answers, so it’s less disruption.” (Year 9 pupil)

“It’s fun, it’s better than writing and than like to listen to the teacher all the time.” (Year 9 pupil)

“It’s a more fun way of learning rather than listening to the teacher.” (Year 11 pupil)

Pupil: “It’s more fun than just reading from a text book.” Interviewer:” Why?”



Pupil: “Because you are doing, it’s more active and just like sitting down from a text book and revise.” (Year 9 pupil)

“Told my little brother abut it – he thinks it sounds ace.” (Year 7 pupil) Only one student from all the focus groups commented that:

“Personally, I don’t like researching that much on the computer. I like books or newspaper or television. I think that’s why probably I didn’t like it that much. But otherwise, it’s good for research.” (Year 12 pupil)

The format of how ideas or activities were presented to students seemed important. Some students commented on the fact that they preferred working on the computer to pen-and-paper writing. Possible explanations were: Students find typing is neater than handwriting and spellings or ideas can be corrected

on-the-fly; There may be more time to formulate ideas, especially given the self-paced nature of

LAMS sequences; All students are able to contribute to written tasks. They don’t need to wait to be called by

the teacher; LAMS presents all class responses in a neutral list unlike the situation where the teacher

might have several ‘most-favoured’ pupils that they would ask for answers in a classroom;

Writing up ideas may have suited 'visual' learners who like seeing ideas in graphical form; Off-task contributions could be easily ignored or skipped.

“Good. It was better than writing” (Year 9 pupil)

“Prefer going on the computer than writing.” (Year 9 pupil)

Pupil: “It’s good going on the computers. It’s better doing it on computers.”Interviewer: “Why?”Pupil: “Better than writing.”Interviewer: “Why? [silence] So if you had to write down how you thought about it on paper…”Pupil: “It wouldn’t have been as fun. But you do learn on computers…” (Year 9 pupils)

10.5 Ability to express opinions in the absence of peer pressure with LAMS(9 comments) Another advantage described by students was that they were able to express opinions without peer pressure or disruptions in the classroom. There was a sense that pupils prefer not to be told by their peers or the teacher that they are wrong and LAMS muted such possibilities:

Pupil 1: “No one is telling you that you are wrong.”Pupil 2: “Yeah, they give you different opinions.” Interviewer: “Does that happen in class?”



All: “Yeah.”Pupil 3: “You will have an argument over whether it’s right or wrong. And it turns out, you are right." (Year 9 pupil)

“… when you try and give your opinions in class, then other people speak over you. [in LAMS] you can see [people’s ideas] well spaced like. You can see your views and you can see other people’s views and you can compare it easily, and go back and have a look.” (Year 9 pupil)

“There’s no restrictions on what you can say, you can say your own opinion, doesn’t have to be the right or wrong answer, it’s your opinion.” (Year 9 pupil)

“And sometimes when you want to give an opinion to the teacher…and if you’re saying, 'I don’t agree with you', in case he says something back to you a bit, so you can just send it to him.” (Year 9 pupil)

“I liked it when we’d done the questions because there it was anonymous. If you’d done a silly question, it’s not as if everyone will start laughing at you.” (Year 9 pupil)

10.6 Classroom atmosphere in a LAMS session(5 comments) Students experienced a better classroom atmosphere in LAMS sessions due to, for instance, fewer disruptions, with students working away at their workstation and discussions concentrating on the learning:

“You can ask your friends if you don’t understand something… and they can help you through it, especially if they’ve done it before.” (Year 9 pupil)

“Yes, because if someone gets asked in the classroom and someone else gets asked, it ends up like everyone is talking at once and you can’t really distinguish who is saying what.” (Year 9 pupil)

“Because we are not having a social chat. You can share information with the class and it doesn’t disturb the atmosphere, the concentrated atmosphere, so it’s good.” (Year 12 pupil)

“You can actually talk to people in the class without …shouting.” (Year 12 pupil)

“When somebody says something stupid you don’t get distracted by them, so you just carry on with your work ‘cos you don’t have to read what they’ve said.” (Year 7 pupil)

“I think it’s more enjoyable than lessons ‘cos people like interrupt the lesson and stuff – that doesn’t happen [in LAMS] ‘cos they’re all concentrated on the computer as well..” (Year 7 pupil)

10.7 LAMS and active learning(5 comments) Some students compared learning via LAMS with learning from text books, appreciating LAMS activities in which active learning was involved:



“[LAMS is] really simple so it helps us revise things...makes things a lot easier to remember…we’re not getting bored, it’s keeping our minds active… it’s games and fun things to do” (Year 9 pupil)

“In class, we don’t do questions like that. We just copy from the board and do stuff from text books. But we don’t do hard questions like that. …it challenges you to get it right.” (Year 11 pupil)

“You’re actually doing it for yourself and figuring answers out for yourself instead of the teacher actually telling you them and you having to learn them. You’re learning as you think about the questions and answers.” (Year 9 pupil)

“It’s really good fun…rather than just having plain old boring lesson, you get a really good interactive lesson.” (Year 7 pupil)

“Some computer things it’s just a load of reading…and you just get loads of questions but on LAMS you’ve got little activities you can do and it’s not just all reading…” (Year 7 pupil)

10.8 Miscellaneous focus group comments Extending LAMS use – Students contributing to the focus groups often asked about (or

were positively surprised to find out about) the possibility that they were able to carry on with LAMS at home using their home computer. Students also suggested extending LAMS in other ways than were used in the observed lesson, e.g. in a class where LAMS was used as a revision tool, they could see that LAMS would be useful for doing their coursework (“Yeah! To have it in more lessons” (Year 9 pupil) or “It would work in English” (Year 9 pupil)).

Some student focus groups, for non-ICT subject lessons, reported that their LAMS sessions were the best ICT lessons for that subject that they had experienced.

Knowing where one was up to in the sequence was found very helpful by the students. (They referred to the sequence monitoring in the left-hand side of the screen.)

Instant access to directed resources meant that students found LAMS made it easier for them to access web sites and other materials quickly without the need to make or type in addresses and URLs. Many comments were made by staff and pupils alike along the lines of ‘It’s all there’, referring to this facet of LAMS.

Interestingly, students sometimes were often not clear that it was their teacher who made their learning activity and not the software program itself – an empowering thought for the teachers to be able to do something that looks professional for their students.

10.9 Student survey The Review team attempted to carry out a student survey with all the observed classes. A LAMS sequence was prepared using the Survey activity. Students were asked to rate their ease of use with LAMS, compare their classroom contributions with LAMS contributions and note down aspects of LAMS they liked and didn’t like. Survey presents and orders results



electronically in an easily comprehensible format. The ‘Student Survey’ LAMS sequence was made available to all teachers via email and also uploaded to the public area of LAMS for public access.

To date, only three classes out of the twelve observed attempted to complete the survey. One contributory reason for this low return may be that it was not possible to copy and paste the Survey activity into teachers’ pre-existing sequence as a final add-on exercise (LAMS does not have this capability at the time of writing) so the sequence had to be separately scheduled for the class. Although the review team attempted to do this for each class, there was usually no time put aside to complete this activity at the end of observed lessons. It was also deemed more appropriate to let the lessons carry on in as real a context as possible so reviewers only asked teachers to complete the Student Survey at a different session. This meant that teachers had to book ICT rooms at another time, which could have been another factor contributing to the low return.

Two out of the three classes that completed Surveys are incomplete (not filled out by each student) – so it was decided that rather than to attempt presenting an incomplete study, it would be more appropriate if student attitudinal data could be built in to any further LAMS research activities. Some teachers carried out their own evaluations and kindly made these available to the Review Team.



11 LAMS and attainmentLinks between attainment and using LAMS were explored from staff perspectives. The short scale of the pilot, however, did not allow the examination of longitudinal data or other quantitative methods.

Most staff reported that LAMS could impact positively on attainment:

“Ultimately, it will [impact on attainment]. It’s more motivating, I think, because in a lesson, they can see down on one side, what activities they have got to do, they can see how far they are with a sequence and it is motivation.” (Teacher no. 1)

“I think it will [impact on attainment] because just the amount of work they get through in a LAMS lesson is a lot more than in a classroom lesson” (Teacher no. 5)

“So when the exams come through I’ve noticed … that the things that we’ve taught on LAMS have certainly been well-remembered and well-developed.” (Teacher no. 10)

Some teachers were unwilling to commit an opinion, citing the small scale and duration of their LAMS use:

“I couldn’t really comment on that until further down the line I think.” (Teacher no. 20)

“Attainment, it’s too soon to gauge how effective it’s going to be. I’ve used it twice, three times with that group, couple of times with a year nine class, couple of times with a year eight class. They enjoy it. It certainly engages them. How it’s going to affect assessments, that’s the next step. What I’ll be looking towards doing is creating a series of LAMS sequences that lead to an assessment, so for instance, the year nine group looking at…the origins of the cold war, it might be a couple of LAMS sequences, and then hopefully they can build on that to create a piece of assessed work. That might be where we can gauge it.” (Teacher no. 19)

“At this stage, it’s difficult to have hard evidence whether there has been an improvement or understanding through exam results. We are not that far yet. The limited amount of use that I have done in the lessons, … I have only done two lessons with LAMS as part of the lesson.” (Teacher no. 24)

Areas of potential impact envisaged by staff offering an opinion included:

Opportunities for a whole class to acquire, practise and improve metacognitive skills. Getting more work done in a LAMS session than in a normal classroom - students

motivated by ICT and being able to monitor their own progress; LAMS is a valuable vehicle for revision and recall. LAMS increases self-confidence and autonomy. Learners keep on task and cope with manageable chunks of learning. LAMS is well-suited to rapid cycles of formative assessment, the latter having a well-

established correlation with enhanced pupil achievements, “I think the attainment



from the child’s point of view is that they possibly want to do more because they know they are being monitored, therefore they are more likely to try and I am more likely to have a better idea of how well they are doing so that I can tailor the lesson to focus on a better outcome.” (Teacher no. 21)

Anecdotal evidence suggests that LAMS is not seen primarily as a vehicle for boosting attainment in terms of results or numbers of achieved GCSEs and that, in fact, a main objective in adopting LAMS is that of encouraging and developing those less measurable skills which are critical to the development of independent learning and reflective processes, as expressed below:

“For most of my young people, if you could give me the choice between whether or not they pick up more qualifications or whether or not they become better learners, I know which one I would choose. I would much rather have better learners with independence and transferable skills in the way that they’re managing and progressing their own learning.” (Teacher no. 6)

That said, it is anticipated that these metacognitive skills, once cultivated, will contribute to meaningful improvements in the students’ lifelong learning skills and, ultimately, examination performance:

“Because, as I say [business studies] is not about being right or wrong, it’s having the ability to substantiate an opinion and … unless [students] can support those with some reasonable arguments, it’s no good. So the idea of sharing that pool of arguments together enables them to actually support their answer in a much better way, which will hopefully translate into exam marks and performance later on.” (Teacher no. 24)



12 What is LAMS? Teachers’ perceptionsAs the review progressed, researchers came to appreciate the different perceptions teachers and other school personnel had when talking about LAMS. This section looks at teachers’ perceptions of LAMS as a software tool based on workshop observations, telephone/email conversations with teachers and the evidence of interview data with teachers. (After piloting the interview instruments, the question ‘What is LAMS?’ was added to the interview schedule).

The LAMS pilot advertised LAMS as a learning design software tool which was also the focus of the JISC LAMS evaluation (Masterman, Lee 2005). The introduction of LAMS into teaching practice was radical as it represented the first serious attempt to harness learning design software for use by teachers, so it was a conceptual step up from pre-packaged content-focussed solutions. Not all teachers who came in contact with the pilot may have made this conceptual leap. This could either be put down to the fact that they did not engage with LAMS in great depth (i.e. left the pilot) or may have thought LAMS was more difficult than it really was. One teacher, who discontinued the pilot, commented that LAMS required ‘high-level programming’ which was clearly not the case but it may have been a logical conclusion for someone who was less ICT-aware.

Those who did engage with LAMS found different features of the tools arresting, so the word ‘LAMS’ evoked different ideas from one teacher to another. There seemed to be a consensus about LAMS as an e-learning tool having unique features and being ahead of its time, as well as an appreciation that it was a tool in development that needs to be made more robust, reliable and user-friendly:

“I do think LAMS is a little bit before its time in some respects because it’s got all those key elements that are really good, these ideas that are very unique, but there’s all the other bits that need to be incorporated to make into a really usable and user-friendly system.” (Teacher no. 9)

“It’s a tool for the future when every kid has got a computer.” (Teacher no. 2)

So what is special about LAMS? What does it offer, according to teachers, that is unique?

Learning design The major unique feature about LAMS is that it is a learning design software tool. Teachers did not call it that however, and instead they talked about a tool that gives structure and guides students through a pre-built lesson plan. LAMS is distilled down to the level of activities and while these e-learning activities are not necessarily revolutionary or innovative (e.g. chat, forum, voting, multiple choice tests, weblinks) what is new is that teachers can customise and tailor-make each and link them all together in a sequence.



One teacher said, “what particularly caught my eye … was the design for learning side of it, rather than just being a VLE for delivering content” (Teacher no. 4), LAMS addresses the process of learning, the learning design:

“Because it’s something that nothing else can offer. It’s a structured chat room…something no other IT package can really offer.” (Teacher no. 18)

“It gives you the opportunity to provide as you would on a standard lesson plan where you won’t have time to do a normal full lesson plan, it provides you with the key elements…of the starter, the introduction, the lesson objectives, main body, then at the end you got the review, in terms of multiple choice or a voting system, or a chat session…It focuses your mind as a teacher.” (Teacher no. 11)

One teacher thought that unique feature of LAMS was:

“The actual sequence. Because you can either just have a worksheet or a PowerPoint presentation in the same format. There is not much that you can manoeuvre within it. Yet [with LAMS] you can have the questions, the polls, a noticeboard to a discussion and chatrooms. And that the whole concept was brilliant. But how d’you do it? How you link it all together? And how the children see it, what happens on their screen?” (Teacher no. 13)

The above view suggested another advantage of LAMS, i.e. the learner having a view of their own progress.

The control of the flow of the sequence of activities was considered positive in the school context as this process reflected how teachers normally manage their traditional classroom lessons.

LAMS was often compared to VLEs, with some making a distinction between the two, while others did not see any difference e.g., one support staff member thought that their school bought LAMS and Moodle because the former had pre-written sequences with it. Some teachers found that LAMS offered ‘something nothing else can offer’, a structure for learning activities, e.g. a structured chat room embedded into a particular learning sequence.

Visual authoring interfaceThe authoring interface in LAMS is not visual/diagrammatic just for the purpose of usability. It also acts as a tool that makes learning designs explicit. This was also considered to be a unique feature as it gave teachers the ability to share and talk about their teaching practice in a visual form: “The way it’s set out. The menu, it’s just really clear. You just drag it and if you don’t want it, you bin it. I mean, that is really easy, isn’t it? So making those questions up, just typing it in, aren’t you? It’s really good.” (Teacher no. 13)

Empowering teachers



One management interviewee expressed the view that LAMS acknowledges the fact that it is the teacher who knows the students, the curriculum, the teacher being the expert. The big advantage of LAMS was that it, “put that expertise to the forefront.” (Teacher no. 4) It, “allowed the teacher to be so creative” (Teacher no. 21) to be able to tailor their sequences to their own teaching style and to their students' needs. The added advantage of LAMS was that teachers had a choice as to whether to use their own creativity and fully author their design in LAMS or draw on technical/e-learning support (if available at their school) to develop interactive e-learning content that could be easily integrated within a Share Resource activity in LAMS.



Support for different teaching approaches LAMS not only empowered teachers to construct their own designs but gave them the flexibility to adapt those processes to suit their teaching strategy:

“It’s a computer package that allows independent learning through different sequences that allow all kinds of learning.” (Teacher no. 13)

Powerful ICT for non-ICT subjectsIt could be said that LAMS is less suitable for teaching ICT itself and is more suited to non-ICT subject specialists. Teachers who claimed not to have high ICT confidence found LAMS easy to use, producing professional-looking online lessons. It was also found to be an excellent tool to satisfy the cross-curricular ICT needs in the subjects observed:

“It’s good ICT for non-ICT subjects. It’s that idea that it’s cognitive learning rather than having to create a Word document to fill an ICT link within a school. It’s about being able to develop a different environment for learning using the best of ICT.” (Teacher no. 19)

Re-use of existing electronic resourcesSome teachers were pleased to find that using LAMS did not mean that they had to redesign their existing resources, but that they could plug in their existing resources within a sequence:

“LAMS is like the master structure programme and from that you can link onto it all sorts of other little things…” (Teacher no. 10)

Live monitoring Teachers who used the online monitoring function in class commented that it allowed them to manage the classroom session in ways they had not done before. The Monitor function offered them a snapshot of the whole class progress as well as that of the individual students, helping them with the management of the classroom. Compared to traditional classroom methods, this online feature was considered as a distinctive LAMS feature.

“And you know that, because you can see on the monitoring, that they’ve covered all the aspects that you wanted.” (Teacher no. 11)

Whole class involvementTaken individually, most of the LAMS activity types cannot claim to be uniquely innovative. Each has a presence in some form in other e-learning tools. There is one activity that could be considered unique to LAMS, the Question and Answer which asks students to submit an answer, then the whole-class contributions are shown in a list. Facilitating and promoting whole class involvement was further enhanced by the optional function with which contributions could be made anonymous. For some teachers, this activity was the essence of LAMS, some even considering LAMS synonymous with this activity.



Combining a range of classroom arrangementsLAMS combined various classroom grouping options as opposed to some e-learning tools that required individuals to work with the computer at their own pace, its activities offering alternatives such as:

Individual work – student working alone ‘with the monitor’; 1-to-many – student responding to a collaborative task e.g. in the chat; many-to-many – students reading responses to a Q&A activity; 1-to-group – same as 1-to-many when teacher has used grouping function; group-to-group.

Easy adaptability and reuseLAMS, partly due to its nature of being activity rather than content-focussed, was considered very easy to modify, change and adapt by teachers, thus inviting opportunities for reuse and sharing.

LAMS as a component rather than a total solutionTeachers saw LAMS as one tool within a package of tools available to teachers; they felt that it would never replace other ways of teaching, or would never become the only e-learning tool in their classroom. The key to successful teaching and learning was employing a variety of tools and approaches:

“ [LAMS] is a tool that is part of a whole teaching…it isn’t just something that will replace a part of teaching I don’t think you can do that, but it is a tool that will help. I think it is very easy to get confused between the computers and using technology as opposed to just having a tool that can help you with your learning and I think that LAMS is just part of that little package of tools that will help and it becomes part of a teachers whole range of things just like the bunch of worksheets that they’ve got in the filing cabinet and the interactive CDs that they’ve got.” (Teacher no. 9)



13 Technical issues and enhancementsTechnical issues including bugs and enhancements as reported by teachers or observed during practitioner visits were recorded.

13.1 Technical issuesThe main technical issues noted by teachers are listed below. A general observation was that LAMS was not always reliable e.g. activities were lost due to save errors or system crashes would occur when two classes accessed LAMS at the same time. It was perceived as a product-in-development rather than a finished piece of software, which was indeed the case as up until February 2005, the LAMS pilot operated a Beta version of LAMS.

The technical issues reported are listed below, grouped under the relevant LAMS mode:

Learner Login – teachers found the class set-up and the login procedure to be difficult and

unsympathetic to their logistical needs when using LAMS. The UK LAMS technical support had control over passwords as due to the nature of the pilot and expected technical issues, they felt the need to control pilot passwords to be able to investigate potential problems. This has meant that passwords were different from school password systems, resulting in local complications to do with students remembering their password. Logins not being integrated with the school’s management system was also an issue for students: students were sometimes juggling five different logins.

Usernames sometimes did not work – login had to be repeated to take effect. Chat port – a closed network port on some schools’ systems prevented the chat activity

being run. The learner screen does not indicate which sequence is currently being followed so the

learner is not able to tell whether s/he is in the right sequence or not, especially when more versions of the same sequence are present in the list.

Accented characters e.g. ‘é’ sometimes displayed differently depending on the machine used. One teacher keyed in with ASCII codes using NumLock, which then displayed some substitute code instead of the required symbol on the learner screen.

Voting results are in random order and not in the order of ascending or descending total scores.

The voting screen crashed on several occasions.

Author There is no logical management of the storage of sequences in that there are no fields by

which sequences can be sorted within the list of sequences in one’s private or public LAMS area.



If the sequence has a synchronisation point, it cannot be previewed in full as the preview stops at the synchronisation point and cannot be released as it is not tied to a monitoring function.

Sequences containing external resources or files cannot be imported into LAMS, preventing sharing.

Monitor function The Learners tab in the monitor function, displaying individual students’ progress, had a

colour-coded system which was inaccessible to the colour-blind, i.e. uncompleted activities were coded green and the current activity red. The suggestion was to add another visual clue independent of colour (as in the Learner view).

If the LAMS sequence is long, the learner tab displaying each student on a horizontal line needs to be scrolled across the monitor. However, the students’ names are only displayed at the left hand side of the screen and are not visible when the teacher scrolls to the right (to the end of the sequence).

The synchronisation points are not displayed in the Sequence tab of the Monitor mode so teachers, especially if using someone else’s sequence, are not aware of how or where they can release them.

13.2 EnhancementsThe Review team is aware that future releases of LAMS are planned and so most of the enhancements suggested during the Becta LAMS Review may have already been incorporated in these planned future releases. The JISC evaluation study also includes a detailed list of suggested enhancements (Masterman and Lee 2005).

The Preview facility was welcomed by all users. Practitioners suggested a number of enhancements (see also Section 13.1 for bugs):

More sophisticated grouping options (e.g. teacher to set groups and not just random allocation);

Ability to go back and change contributions (e.g. in Question and Answer); Allow modifiable font type/size in all activity types; Expand capacity for seamless inclusion of images and other multimedia (e.g. adding an

image to Q&A); Improved management of sequences so that it is easy to find subject sequences in the

public area as well as the ability to manage the user's own and the institution’s sequence library:“it’s very difficult to organise your work and the sequences. If you put sequences in the public area we end up with absolutely loads of sequences and it’s another issue about management…As a way of trying to counter that what we’ve done is we’ve created an area on our shared drive here and made it so that it’s subject specific for LAMS sequences, so they’re actually going into a



proper folder system and exporting them out…which is fine but a lot of people don’t like doing that because of the time that it takes.” (Teacher no. 9)

Allow copy and paste a single activity (or more) from one sequence to another. Ability to team-teach, i.e. allow more than one monitor for a class when running a LAMS

sequence. Allow classes in different schools to access the same sequence as if they were one class

synchronously or asynchronously. (This may be a potential issue if each school hosts their own LAMS server).

Ability to preview when sequence has synchronisation points. Ability to have branching sequences, not just optional activities (e.g. depending on the

completion of an activity, one branch is chosen over another one). Spell-checker (both author/learner). Email notification – when someone is responded to in a forum, they would get a

notification ”You have been responded to by…” Have an ‘Alert’ button for pupils to call the teacher if they need help but don’t want to put

their hand up. Incorporate mathematical symbols e.g. to use algebra, and possibly a calculator. Include a drawing tool to add colour and text.

The sequence is a .las file which is unique to LAMS, so can only be re-used within the LAMS environment. Although LAMS is very open to re-usability, there is an issue about continuing the hosting of the LAMS environment by the school, i.e. if the school decided to discontinue using LAMS or LAMS becomes unsupported, the sequences will not be usable outside LAMS. There are new developments in making LAMS conform to the relevant IMS Learning Design standard (by October 2005) which may mean that LAMS sequences could be imported into other learning design systems conforming to that standard.

At times, users listed enhancements which suggested that they were not aware of the full system potential (e.g. use of survey tool for questions with no right/wrong answers or group submission) – calling attention to the importance of continuous training and support, especially when new functions are added in later LAMS versions.



14 LAMS practitioner workshopsAs a part of Becta’s strategy for introducing LAMS into schools and supporting and encouraging ongoing uptake and development within ‘early-adopter’ institutions, the review team prepared and ran two LAMS workshops. The stated aims of the workshops were: getting teachers started with using LAMS; establishing mutual support with other teachers; bringing together fellow subject-specialists; gaining more experience and confidence in creating and delivering LAMS sequences.

The first workshop took place in Coventry on 11th March 2005, the second in Bromley at the Bromley Education Centre on 6th June 2005. ICT, Geography, Science, Mathematics, Religious Studies, PE, History and English were the main subject areas represented by the workshop delegates.

The agenda of the second workshop was slightly amended based on the feedback from the first workshop and incorporated more hands-on sessions and subject-based group work. These were both found very useful by the attendees.

The overall feeling from both workshops was very positive. There was a general consensus that people felt motivated to create and trial LAMS sequences for their teaching. They felt inspired to take LAMS back to their schools and drive its adoption across subjects and year groups. Knowledge of the potential of LAMS was gained and people could see the broader applications such as homeworking, extension activities and lesson management. The review team was delighted with the enthusiasm of the workshop participants and the creativity they brought to creating LAMS sequences in a few short hours. It was felt that this kind of support, complementing the LAMS training and focussed around the functionalities of LAMS, creating a space where LAMS users can explore and experiment with the system, as well as share and communicate their experiences, should be a very productive way of continuing to encourage the uptake of LAMS across UK schools.

The review team found (via practitioner visits and telephone/email contact with teachers) that: Some activity types and the online monitoring function were underutilised (e.g. chat &

scribe). Most teachers tended to use the more basic activity types while they were getting more confidence in their LAMS delivery;

Some teachers would have liked more practice with the running of the chat and forum, especially as some felt that there was a gap between students’ and their own skills in using this medium. Teachers did not have an idea how students used chat in their day-to-day life. It was felt that teachers would benefit from finding out or observing a chat in action as used by youngsters in order to relate this experience to an educational setting.



Some teachers, even though new LAMS releases happened, were not aware of some of the new functions or how they worked – even though there was a circular sent round to LAMS practitioners.

The biggest hurdle to wider implementation appeared to be teachers’ confidence in running their first LAMS session. The hands-on workshop gave them a chance to have a go with a ‘dummy’ run of their class.

It is suggested that these outcomes are evidence of the need to continue to support practitioners in some form, beyond the initial training.

14.1 Group needs analysisOne of the outcomes of the first workshop was a LAMS needs-analysis, looking at the ways in which teachers would wish their use of LAMS to be supported. At the end of the workshop session, all participants were invited to identify outstanding needs and to suggest ways in which they might be assisted, individually and institutionally, to make progress with LAMS implementation.

The following issues were identified and are presented verbatim:

Staff Support Access to a pre-built presentation – such as some PowerPoint slides/video presentation

of LAMS in use - that ‘sells’ LAMS to other staff members, would be found useful. The presentation would emphasise the benefits and potential of the system.

Include an example sequence (short) as part of the above presentation. This should demonstrate the pedagogical elements that are LAMS’ major strengths.

Technical Issues The group discussed the available avenues for resolving technical issues/bugs: There is an automatic form for technical issues/bugs which go to SST (this is at

http://www.uklams.net/support/techSupportForm.html ) The community forum is for discussing pedagogical issues. Kemnal College, the institution responsible for the LAMS training, is a point of support. Peer-to-peer support is encouraged. The SST contact person is always willing to help point people in the right direction if they

are not quite sure of where to take a particular problem.

Running Sequences - Classroom ManagementIt would be useful to have: Technical support for point-of-delivery. Evidence of pupils actually using the LAMS system. This could be in the form of excerpts

from monitor mode, videos/DVD of LAMS sessions and feedback from children etc.


http://www.uklams.net/support/techSupportForm.html


Exchange visits between teachers in order to see real-life LAMS sessions. The community forum might be used to arrange such visits.



Subject-Specific SharingThe group agreed on the benefits of sharing and re-using sequences which can be achieved: By saving sequences to the public area to release to the LAMS world at large. Posting sequences to the forum. Some of the sequences will be available on the

www.uklams.net site.

The issue of quality assurance was discussed, i.e. how does one know whether a sequence is valid and of reliable quality? Would practitioners need sequences as starting points and ideas OR fully-proofed instantly usable resources? It was agreed that the SST LAMS site might reference proofed resources whilst the public LAMS area can be used for instantly usable sequences.


http://www.uklams.net/


15 Community forumA web-based community was set up at http://www.uklams.net/community/ by the UK LAMS team. Its aim was to bring together the LAMS community and offer a space to discuss teachers’ experiences and thoughts on LAMS, including pedagogical issues, suggestions and enhancements. The community forum was released on the 17th December 2004.

By July 2005, the forum had 39 members. The community site was promoted at the practitioner workshop, with people signing up to it on the day. Questions that were collected during the workshop by the review team were posted to the site with feedback from SST and LAMS. The two main areas of the forum were a) technical support b) pedagogical forum. The former had 18 messages and these 18 messages were viewed on 80 occasions in total (mean = 4 views per message); the pedagogical forum had 9 posts all of which were viewed 130 times in total (mean = 8 views per message not counting the welcome message which was viewed by 54 in total). There was only one post that was made by a practitioner, the rest were made by the review team, the UK LAMS team or SST.

It can be seen from the above figures that the volume of access and contributions by practitioners to the forum was minimal during the seven months of the pilot. The JISC LAMS evaluation used a mailing list (EPED-LAMS) that came directly to users’ inbox rather than requiring users to log on to a different forum. Altogether this mailing list received 72 contributions by 18 practitioners and a further 77 messages were sent by people with an administrative function, either review team members or a LAMS technical announcement (Masterman, Lee 2005). The higher rate of contributions, albeit still modest, suggests that a LAMS community mailing list may provide a more direct ‘reach’ into people’s LAMS awareness than a web-based forum. Busy practitioners currently need to make the effort regularly to log in and seek important LAMS-related information and contribute to the development of LAMS communities.

The planned ‘LAMS Community Forum’ (which is a forum that is being brought out by LAMS itself at the time of writing and which will be integrated into LAMS) is planning to take on a similar role to that was envisaged by the review’s community forum. It will be interesting to revisit how it is being used in the future.


http://www.uklams.net/community/


16 The future of LAMS in pilot schools

16.1 Schools planning to continue – Future aimsSection 7 summarised the ratio of those who discontinued the pilot and those who embarked on adopting LAMS at their institution together with the reasons influencing the success of adoption. This section examines the plans of institutions that intend to continue to use LAMS beyond the pilot (source: Final LAMS Review Questionnaire).

The quantitative data gained from the final questionnaires presented below offers a picture of immediate short term plans of practitioners (Figure 14).

Figure 15 Future plans (Source: Final LAMS questionnaire, n=16 staff)*

Future plans: staff perspectives

13 12 12

7 75

4

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

Trainingother staff

Making moresequences

DeliveringLAMS

lessons

Collaboratingoutsideschool

Reusing seq-s - other

school staff

Reusing seq-s - createdelsew here

Getting moretraining

* seq-s = LAMS sequences

Of the 16 staff who responded to the final LAMS Review questionnaire, 13 plan to train other staff, 12 to make more sequences, 12 to deliver more LAMS lessons.

Seven staff members plan to collaborate using LAMS outside the school, seven plan to reuse sequences created by staff within the school, five to reuse sequences created elsewhere e.g. in the public area of LAMS. Four staff are planning to get more training in LAMS.

Interviews elicited future LAMS plans of practitioners at school as well as individual level. These related to the models of LAMS adoption as described above illustrative of long-term LAMS visions. Teachers and managers had a range of plans for LAMS in their institutions and these are listed below with some illustrative quotes.

At the institutional level, individual teachers or schools had one or more of the plans below:



Extending the range of LAMS sequences – by developing further elements of the curriculum for LAMS delivery. One school had plans to deliver the new DiDA (Diploma in Digital Applications) qualification through LAMS.“We would develop quite tight banks of LAMS-based resources that support particular areas of the curriculum, so it might be that GCSE science or that applied ICT or the new DIDA is taught exclusively through LAMS or largely through LAMS;” (Teacher no. 6)

Exploring further LAMS functions – most teachers acknowledged that, in the first instance, they did not necessarily make use of the full LAMS functionality as they first needed to gain confidence in being able to author and run a LAMS session. In the next round, they were looking forward to exploring the more sophisticated functions offered.

Training other members of staff within the same department – LAMS practitioners had various roles within their department. Some were either the heads of department themselves or had a special co-ordinator role or were teachers, sometimes newly qualified teachers (NQT). Their brief was usually similar, i.e. having tried LAMS with students, they were to disseminate that knowledge to other members of staff within the same subject areas. At times, training others was dependent on teachers’ developing their LAMS confidence further, after, “spots have been ironed out” (Teacher no. 17)

Training other departments – some departments piloting LAMS had plans to cascade LAMS training to other departments in the school. Sometimes the other department was one closely linked with the pilot department (e.g. Science and Technology). Sometimes, roll-out plans were irrespective of the subject and included the whole school.“At the end of this, we will do a formal review because it’s an innovation we have tried, using the questionnaires that they have used with the students …and it will then become part of our CPD programme and in twilight sessions…hopefully with one person from every faculty so we can spread the word that way. You know it’s going to be slow but that’s probably the best way to do it, slowly drip-feed. So you’ve got one person in each faculty, who can take it on and say to the others, actually, it isn’t more work, and it does enable you in the classroom rather than hold you back. So that’s hopefully what will happen.” (Management Personnel no. 4)

o At times, whole school roll-out was dependent on the successful experience of the department piloting LAMS.

o The roll-out in one school was envisaged to be piecemeal : “we will teach it in small cohorts to school, maybe subject-related” (Teacher no. 21)

o A time scale was indicated by one school which took a year to pilot LAMS with one teacher in one department and envisaged that it would take altogether two years to involve other departments across the school

Using LAMS for CPD – a few schools saw the potential for using LAMS for staff training sessions (INSET).

Networking with other schools within UK and abroad – schools had various plans and ideas for team-teaching with LAMS or developing resources than could be shared. The attraction of using LAMS was that networks would work across geographical boundaries



so schools were enthused by the idea of linking up with schools abroad to see what LAMS can bring to enhance international school links.

Institutional reuse of sequences – one school plans to combine training and extension of LAMS use through the development of a bank of sequences to be trialled within their department:

“My plan for the moment is that in the next couple of weeks, each member of my faculty will have written a sequence. Plus the couple that I have written already. That gives us about 12 sequences. We’ll fit those into different schemes of work for next year, and I think that’ll probably be enough. You know, we will use those 12 sequences. If people, with the knowledge of how to use the software, then want to write other ones for the lessons they are planning, we can just add that to the collection. But initially, we’ll just use those 12 [sequences] and see how those 12 work.” (Teacher no. 23)

Some schools which did not make much progress with LAMS during the 2004/5 year were planning to carry on or start their LAMS pilot in September 2005. One head of department expressed the view that, given he had to focus on developing five new courses in the year of the pilot, LAMS was pushed to a lower priority activity:

“So I am behind where I thought I would be at this stage but certainly by September, October time in that first half term of the next academic year, I want to be at that stage where I actually have done two or three INSET sessions with my staff and got them actually familiar enough to create sequences [for] key stage 3 and key stage 4 … And then we can pool our results then and see how it is across the school.” (Teacher no. 24)

Plans at professional level: Getting more confidence in using LAMS – e.g. by running more sequences with students

in general. Establishing practice as opposed to having experimental lessons, i.e. running LAMS

sessions with the same group of students, “I am planning to keep using LAMS with this particular group for maybe until the end of term just to see how that goes with them” or, as another teacher said, “My hope is that it won’t be something that people use for showpiece lessons, that they will have it on a day-to-day basis, they will use LAMS sequences to produce effective lessons.” (Management Personnel)

Planning and delivering LAMS lessons for other classes than those in the pilot – teachers tended to select the class that they trialled LAMS with on the basis of various considerations or their own ideas of what LAMS was capable. For instance, one teacher selected a group that she knew would not have behavioural problems so she did not have to think in her first LAMS lesson, “‘Oh, I have got behaviour management AND be confident about the system’.” (Teacher no. 20) her next plans involved trialling it with other, perhaps more challenging groups.



Trying LAMS with other abilities and/or year groups. Some teachers who trialled LAMS with high ability pupils wanted to experiment with how LAMS would work with low ability pupils, and vice versa, “at the minute I have used quite able pupils and I would like to see how low ability respond.” (Teacher no. 20) Teachers who tried LAMS with Key Stage 3, wanted to try it with KS4 and 5.

One teacher talked of plans to extend LAMS use to master classes running at primary level with pupils (Year 6 and 7) working remotely.

A generalisation about LAMS plans of schools, departments and individual teachers is that no one planned for LAMS to take over their whole teaching. Rather, they planned to integrate it within their day-to-day schedule:

“I am looking for it to sit with other similar initiatives so that staff have a range of these. I cannot believe that it will be the only part of our toolbox…that will sit with others so that staff, along with picking the resources, will pick which of these is the best vehicle to deliver their effective teaching.” (Management Personnel no. 1)

16.2 Schools planning to continue – LAMS needsThe final LAMS questionnaire asked school staff for their views on what needs they may have with regards to continuing their use of LAMS. The possible needs were categorised in the questionnaire, so teachers only had to tick the relevant need. Responses were available from 16 staff members. The responses are therefore not necessarily representative of the whole pilot population but can provide a likely picture of pilot schools’ needs in order to continue with their use of LAMS. Figure 16 shows a summary of these needs.

Figure 16 Future LAMS needs (Source: Final LAMS questionnaire, n=16 staff)

6

45

7

11

4

8

5

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

A1 A2 B1 B2 C1 C2 D1 D2

Num

ber o

f sta

ff re

porte

d



Explanation of the above figure:

LAMS hosting LAMS technical training

A1= 6 able to install LAMS on own server C1= 11 able to train other staff

A2= 4 need centrally hosted server C2 = 4 need external training support

LAMS technical support LAMS pedagogical support

B1= 5 able to do without technical support D1= 8 able to make effective use of LAMS

B2= 7 need outside technical support D2 = 5 need pedagogical support



LAMS needs were grouped under four categories: LAMS hosting – elicited whether schools would need the support of a centrally hosted

server as was provided during the pilot by SST or they would be able to install LAMS on their own server. Six staff thought their school would manage without support, while four thought they would need server hosting.

LAMS technical support – seven staff would require outside technical support as had been provided during the pilot by the UK LAMS team. Five teachers thought they would manage with no external technical support (presumably using their own school-based support networks).

LAMS technical training – eleven staff felt able to train other staff members in the use of LAMS while four felt that that they would need to rely on an external training facility to be able to train further staff members in LAMS.

LAMS pedagogical support – eight teachers believed that they were able to make effective use of LAMS for teaching their subject area, while five thought they would need pedagogical support.

The most frequently identified needs seemed to be in the area of technical support with more than 30 per cent of respondents thinking that they would need external support. The above figures showed that there were no clear messages as to the LAMS needs of institutions (at least those who responded to the questionnaire). LAMS requirements need to be considered on a case-by-case basis. The above picture tells us that clearly, if LAMS adoption was extended at these institutions, various forms of support structures (technical and pedagogical) need to be in place.



17 Review recommendations: Pilot and researchThe evidence available to the Review Team for the investigation of subject-specific LAMS pedagogies is currently too limited to identify any emerging models. Amongst LAMS enthusiasts there was a recognition that, although its components all looked familiar, LAMS offered something unique – its learning design ethos being new to the secondary school context – and this was something that engendered excitement.

Practice across all subjects and for all practitioners was mostly tentative and experimental rather than habitual and established. Over the review period, most practitioners, at such an early stage of LAMS adoption, tended to be trialling the ‘big concepts’ of LAMS to check how they related to their current practice. Some potential aspects of LAMS pedagogy that may eventually contribute to subject-specific models have been identified. There is also limited evidence for extensive personalisation (with the main exception being a hearing impaired unit) the chief findings being that teachers obviously target the language and complexity of activities to the immediate needs of the group, but that extension activities and differentiated routes for learning do not yet exist in any practice. Finally, there is no evidence at all (beyond the reported aspirations of schools) for models of home-school links.

As the evidence base is currently circumscribed it is important that further information should be collected through the extension and expansion of the LAMS pilot phase. If LAMS adoption is further supported and propagated in a focussed way then it will be possible to revisit these areas of research and examine the development of the initial pedagogical discoveries presented in this report. Therefore, the recommendations here cover firstly areas in which an extended pilot might be enhanced in order to achieve a more effective adoption of LAMS in schools, and secondly potential areas of future research based on a more comprehensive and directed adoption of LAMS in schools are suggested.

17.1 Recommendations for continuing LAMS adoptionThe Review Team discern that an encouraging level of momentum has been achieved by the pilot but that the majority of early adopters are still at an early stage in this dynamic. There are sufficient positive signs to recommend that the pilot period be extended or enter a second phase. Over the course of the review’s practitioner visits and workshops the team identified elements of the current pilot which future pilots should maintain and enhance and some undeveloped areas of support that would benefit schools and practitioners by being offered. These include: Continuation of the highly-valued technical support. Further encouragement for networks of support, communication and good practice, both

cross-curricular and subject-specific.



o Bringing groups of professionals to work together at the LAMS practitioner workshops proved an effective means of promoting and energising such networks.

Practitioner workshops offer a valuable means of disseminating and discovering excellent LAMS practice in subject-specific groups.

Enhance the support materials available for promoting the uptake of LAMS in schools, subject-specific and general. (Sometimes there is an initial confusion as to what exactly it is that LAMS offers that is new or unique: the capability of orchestrating e-learning.) The review has assembled some elements that could contribute to, for example, a support CD-ROM offering multimedia-supported case histories with exemplar LAMS sequences.

Strengthen the support available to sustain LAMS activity from training into development, implementation and training.

o Following initial training, teachers are more likely to use basic LAMS activities and monitor functions and defer the exploration of more advanced tools until they feel more confident. Follow-up training sessions/workshops could encourage practitioners to step up their skills more rapidly.

o A ‘LAMS clinic’, either visiting schools or set up on a drop-in or workshop model, could be an alternative means of disseminating the information in the above point and for recommending to teachers new models of delivering LAMS sequences e.g. try this activity or this monitor function to achieve goals for their subject.

o A LAMS community e-mail bulletin might provide a more direct ‘reach’ into people’s LAMS awareness than a web-based forum to which people need to make the effort regularly to log in.

o As the LAMS software grows and becomes more sophisticated, it is important that people who have been trained in previous versions receive comprehensive information on how these new features may be utilised e.g. web-based multimedia training materials, examples of applications and case-studies.

o The review team provided some phone-based support to teachers, evidencing a potential need for the provision of a similar, personalised support facility.

Make more subject sequences publicly available. Introduce LAMS to teachers at pre-qualifying level and trainers of teachers by providing

support materials adapted from those recommended for INSET use.

17.2 Recommendations for future researchOnce the coverage of LAMS adoption is more widespread across subjects using LAMS and being used more comprehensively (LAMS is becoming habitual practice rather than a ‘special event’) then it should be possible to discern more securely those emerging models of e-learning that LAMS supports in each subject area.



17.2.1 LAMS and Emerging Models of Subject-Specific e-learningOver the review period, there has been only a limited range of practice in the applications of LAMS and teaching approaches to LAMS sessions. Whilst effective ‘purely on-line’ and ‘blended’ sessions were observed, there is not sufficient evidence to support the assertion that these are replicable models of subject-specific e-learning enabled or emergent through LAMS. It is recommended that future server usage data should be monitored carefully to identify and focus upon active schools. With more data available, future research might: Investigate sequence re-use and adaptation, both subject-specific and general instances.

The integrated LAMS Community Forum that is currently being brought out by LAMS is likely to play a relevant role in any future research.

Investigate LAMS as a tool for formative assessment in its various forms and across subjects. This could include teacher driven formative assessment, pupil self-assessment and peer-to-peer, both in the classroom and school-to-home.

Investigate the potential for using LAMS as a collaborative or team-teaching tool, both locally and internationally.

Conduct controlled studies to examine the impact of LAMS on achievement in key areas, cross-curricular and subject-specific.

17.2.2 LAMS and PersonalisationLAMS offers a limited although improving level of personalisation at the interface level and the highly textual nature of the system rules it out of teachers’ consideration for certain groups of learners e.g. for those with literacy problems. Additionally the review found limited evidence for the personalisation of sequence structures in current LAMS practice. It is recommended that this area needs further research and development.

17.2.3 LAMS and Home-School LinksWhilst there was no evidence of any model of home-school learning revealed by the review, the potential excited considerable interest amongst teachers and pupils. Schools that have thought about this issue cite inequalities between households in the level of ICT provision available (lack of broadband access being the most consistent problem) implying that not all students would be able to complete out of school tasks. Consideration of LAMS and learning design software tends then to be visionary, “There are many aspects of LAMS yet to be explored. The use of distance learning; the idea that work can be completed at home; perhaps even parents could become involved in some way” (Teacher no. 21), (Final LAMS questionnaire)

The anecdotal evidence available from interviews and questionnaires indicates that there are several applications of LAMS envisioned by schools that would merit further research. Parent discussion communities – one school proposed the idea that LAMS could be

utilised in some way to involve a greater number of parents in forum discussions of school issues, rather than continue to rely on the alternative distribution of paper or calls



to attendance at evening meetings. This could be a very powerful means of strengthening links between the home and the school. Models of organisation and effectiveness of such forums might be investigated.

Setting homework for students – schools are interested in the idea of being able to extend classroom activities and experiences into the home using LAMS. Two areas of research would be useful here. Firstly, drawing on established BECTA research to offer solutions to the issue of ICT access and the extent of ‘digital divide’ between students’ homes, which is the most frequently cited barrier to LAMS home use; secondly, investigating models of extending classroom activities into the home, whether these be separate homework sequences (any subject-specific issues) or classroom sequence extension activities, and issues of electronic submission (security and organisation) and teacher feedback.

Students who need to access their learning outside the classroom for whatever reason (illness or exclusion for instance) could have some of their learning needs supplied by LAMS. Subject-specific models of offering out-of-school curriculum opportunities to such learners would be a useful area of research.

17.2.4 LAMS – Other Research RecommendationsThe review has also identified research opportunities that do not necessarily sit under any of the categories above. These research activities focus on LAMS at the level of school management and strategy and at the standards level of learning design: Research into the relationship between LAMS adoption and effective management of

innovation. Integration with Moodle (or other VLEs and school management systems) – examine how

schools that adopt the Moodle VLE deploy and manage LAMS. IMS Learning Design – investigate the practical impact of LAMS becoming IMS Learning

Design compatible. JISC Reload and the European UNFOLD project on learning design – new learning

design tools are being created and released in parallel of the Becta LAMS Review – suggesting the need for comparative studies that would place LAMS use in the greater context of learning design. 7

7 RELOAD: http://www.reload.ac.uk/ UNFOLD project: http://www.unfold-project.net/


http://www.unfold-project.net/

http://www.reload.ac.uk/


18 Comparison with the JISC evaluation: Cross-sector LAMS experiences

The JISC LAMS evaluation, published in June 2005, was carried out in the higher, further and adult community learning sectors, and the current Becta report examined the use of LAMS in UK secondary schools. The two reports had different aims in that the JISC study focused on LAMS as learning design software and whether tools such as LAMS support effective practice in designing for learning whilst the Becta review examined the objectives and achievements of institutions adopting LAMS and consequent subject-specific uses of LAMS in secondary schools. Despite these differences a comparison of the findings of both studies reveals significant cross-sector parallels. These parallels are briefly summarised below:

Retention rate – In terms of the institutional involvement in the pilots, both studies found that the LAMS pilot had a low retention rate with a high number of institutions and practitioners who had not engaged with the pilot. Both studies explored reasons for this, including time and resource commitments and the limitations of LAMS for the target student groups etc. (See Section 3.5.8-JISC and Section 7 for the Becta study for further details.)

Pilot participants’ e-learning experience – Although not explored in detail in the Becta study, it was felt that the participants who took part in the pilot were similar to those in the JISC study, i.e. ICT/e-learning champions, more experienced users and those less ICT-literate but still keen enthusiasts with some ICT knowledge or experience.

Sequences – In both studies students appreciated the independent learning and self-paced nature of LAMS sequences. The learners in the JISC study (HE/FE and adult learners) found the linearity of sequences was potentially limiting their learning styles, whilst this not an issue with secondary school pupils, possibly because of the nature of classroom teaching.

Benefits of LAMS for students – The anticipated and achieved benefits were very similar between the two studies. These were that LAMS: motivates and engages students; supports students partaking in group discussions and collaborative learning; encourages the development of meta-cognitive and reflective skills; caters for a degree of differentiation; allows self-paced working. However, the potential for ‘anytime, anywhere’ learning, whilst recognised by staff in the Becta study, was not realised in practice as was achieved by practitioners in the JISC study.

Benefits of LAMS for teachers – LAMS showed effectiveness in both studies in offering structuring support of learning activities for teachers and also the provision of a common repository of resources. The evaluations found that LAMS was capable of supporting a range of pedagogical approaches be it for teachers of secondary students, higher education tutors or adult and community trainers.



Designing for learning – The JISC study found that using LAMS made practitioners reflect on their own practice. This is parallel to the Becta study in which teachers found that LAMS helped them with lesson planning and structuring learning activities. (See further details on learning design and LAMS in the JISC study.)

Sharing learning designs – Both studies found that practitioners felt it to be a distinct advantage that LAMS offered opportunities for sharing learning designs with other practitioners.

Shortcomings of LAMS – Practitioners involved with special needs students with literacy problems across the different sectors found that LAMS was not suitable for their student group, resulting with some discontinuing with the pilot.

Risks – The JISC study pointed to barriers to LAMS use, including technological problems with LAMS, tutors’ and learners’ ICT skills; the Becta study explored institutional contexts with regards to barriers and enablers to LAMS use. One such example involved ICT room-access by teachers. If teachers were not able to book ICT rooms easily for their subject, access became a barrier.

Online tutor-student interactions – The JISC study found that LAMS was not supporting online tutor-student interactions whilst in the Becta study there was one example of a teacher using the forum and making contributions to a discussion. This may be a useful area to explore for potential future requirements, uses and scenarios for online tutor-student interactions.

Workload efficiency – Both studies reported that practitioners felt that the adoption of LAMS would increase their workload in the short term but would potentially lessen it in future. Creating LAMS sequences was seen as an investment.

The uniqueness of LAMS – Both reviews attempted to explore what made LAMS stand out from other software tools as both had come to the conclusion that the activities LAMS allowed were not new in themselves, but there was still something unique about LAMS, sometimes elusive to practitioners, which could be discerned from practitioners’ comments. Some of these were (see Section 4.1.4-JISC and Section 12-Becta study):

o LAMS could bring together online research and discussion activities in an ordered, ‘orchestrated’ manner, the activity (and not content) being the focus.

o Teachers were able to monitor students and their contributions from the classroom or from a distance.

o Activities are not new but added some extra dimensions, as for example, anonymous student contributions.

o The visual representation of a learning sequence lent itself to a useful overview or abstraction of learning design, even though practitioners may not have been consciously aware of the concept of learning design itself.

LAMS and VLEs – Both reviews found practitioners comparing LAMS to VLEs, as perhaps the closest tools available at the time of the studies being undertaken8. LAMS

8 Britain (2004) provided a review of learning design tools – these were either not offering functions on the scale of LAMS, or were not yet widely available to practitioners or were just being developed (e.g. Coppercore, EduBox, Eduplone, Lobster and Reload).



was found to have more sophisticated administration facilities and less rigid structure to support differentiation than VLEs, the JISC study reported. Although there was no explicit focus on this comparison in the Becta study, both studies’ participants called for the integration of VLEs and LAMS to provide a simpler logon and in appreciation of the fact that the two should be complementary.

LAMS usage and training needs – the JISC study provided a detailed analysis of 14 learning sequences including the type of activities and concluded that the Noticeboard, Share Resources and Question and Answer were the most used activities, while some activity types were not used at all. The Becta study also found that certain activity types, especially the ones needing more advanced knowledge or that appeared in later LAMS versions, were less used, pointing to the need for and importance of continuous LAMS training. (see Section 3.6-JISC and Section 14-Becta)

Sequence management – Practitioners across all sectors found that the management of LAMS sequences was difficult, calling for a more organised structure which was recorded as an enhancement.

Recommendations for LAMS hosting – The JISC study recommends that LAMS be hosted for another 2 years for the pilot to further develop as there will be some institutions lacking the expertise to host and support the open source LAMS software. This recommendation is also confirmed in the Becta study, calling attention to the case-by-case needs institutions may have with regard to their continuing with (or embarking on) their LAMS adoption.

In terms of the context of LAMS use, practitioners in both studies delivered LAMS sessions which contained asynchronous and synchronous LAMS activities. The difference lay in the delivery location in that, whereas the secondary school context was exclusively classroom use of LAMS, students of LAMS at higher and further education institutions might have logged on to LAMS from anywhere to complete their sequence.



19 ReferencesBecta ICT Research (2005) What the research says about ICT and motivation at http://www.becta.org.uk/page_documents/research/wtrs_motivation.pdf

Becta LAMS Interim Report (2005) Commissioned by Becta and written by the LAMS Review Team , CRIPSAT, Centre for Lifelong Learning, University of Liverpool. http://www.cripsat.org.uk

Britain, S (2004) A review of learning design: concept, specifications and tools: a report for the JISC e-learning Pedagogy Programme, May. Available at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/ACF1ABB.doc

Gibbs, D; O’Sullivan, K (2005 in press) Thinking outside the square: using LAMS to teach a concept. Curriculum and Teaching

Masterman, E; Lee, S (2005) Evaluation of the practitioner trial of LAMS: Final Report. Learning Technologies Group, Oxford University Computing Services. Report commissioned by JISC.http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/LAMS%20Final%20Report.pdf

Parry, Andy. (2005) Evaluation of LAMS Training. Kemnal Technology College, Sidcup, Kent.


http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/LAMS%20Final%20Report.pdf

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/ACF1ABB.doc

http://www.cripsat.org.uk/

http://www.becta.org.uk/page_documents/research/wtrs_motivation.pdf


20 Appendices

20.1 Appendix A – LAMS Tools

LAMS tools –



LAMS tools continued –


learning activity management system specialist...

Documents