Jennifer Gutridge, Digital Learning Developer from Durham University was a speaker at PebbleBash 2024 and presented ‘Diving into PebblePad.’ Click here to watch the video with the full transcript or if you’re having trouble viewing the video above.
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My name is Jen Gutridge, and I would class myself as a PebblePad newbie. I’m gonna explain my first project using PebblePad, and I’m kinda going with the swim lanes kind of theme. So six months into my role as a digital learning developer at Durham, I was introduced to PebblePad. I had known about it before, but this was me using it. And around the same time, I met in the Science into Schools placement tutors.
So in these, they spend students spend ten weeks learning the theory of becoming a science teacher and then attend to ten week placement. And I suggested digitizing their formative self reflective journal template into a PebblePad workbook. So I had a couple of excited, module tutors to jump in with me, and this is what I was doing. I was taking them with me, and I felt like I was kind of just jumping into the unknown, but they were happy. They came with me. So for this initial pilot, to avoid too much change, we followed the same format as the PDF. So we kept it structured, consistent, simple.
So it was a page for each week, text entry boxes, for each of the prompts.
But we did have that added perk of the PebblePad offered where you could upload the resources with, the content, so it was all in one place.
So then our PebblePad customer support managers suggested introducing, Likert scales for confidence. So thank you, Neil, and thank you for your support.
So we use these for confidence in the themes that were discussed in the module, like teamwork and leadership. And we had them at the start and the end of term one, and then at the end of term two.
Now, yes, this was a self-reflection journal, and usually, this is private to the students.
So but for these pilots, we did set it as an auto submit assignment, for to help us monitor its use, and for us to critique the journal template as well. And I’ll come back to some student feedback on this. So setting it up this way enabled the tutors to monitor the confidence scales and determine the areas where they’d been struggling, and then they could adjust their teaching accordingly to support the varying needs of the students.
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