At the heart of PebblePad3 is the Personal Learning Space, Pebble+, which provides an online place for users to plan, record, reflect, and aggregate records of their learning and development. These records can be shared with others for feedback or comment and submitted to organizationally managed areas for more formal assessment, accreditation, or other processes such as appraisal.

Behind the personal space is a powerful assessment system, ATLAS, designed to make it easy for managers to provide and support learners through rich feedback and supporting resources. ATLAS also provides robust and flexible tools to support organisational requirements such as reporting and quality-assurance processes.

In designing the new version, the PebblePad team has built upon the experiences of developing and enhancing the original version of PebblePad, which dates back to 2005. Shane Sutherland, Pebble Learning's Development Director explains, "Over the last eight years, we have learnt a lot about the technology and the ways people want to use a personal learning space. In creating this new version of PebblePad, we have built on our customer feedback and consulted widely on individual features."


"The new version offers users a very different experience. It's far more customisable than previously, both in terms of branding and structures. Importantly, we've created PebblePad3 to go beyond single episodes of learning so that over time users get the bigger picture of how they are progressing and where they are heading."

Pebble+ uses templates to provide structure for users to record activities they are involved in, develop plans, and create evidence of their competences. The system includes a number of default templates to support activities such as creating a record of meetings, highlighting achievements, and developing action plans for future activities.


Importantly, the system allows users to build their own templates and make these available to others. For example, an HR manager can build appraisal templates and make these available to all staff; work- placement officers can build templates to record work-based learning; and individual learners can build templates to record learning activities they take part in.

ATLAS is the "Active Teaching, Learning, and Assessment Space". Designed to support the management of groups of learners throughout assessment or accreditation processes, ATLAS allows users to submit work for review and allows assessors to view all group members' work in a single place. There is a range of tools within ATLAS to support the whole assessment process, from setting deadlines and managing extensions through to material distribution, providing feedback, reporting on the group's activities, and archiving submitted work.


As well as supporting mobile access, where appropriate, PebblePad can be linked to external stores such as Google drive to allow users to store large files remotely. As an enterprise system, PebblePad can also be linked to organisational systems such as HR, student management, and membership databases to automatically input information from central systems into PebblePad.

The new version of PebblePad has been available since September 2012, and there has been a rapid uptake since its launch. Colin Dalziel, Operations Director for Pebble Learning, says, "We have been delighted to see a high percentage of our customers in the UK, Australia, and the Middle East move to the new version of PebblePad, and they are reporting very a successful transition. The features of the system are providing new opportunities to enhance learning and teaching practice, and the management features of ATLAS are making large group activities far more practical than ever before."