As many schools wake up to how incredible control, programming and robotics can be as a subject area, it is also exciting to see robots themselves revolutionising how other technologies are used in education. “Swivl” is a robot that has been developed to hold your video camera of choice and then track you as you move around a room and interact with students. It does this by following a Bluetooth lanyard which you can carry or wear.
The lanyard has a built- in microphone to pick up high quality audio and cut out all the background noise that you usually get when recording in a classroom environment. The video camera can be an iPhone, iPad, iPod – any device running iOS7 or later, or any Android device, and it can adapt to take most smartphones, tablets or video cameras.
Students at Pakuranga College are definitely “Swivling”. This ground breaking technology arrived in New Zealand in mid-2014 but Allistair Williamson, the e-learning coordinator and his staff and students pre-empted its arrival on these shores. Allistair first spotted the Swivl during a visit by six Pakuranga College staff to Monte Vista Christian School in California. This school was the first 1:1 iPad school in the world and has continued exploring new technologies with the appointment of a Research and Development Co-ordinator on staff. The Pakuranga College staff bought two Swivls back to Auckland and set about investigating their potential.
The College initially focused on supporting the staff continuous professional development programme. Allistair explains, “We have a weekly PD programme, with students starting an hour later every Friday, to reflect on our practice using an inquiry cycle. Analysis of video is an important part of this inquiry.” Swivl brought two benefits to video reflection. Firstly, the quality of the audio improved dramatically because of the mic built into the lanyard. Now they could easily analyse discourse to measure how often they used open ended as opposed to closed questions. Critical moments were not drowned out by chairs scraping or discussion taking place elsewhere in the room. Secondly, the ability of Swivl to follow the teacher as they moved around the room made the whole exercise much more meaningful then when done previously when for much of the video the teacher might be out of shot.
Once teachers started to use Swivl for their own development, they soon realised the potential for students to reflect on their own presentations. Teachers in the English department began to record their students. Allistair describes how now almost every department has seen the potential. “My own department, Physical Education, have been piloting using it to capture speed tests. Students can then analyse their biomechanical movements and techniques. This is being rolled out further this academic year.”
Pakuranga College are using the iPod with Swivl to capture the video because they wanted something that was easy for tutors to extract the content from. The Swivl and the accompanying iPod are kept in the library and the school uses a booking system. Just as with the Flipcams of old, they expect demand to grow and the numbers of Swivls to increase.
This year they really want to explore using Swivl for creating records of learning for students, and for creating content to support flipped classrooms. The one barrier that Allistair sees is the reluctance of some staff to have video of them teaching in the public domain. The College is now using Google Classroom and this provides a more closed environment in which to share video. He hopes this will help with some staff reluctance. Such is the quality of the audio recording he also thinks that teachers will utilise the Swivl solely for its audio recording capabilities and map the “soundtrack” to slideshows for student use.
Pakuranga College, following the lead of Monte Vista Christian School, has also developed a R&D role within the school. Some “out of the box” thinking has already materialised. The College is using AirServer, an app that lets you wirelessly beam your iPad display to your Mac or PC and from there to your projector or HDTV. When this is combined with Swivl it means that a presenter in the hall for example, can be tracked and the live feed displayed on the projector so that even students at the back can see and hear.
Perhaps the most positive aspect of the integration of Swivl has been the interest of staff that may once have been described as ‘Old School’. Once they saw the new way that they can reflect on their teaching practice they were willing to give it a go. So for once it is not just the ‘early adopters’ who are getting to play with the new robot!
Other examples of how this simple robot is having a positive impact on education are being seen in the USA. The company Swivl’s mission is “to improve education through video”. To support this objective they ran a Swivl Pioneer’s programme and gave Swivls to teachers who had creative uses for video content.
A teacher, who had originally intended to use her Swivl with new teachers wishing to reflect on their own teaching practise, took the whole concept of unobtrusive observation a step further. She had a student who was unaware of the effect that his disruptive behaviour in class was having on other students. With consent from the parents and principal she captured and analysed examples of the student’s disruptive behaviour. In a three way conference, the parents, student and the teacher reviewed the footage. This removed any value judgements from the discussion and allowed the student to begin to develop an awareness of the impact of his behaviour. The parent-teacher conference could then focus on a plan to improve the student and his classmates’ learning.
Another example (also from the United States) is of Swivl being used to support teachers working in remote outposts. A specialist team working for the Special Education Service Agency was tasked to provide case consultation and technical assistance to teachers across Alaska. The description of working across Alaska is not that dissimilar to issues facing those in similar roles in New Zealand: “Trips can be time-consuming and cost thousands of dollars to travel to the farthest locations: weather problems, rough roads or small planes do not make the laborious trips any easier for him.” Well, maybe on a slightly smaller scale…!
However these specialists now capture all their case consultations using Swivl and share parts that maybe of interest to others. They also use Swivl to create example videos such as modelling how to redirect a student with challenging behaviour. Plus they use Swivl to effortlessly capture all their workshops and conference presentations to share with all those teachers who would never be able to attend such events. By using Swivl they ensure that not only the speakers’ contributions are captured but input from the audience can easily be recorded too.
Finally, teachers in the USA are using Swivl to support flipping the classroom. The lanyard not only has a built-in mic but also a clicker to forward any presentation slides that you may be using. It actually time stamps the video when the slides are forwarded. Thus when your session is finished and you upload your video for the students, it will map the video content exactly to the slide.
Swivl is a powerful tool for learning made possible by the integration of robots into the classroom. Rather than replacing the teachers as some have feared, robots are actually helping humanoid teachers improve their practice!