Northernlands 2 - Teacher Tapp

Description

Tom Forth interviews Laura McInerney, Founder of Teacher Tapp, and Dr Amber Walraven, Associate Professor at Radboud Academy, about the way that Teacher Tapp engages with teachers, and how the successful app is being rolled out in the Netherlands

Transcript

This transcript comes from the captions associated with the video above. It is "as spoken".

00:09 So I think to start off, the best thing is if you could tell me who you are

00:15 My name is Laura McInerney and I'm the CEO of

00:21 Teacher Tapp. Fantastic and I suppose the question everyone will have

00:25 is what is Teacher Tapp?

00:27 Are you sure everyone else? I think some people will know, but

00:30 if you don't then Teacher Tapp is a survey app that surveys

00:34 teachers every day so they have it on their phone. It pings once

00:38 per day and then it gives him about 3 questions. They answer

00:41 the questions and they get to see the results of the day before

00:45 There's a little bit of gamification There's some badges available and

00:48 there's a daily read on the final page, but otherwise that's it.

00:51 It takes about a minute to minute and a half for teachers

00:54 We've now got about 9000

00:56 users every day. And the things they say they love about it is

01:00 that they enjoy answering the questions that make something

01:02 They loved seeing the answers 'cause they're often spending

01:04 lots their day on their own so they don't get to see what

01:07 happens in other classrooms. And also they really appreciate having

01:10 one thing to do today - two to three minutes that helps you get

01:14 better at their job, but isn't. You know you're not going to

01:17 have to scroll through loads and loads of social media to make it

01:20 happen. Yeah, so at the end of the day you show the

01:26 teachers who've answered questions all of the results.

01:30 And you include a link to some learning or blogs. Is that

01:34 right? Yeah, that's right. So this one blog every day. It's

01:38 just one curated and picked for you. Fantastic. In the time that

01:43 you've been running Teacher Tapp, which is a few years now, in

01:47 the UK. Which has been your favorite result? What's the

01:51 output that you've had from it That's been most exciting or

01:55 surprising or interesting? So there's a difference there there's

01:58 my favorite result. And then there's the one that had the

02:00 most surprising output, so I'll give you my most favorite

02:03 question is when we ask on New Year's Day or we asked on New

02:06 Year's Day a couple of years ago, which was imagine you're

02:09 walking down the street, and a

02:10 genie appears. You can have one

02:13 of three wishes. Would you like to have number one: total

02:16 well being for you and your

02:18 colleagues? #2 top exam results, for every child in your school

02:22 or #3 £1,000,000 in your bank. And if you ask a room full

02:26 of teachers this, you know, very few people put their hand up

02:31 for the million pound. Yeah when you ask on an app what you find

02:35 is around 75% of teachers will pick the million pound and my

02:39 cofounder professor Becky Allen who comes from an economic background

02:42 and her question was who was the 25% who didn't take the £1,000,000

02:46 in their bank. But it seems quite shocking.

02:50 So that was my favorite result. And then in terms of the impact,

02:53 we've actually had lots of different ones and things that

02:56 government ministers have talked about: big policy changes. But my

02:59 favorite was a teacher who ran up to me at a conference and said "thank

03:02 you so much for Teacher Tapp.

03:05 We took the finding that over half of schools don't have to

03:08 pay for their hot drinks to our Head Teacher as we had to pay for

03:12 tea/coffee in our staff room. We thought it was completely unfair and

03:16 we showed them that actually loads of other schools got it

03:19 for free. They gave us pretty and coffee". So somewhere out

03:22 there there's someone having a brew

03:24 on Teacher Tapp. I'm amazed, I'm amazed that you would make

03:28 teachers pay for tea and coffee, but you started this two or three

03:32 years ago. You're up to something like 10,000 teachers.

03:37 Is that about right?

03:39 Yes, there about 9000 teachers now and I have to say that I've

03:43 just noticed the date and this time three years ago I was

03:46 actually lying in hospital with sepsis nearly dying. We just

03:49 about four days earlier set up what was going to become Teacher

03:53 Tapp and then yeah my body decided to try and off me and

03:57 then when it didn't manage, the nice thing was I had a whole

04:01 summer in which I was recuperating and we were able to

04:04 plan and develop the app. So in some ways it was great.

04:08 What's next for the app? So 10,000 teachers in UK is

04:11 fantastic where are you going next and what are the challenges

04:14 with that expansion? One of the things that people

04:17 have said all along is "well can we go to other countries?" and

04:21 that would be amazing because there's a lot of questions that

04:24 we get answers to and we think, well, that's just how

04:27 teaching is. But what if actually it turns out that maths

04:30 teachers answer these questions completely differently in

04:32 another country? You can't just say then, or that's how maths

04:35 teachers are. So we've already launched. Teacher Tapp Ghana

04:38 that's piloting at the moment and is off. We also launched

04:41 Teacher Tapp Netherlands, so we've now got Dutch speakers on the

04:44 app and tweeting me in Dutch, which is amazing. It's sort of I

04:48 can never quite. It sounds a bit like Geordie half the time mixed

04:53 with some different letters, but it's amazing. So exciting to see

04:57 the questions in another language. And obviously we'd

04:59 like to do more countries and expansions in the future as well

05:03 as the fact that we're about to launch in a couple weeks time

05:08 Parent Ping, which isn't going to be something related to

05:11 parents. Now I will let slip that me and Dan developed the

05:15 very first version of Teacher Tapp.

05:17 But I know nothing about Parent Ping. I've not been

05:20 involved with it at all. What is

05:23 Parent Ping? I mean, it's very, very similar to Teacher Tapp, so

05:26 the same concept and at the moment it's just in development.

05:29 We're just starting to test it, but the aim should be that

05:32 parents will be able to do the same thing. So answer some

05:35 questions, see what other people

05:37 are saying and read something very simple, everyday.

05:39 And as a parent you know it's really difficult. You don't

05:42 always know what other people are doing, and you don't always

05:45 want to ask. You don't want to get into these kind of

05:47 competitive WhatsApp groups where you ask somebody about

05:49 what you're doing on lock down and the next thing you know,

05:52 you've got 53 pictures from somebody who's got amazing

05:54 timetables everywhere and she's

05:55 done gingerbread cookies and you know some bloke is

06:00 cooking with his kids. You just want something very simple and

06:04 that's what we're hoping that Parent Ping will be. I suppose

06:08 that's like your earlier point around teachers lying or being

06:12 sociable and saying they wouldn't take £1,000,000 when

06:15 really they would take £1,000,000, right? And probably

06:18 the public persona of parents is quite different to just trying

06:22 to make sure that their kids are out the door at half past 8.

06:27 Well, exactly and you know then there's really tricky

06:29 questions, like how much money is the tooth fairy, and I

06:32 know that sounds really simple, but you don't want to

06:35 overshoot the first time and then find out that everybody in

06:38 the other class you know wasn't giving away pound coins.

06:41 But you also don't want to be too stingy if you start asking

06:44 people that everyone's got to look as if they're giving lots

06:47 of money away. So I think there's some really interesting

06:49 tiny little things that we can work on, and they don't sound

06:52 important to begin with. But like with the tea and coffee

06:55 that can make quite a big difference to teacher moral

06:57 and well being, and that's one of the things we were.

07:00 focussed on likewise with Parent Ping you just don't know

07:03 what will make people feel better, more confident, more

07:06 interested in becoming a better parent until we start asking the

07:09 questions. Fantastic and the last thing I want to talk about

07:14 is the blog so.

07:16 The data that you collect is extremely personal, so you can't

07:20 publish the data. It's individual teachers data, but

07:23 you do publish a blog relatively often with results. What does

07:27 that involve and what kind of readership do you think you get

07:32 on that blog? So important point there - the statistics that

07:36 we we provide in the kind of the graphics and the results that

07:41 we're sharing are at that top aggregate level. So we're not

07:45 sharing individuals data.

07:46 But then what happens is so my cofounder, and actually the

07:50 person who came up with the idea initially is Professor Becky

07:53 Allen. As I said, she's an economist by background. Also an

07:56 amazing quantitative researcher. I mean, you've met her Tom, she's

07:59 amazingly impressive. And so what happens each week is Becky

08:02 looks back over what we've been learning and curates the

08:05 best findings, develops graphs and puts those findings out to

08:08 the world and has been on Mondays. It's going to be on

08:12 Tuesdays, going forwards, and those then get picked up by

08:15 journalists, by education policy

08:16 makers. We made a lot of our data initially when Covid was

08:19 happening. We made a lot of it as open as we could in terms of

08:24 those aggregate results, and that meant that decisions could

08:26 be taken at the highest level based on up-to-date information,

08:29 which otherwise just wouldn't have been available. So I have

08:32 to say the blog is very much Becky's genius and then other

08:35 people who are the geniuses that make things work in the country

08:38 tend to read it and overall the nice thing is, it means you

08:42 helping people from biscuits right through to decisions

08:45 around for instance the tuition

08:46 next year that's happening in schools. We ask questions

08:49 around that. We ask questions around when the kids should be

08:53 going back. Government doesn't always listen, but at least

08:56 we've got the data. Fantastic. Thanks very much, Laura.

09:05 So my first question for you, Amber is, can you introduce

09:11 yourself so that our audience Northernlands 2 know who you

09:16 are? I can, my name is Amber Walraven. I'm an assistant

09:22 professor at the Radboud University at the ITE of the Radboud

09:27 University called Radboud Docenten Academie or are Radbput

09:32 Teachers Academy. I teach general didactics there and I'm

09:36 also currently running research projects where we involve

09:40 Teacher Tapp. So we brought Teacher Tapp to the Netherlands

09:45 and I'm running that platform in the Netherlands at the moment

09:50 Excellent. So we spoke to Laura Teacher Tapp in the UK earlier

09:56 and she was telling us about how they have sometimes 10,000

10:01 teachers answering that

10:03 question. How many teachers do you have answering your

10:06 questions at the moment in the Netherlands? Well, we've only

10:11 been running for four weeks with a small test group, so at the

10:16 moment we have between 60 and 80

10:19 people answering. A long way to go.

10:22 After four weeks in the UK we did not

10:28 have 60 people. OK, it was still just Laura's friends really

10:32 and Becky's friend. Even with just 60 people. Have you

10:37 had any interesting results yet from Teacher Tapp? Now of course

10:42 I think every result is interesting. I look forward to

10:46 the results every day.

10:48 But I think the question we had the most

10:54 what do you call it? Response that's been given

11:00 by the largest group of people is about whether it would help

11:05 to receive a bonus to go to work in a school in part of your

11:12 town. What's the English word. It's Friday afternoon and

11:17 I'm searching for my words. Deprived? That's what I mean.

11:21 We had a sum of money. Our government said we need to do

11:27 something about our four large cities which have a teacher

11:31 shortage. Big teacher shortage. How can we get people to go to

11:36 work in our four big cities and one of our cities, Amsterdam

11:41 said "Let's give teachers a bonus" and we ask our participants

11:46 about would that bonus personally make you go and

11:50 work in such a school?

11:52 And 71% said no.

11:55 It was interesting I thought Yes, I think they have

12:00 asked some similar questions in Teacher Tapp in the UK.

12:05 Some of them are maybe a bit more capitalistic than that in

12:10 some of the answers perhaps. Well we followed up, of

12:14 course with a few days later with a question about teaching

12:18 in certain schools, does it require extra skills of

12:23 teachers, most of them said yes,

12:25 absolutely. And we also said what would be a reason for you

12:29 to go and work. And some said "I need to feel that I can

12:33 "make a difference over there."

12:36 "Plus I need smaller class size".

12:40 Excellent, yeah, I think this is these are the kind of results

12:44 that I love from the app so the government would be better

12:48 to improve the quality of the job not to pay teachers more.

12:52 Excellent, can I ask how you found out about Teacher Tapp in

12:57 the first place? How did you learn about it? On Twitter I think. I'm

13:02 a huge Twitter fan. I tweet all the time. Most people ask how I

13:07 can get any work done with the amounts of tweets. Sometimes it

13:11 turns into free work, doesn't it? That's what I find.

13:15 I'm a teacher, educator with also special profile aimed at

13:19 ICT in education. So I feel it's part of my job to be involved in

13:24 things in ICT, in education as well. So I saw it on Twitter

13:29 I think and then I started to follow and I looked

13:35 at the website and a few years ago I thought it would be great

13:40 if we could have a Dutch version. So I already contacted

13:44 Becky at that time, but I did not have the funding at that

13:49 time and when I was writing a new research proposal, I kind of

13:54 wrote Teacher Tapp in the proposal said we need to have as

13:58 a building block for our research and that's.

14:01 why we have Teacher Tapp now for at least three years in

14:07 the Netherlands? So what is the plan for Teacher Tapp in the

14:12 Netherlands? More users, I guess. More users making sure we

14:17 have... well, we aim at primary, secondary and

14:21 vocational education, and at the moment I

14:25 think we have more users in primary education. So a step would

14:30 be upping the users but also making sure we have enough users

14:35 in all of our groups. And all of our regions. And I think my most

14:41 important goal is also to find the users that are not on

14:45 Twitter. So to make sure that the people who are using it will

14:50 go to their colleagues and say please download it and use it as

14:55 well and to make sure that Teacher Tapp can become

14:59 something that they talk about during lunch everyday.

15:02 That's I think my main goal. Of course having a lot of

15:08 users is great but making sure that it helps the actual

15:12 teachers in schools is more

15:14 important. And I guess that the the primary difficulty

15:20 in just... we could not just copy the app from the UK to the

15:25 Netherlands, because the questions would all be in

15:28 English. What other challenges have there been apart from that,

15:31 or has it been quite easy?

15:33 Translating is one, but you have things like Head

15:40 Teachers and we don't have things like Head Teacher, so

15:45 it's trying to use the right concepts and then.

15:51 So it's not just about translating, it's also a

15:54 different structure in education

15:56 as well. Yes, I know that in Teacher Tapp even within the UK

16:03 they have some fun feedback because Scotland has a different

16:07 education system to England. So they ask a lot of questions and

16:12 the language is obviously understandable. But the question

16:15 is meaningless. Yes, can I ask a bit more widely about

16:19 technology in education? As part of this conference, we are

16:24 talking to a lot of people in the Netherlands, in the UK and in

16:29 the USA about how they think technology will change work, how

16:33 it will change socializing.

16:35 We have not heard anything about how people think technology will

16:39 change education. In this conference you mean or in

16:43 general... In this conference, just in this conference we are mostly

16:47 technology users and developers, not education specialists.

16:50 Yeah, well there are a lot of people that say technology will change

16:54 education in a huge way but they've been

17:00 saying that for I think about 10 years and indeed you haven't

17:05 seen a lot of big changes in actual teaching or education.

17:09 Yes, people use apps but a lot of time it's what we call

17:14 substitution. So you do on your computer, what you could also

17:18 do using a paper and a pencil, and I think that's not the way

17:24 we should look at technology in education. We should

17:28 use technology

17:30 to do things we can't do without

17:34 technology. Or to make it perhaps easier for some

17:40 teachers to provide things like feedback or formative

17:44 assessment. I think what we saw now in the last period, I think

17:50 Teacher Tapp UK ask a question a few days ago about what would

17:56 you keep from all this distant education, the upcoming year

18:01 when you go back to school, and I think the flexibility and the

18:07 individual feedback is

18:08 something that will stay. And I think because all the teachers

18:13 were forced to use technology they couldn't say no anymore.

18:18 I think we will start using

18:21 technology for purposes that go beyond what we already

18:28 did in the classroom and for

18:31 really... what's the English word... including

18:36 everyone in our classrooms? So I think that's the biggest

18:41 option right now. An upcoming option for technology, and it's

18:45 not about making it fun, it's about helping the learning and I

18:51 think we have seen now what technology, what the differences

18:55 between making it fun and using technology to help people learn?

19:00 Excellent, yeah, I think we have all learned a lot the last three

19:05 months about technology. Also I think we have learned how

19:09 many of the things don't work.

19:11 Things that we have built because we thought they might

19:15 work don't work and some things work that we didn't think would

19:20 work. Yeah, but it's often built from a designer's perspective

19:23 and not from a teaching or

19:25 learning perspective. What often happens is we have a designer

19:29 that comes up with a great tool and then say, well I have to

19:34 sign this now go and use it and then every teacher said says

19:39 "I'm not going to use it". We involve teachers before you start

19:43 designing and talk to teachers about their classroom

19:46 activities and about learning, then you can design together

19:49 with the teachers and that would

19:52 really upgrade I think. Fantastic, so last of all

19:56 Amber, if anybody is watching in the Netherlands, how can they

20:00 download Teacher Tapp and start using it? They can go to the App

20:05 Store store or Google Play and just download. There is

20:09 only one Teacher Tapp app so it's the same app as in the UK.

20:15 But if they are in Rotterdam they will get Dutch questions

20:19 and if they're in London they will get English questions.

20:23 Yes. After the update and we're waiting for the update

20:26 and it it should be in a few days next week and then from

20:30 that moment on if you say "I'm in the Netherlands" then

20:33 you get the Dutch questions.