Every Student Uses a Tablet! Latest Report on ICT Classes

It has already been eight months since our Open Innovation Lab (InnoLab) began collaborating with Ritsumeikan Moriyama Junior & Senior High School on "Adaptive Learning Utilizing SNS." Approximately 500 new junior and senior high school students, each equipped with a tablet, have been engaged in learning primarily through the educational platform RICS (Ritsumeikan Intelligent Cyber Space). After a full year of continuous effort, we are beginning to see signs of change, albeit gradual.

This report details the "ICT Open Class" held as a culmination of these efforts.

A Learning System for the Tablet Era Incorporating "Thought-Provoking Mechanisms"

February 21, 2015. An "ICT Open Class" was held at Ritsumeikan Moriyama Junior and Senior High School. Approximately 100 education professionals from across Japan freely observed classes in five different classrooms: Japanese, Mathematics, English, Science, and Social Studies. They leaned in to observe group work activities, moved right next to students to scrutinize their tablet screens, and watched the lessons with great enthusiasm.

The RICS adaptive learning platform, developed jointly by Inolab and Ritsumeikan Moriyama, was used in the two core subjects: Mathematics and English. In the Mathematics class, while the teacher provided follow-up support to students who "couldn't complete their homework," students who had finished were using RICS to individually tackle new problems. Another key point is that past class videos are publicly available on YouTube. When students encounter something they don't understand, they can immediately jump to linked videos within RICS, enabling them to review independently.

After thinking, researching, and arriving at an answer, the next step is checking it. Students check their answers directly within RICS. However, simply marking answers as right or wrong would make it no different from a paper workbook. Therefore, RICS incorporates a four-tiered subjective rating system for self-assessment: "Perfect!", "Got it!", "Can solve next time", and "Can't solve". For problem evaluation, it allows recording of "Important", "Review again", "Sufficient", and "Ask a question". Additionally, the SNS feature allows students to "Ask friends or teachers," and the system also tracks the time taken to solve each problem.

The major differences from paper workbooks are the inclusion of "mechanisms that encourage thinking" and the "ease of keeping records." Rather than just mechanically solving problems, students build their skills by finding answers independently while watching videos, etc. Keeping records also allows them to objectively assess their own abilities. Reviewing accumulated records can highlight weak areas and enable more effective test preparation. The answer time logs will undoubtedly serve as valuable references for teachers when designing curricula or developing individualized support programs for each student.

RICS is a system currently under development, aiming not just to support problem-solving in the moment, but to provide long-term learning support. I believe those who observed the open class could sense its potential.

Tablet-exclusive! A quiz show-style open class

Among classes using applications other than RICS, the Japanese language class stood out as particularly unique. By utilizing the school-specific lesson support app "LoiLo Note School" (hereafter LoiLo Note) and a large monitor, the class unfolded like a quiz show, with students' answers to questions displayed in real-time on the large monitor.

A key feature of LoiLo Note is that information written on a device can be distributed to all devices in the classroom via the teacher's device. This allows for displaying all answers together or highlighting specific answers. Users can also attach images and videos. During the Japanese language open class, we saw several students posting answers with attached images. It was also interesting to observe students rewriting their answers midway through. There were moments like when the teacher would immediately ask, "Huh, you just changed your answer. Did you change your mind?" This gave the impression of heightened interactivity.

Currently, various applications are beginning to be used in educational settings. We often hear concerns like, "Everything requires individual IDs and passwords, making management difficult," so we also aim to address that challenge.

A major catalyst for taking the next step

I imagine it was quite a challenge for the teachers to utilize ICT and take it all the way to conducting open classes. It required significantly altering lesson plans, and it couldn't happen without many teachers communicating closely with each other. It was also necessary to engage the students and gain the understanding of the parents. The reason they were able to overcome these challenges was because the teachers had a clear sense of purpose. I believe it was thanks to their strong determination to use ICT to transform the school.

I've heard that holding these open classes brought feedback from many different sources. It changed not only the teachers' perspectives but also the students'. I strongly feel it became a major catalyst for taking the next step forward.