personalised and adaptive assessment is needed

The single most powerful feature of the web, is the way it offers individual choice.

This 'personalisation' capability of everything from content sources to social interaction to shopping, has allowed everyone to tailor everything around them, to be about them.

This is the world that students live in.

There is little point debating how anyone could construct a parallel universe where education is experienced one way and life is experienced another.

Teachers and schools now have a unique opportunity to take command of their true domain value..... the accurate and interactive assessment of their students. 

Literatu allows schools and teachers to take command of new assessment capabilities that personalise and adapt to student needs quicker and more interactively than ever before.

the game changer is re-imagining what your materials can do

Vast. One word that describes the amount of content anyone can obtain online, about anything.

Even with this massive over-supply, publishers everywhere are re-packaging and re-creating their content into new digital forms,
laying claim to it being even 'better' content than before. 

This 'better' content really only represents a shift in the way content is delivered, and YES,  there is a huge learning and 'familiarisation' curve for teachers. New content means more changes to your established pedagogy and more time spent aligning learning with assessment.

To extend and transform current processes, literatu helps teachers to:

• modernise and extend the way current assessments are created, deployed and measured
• transform their unique domain experience and materials across new delivery mediums
• adapt and personalise student assessment 
• remain independent of locked and closed publisher based content sources 
• quickly measure students against common core standards and other curricula
• collaborate on assessment development, sharing and building best practice
• keep assessment content sources open and highly flexible
• augment varied materials and sources of good content with assessments
• take control over what goes on each student's screen

A brief history

As with many great products that have been built across the world,  there was a simple message that started the evolution of literatu.

To start at the end of our story,  we believe teachers in front of a class are the authentic content and assessment people.

We worked with Macquarie University and schools in Sydney, testing how our online application could help students learn to write better, more competent long text compositions. Research concluded that three interventions are effective in helping students write better long form text compositions.

1. The learning and writing should be done on computer (who writes with pens now right?)
2. Students compose better responses if scaffolded support and guidance is available.
3. Integrated feedback and collaboration from teachers and mentors is critical.

Our conclusions, agreed with this research. You can read the final university report  if you like. http://hswiki.ltc.mq.edu.au/Epping_Makebook_Project

Working with the schools, teachers recreated instructional materials across several subjects . We helped teachers built scaffolds and interactive guides to help students construct many types of long form compositions. However,  we believe we overlooked one crucial input. There was limited teacher 'mojo' in what we had produced.  We certainly got the students writing better compositions but we wanted to make a sustainable platform that would persist in the class.

At the start of the project, teachers had all their materials, scaffolds and accompanying assessment materials in various formats. They really didn't want to leave these multi-format materials behind or spend more time re-creating them in new formats. They were happy to keep photocopying and emailing the materials they had, dealing with paper and email documents on return from students. We felt that we needed to better harness these instructional materials and integrate them into a complete start to finish experience for students. The teachers were already very talented users of all types of packages like Word and Powerpoint so why ask them to learn another authoring system?

At the end of the trial, we had learnt that technology does makes a difference to students. The bigger, more obvious lesson in hindsight was that technology has to be driven quickly and simply by time poor teachers, most of whom already have a vast number of instructional materials not easily transformed into 'on screen' , interactive activities.

As students started getting more access to laptops and tablet based devices, teachers started emailing materials in Word, Powerpoint and One Note to students. Floods of email started moving around the in-boxes. It all got printed out so paper management remained an issue.

Via paper or email , the workload remains massive. Paper and files everywhere, and that's before marking starts. We watched this happen and formed a view around what really would be  "progress" for teachers.

As text books started to come out in 'digital PDF' format, students were quick to work with the texts online, across any device they got their hands on.

We watched them come home with assigned work, copy the question from their preferred screen into their exercise book and then go about answering the question with a pen! This is happening in 2013 AD? Students still come home with so much paper.

Their exercise books are sometimes marked, most times not, sometimes marked in class by over zealous classmates with a sense of humour. The feedback is variable and no-one knows what part of the curriculum they don't fully understand.

All that work is lost, unrecorded, dubiously marked and of no use in revision planning. As stories move across the press about student levels and overall scores across a range of subjects progressively heading south, everyone asks "All this technology we have been paying for is supposed to extend student ability.. right?"

We realised that technology needed to make a bigger difference, a difference that could be easier driven by all teachers in a context they could better engage and extend their authentic materials. For many teachers, it is too easy to revert back to photocopies and email assessment management and we understand why. Technology advancements need to be made specifically for teachers and students, not administrators or IT people.

Literau is a place where Teachers can control what goes onto the screens of students who stare at screens all day, and we are not referring to white boards. We want to connect teachers with students across any 'screenery'.

Literatu was developed out of our authentic experiences in classrooms. We aligned what literatu does to what teachers do.

Teachers can re-use all of their materials, easily create new materials and augment to any other materials from other sources. If inclined, teachers can share materials across communities, building extensions and better experiences as they grow. 

All teachers are invigorated when they see their current experience materials reset and interactive across web, iPad or tablet devices in minutes.