About Spiral

 

Spiral is an online platform designed to enable teachers to connect with their learners through the use of a number of collaborative apps for use in teaching and learning. Each of these apps can be used to encourage participation and engagement by all learners and to enable the teacher to provide effective feedback in order to help them learn and improve. An introductory video sets out some of the key advantages of the software and uses motivational language designed to engage teachers, such as “elevate your educational relationship” and inviting them to “do some powerful things like elicit responses from every student…”.

Spiral was developed in partnership with the Institute of Education, based at University College London, which is recognised as a world-leading centre for research and teaching in education. Designed to enhance the connection between the teacher and the learners, this platform acknowledges the many demands that teachers face, and aims to facilitate greater interaction between all the learners through an interface which facilitates quizzes, presentation, video clips and team activities.

Through the website, teachers can access four different apps, each designed to foster collaborative learning whilst facilitating effective feedback from the teacher and thereby improving learning.

Quickfire

Teachers can ask a verbal or written question for use in formative assessment, and learners respond on devices with a written or drawn answer. The teacher can review the responses on the board, with either name displayed or hidden. Hiding the names can encourage less confident learners to participate and encourages them to take risks in responding even when they are not sure of their answer. Some learners may be asked to improve or revise their responses through the software, and all responses can be reviewed collaboratively with the whole class. The software keeps a record of the marks and can also produce an exit ticket. Quickfire can be used to introduce a new topic, assess or review a current topic, and reinforce knowledge and understanding.

 

Discuss

The Discuss app allows the teacher to create a presentation, either using an existing file from another application such as PowerPoint or from new, which incorporates collaboration and discussion between the learners. All students are encouraged to participate, and their individual and group progress can be tracked through the software. Questions and tasks for learners can be used during the presentation to identify prior knowledge, to assess understanding and to review answers together with learners being asked to review each other’s responses. Verbal responses and feedback can be used to highlight strong responses and to address misconceptions that become apparent from responses.

Team Up

Team Up provides a facility for groups of learner to work together on creating joint presentation, analysing the requirements and sharing ideas in order to produce the required outcome. The topic of the presentation task may be the same for all groups or alternatively different tasks may be set for each group. The teams may be chosen randomly, or the teacher may plan mixed ability groups in order to incorporate differentiation. The team members can continue to review their work and add improvements throughout the task. Once completed, each team can be invited to present their work to the rest of the class, using their own device as a remote control for the board at the front of theclass. The teacher can review the contribution of each member within the team, and again this data is tracked within the software.

Clip

The fourth tool, Clip, enables the teacher to show learners a video and ask them to focus on specific elements therein. Learners may be encouraged to add comments to a live feed, which appears alongside the video, as it plays. The teacher can set up the video to pause at certain points when the learners will be prompted with questions, which may be open, closed, or multiple choice, and the learners then respond through their devices. The responses can be displayed on the screen and reviewed together, allowing the teacher to provide effective feedback and ask learners to develop answers further where appropriate.