Project

Next Generation Teaching, Education and Learning for Life

NEXT-TELL is an Integrated Project (IP) in the ICT challenge of the 7th framework programme of the EC; its main objective is to provide, through research and development, computational and methodological support to teachers and students.

To bring about our vision of 21st Century classroom learning, NEXT-TELL will work towards these main objectives:

  1. Articulate a conceptual framework for designing and implementing methods that can be used to formatively assess ICT-enhanced learning and to negotiate the assessment process amongst stakeholders.
  2. Provide resources and ICT support for teachers and students to develop learning activities and appraisal methods appropriate for 21st Century learning based on this conceptual framework.
  3. Provide IT support in the classroom so that teachers and students have available nuanced information about students’ learning when it is needed and in a format that is supportive of decision making, thus optimizing levels of stimulation, challenge, and feedback.
  4. Provide IT support for making students’ activities in informal learning places – and in general in the “learning ecology” outside of school – part of ‘accountable work’, thus building on students’ interests, fostering their identity development and supporting their social networks.
  5. Foster in-service teachers’ professional development by providing new methods and tools forlearning from students’ learning and for learning from peers’ teaching.
  6. Increase a school’s capacity for data-driven decision making by means of leadershipdevelopment, including ICT support for the strategic planning of teachers’ professional development.

NEXT-TELL’s formost goal is to provide an innovation platform, used by teachers to continuously and collaboratively innovate ICT-enhanced formative classroom assessment. To achieve this, NEXT-TELL provides method and tool support on three levels:

  1. For the teacher (and for students) in the class, and for homework, to help with pedagogical decision making (feedback, instructional planning);
  2. For groups of teachers conducting inquiries into students’ learning with the aim to improve pedagogy and use of ICT in their teaching;
  3. For principals and head teachers to strategically align ICT with pedagogical goals of their school.

The Next-Tell software system is composed of six layers:

Starting from the ECAAD layer, where assessments get developed and integrated into learning activity sequences, in the learning environment these activities get enacted by students, and information relevant for formative assessment (as defined in the ECAAD planning phase) gets recorded by the tracking tools. Learning products get saved in the E-portfolio. A part of the information tracked gets further interpreted in terms of students’ knowledge, skills, and abilities and is displayed in the Open Learner Model. Information in the OLM, along with available other student and learning relevant data available to teachers gets in depth-analysed by the TISL process (Teachers’ Inquiries into Students’ Learning), guided to some extent by the school’s information needs as resulting from an strategic view of ICT innovation, formulated in the strategic layer with the SPICE tool.