(1888PressRelease)
April 23, 2008 - Imagine that your school is due to be rebuilt and many of your pupils will be expected to work entirely from home for a considerable period without the support of teachers in the classroom. How would you ensure that their learning continues with minimal disruption and that they complete the work set, in order to give them the best chance of reaching their full potential in assessments? Tony Ryan, College Principal at The Leigh Technology Academy in Dartford, Kent, explains how introducing TALMOS, a learning platform provided by Core Education, helped pupils work independently from home for two weeks after the Christmas break, whilst the school was closed awaiting the opening of the new building.
When Tony joined Leigh Technology Academy as College Principal two years ago, the school was making headway in developing its own database-driven learning platform, which had required immense investment of time and funding. However, it became apparent that the project lacked long-term vision and when plans came about to convert to Academy status in new state-of-the–art buildings, the school had to forward-plan to ensure minimal impact on the pupils’ learning during the closure. The challenge was to have a learning platform in place before the Christmas holidays in order to provide some 1,200 pupils with the resources to work independently for two weeks, with a view to developing this as a key resource for daily school life going forward.
The school wrote to a number of different companies explaining their requirements and selected four of them to present their product. “We felt it was important to involve the whole school community in choosing the most suitable learning platform”, explains Tony. “We formed a panel comprising the senior leadership team, teachers with varying levels of technology competency, parents and pupils. Initially, parents were concerned that their children would find the technology difficult to use at home but we involved them from the start so we were able to guide them through it”, he continues.
The Government has set schools the target of offering parents real-time access to information on their child’s achievement, progress, attendance, behaviour and special needs, including the opportunity for secure online access, by 2010. Leigh Technology Academy found itself under unique circumstances whereby it had to address this target by the end of 2007. “We had to find a way to allow pupils to post work online for teachers to mark and send back in a manageable way, so the pressure was on to find a learning platform provider that could support our aim and provide us with something that works with both broadband and dial-up internet access”, explains Tony. Although 94% of the students have access to the internet, many are using dial-up so they needed a learning platform provider that could be flexible with this.
One of Leigh Technology Academy’s main requirements from a learning platform was high-quality content and support materials. Tony comments: “We have especially found the content from Encyclopædia Britannica to be useful and we also have the option to add a video clips resource which would give us access to hours of subject-coded video clips we can use to start a lesson off. If we are teaching a class on rainforests we could show a five-minute clip to draw the pupils in with this multimedia resource before delving into the theory.”
Installing a learning platform in a school and providing all the necessary training can sometimes take up to three years. At Leigh Technology Academy, this had to happen in a month. “The planning beforehand was meticulous as we had to get complete support from the whole school community. We then had in-depth conversations with Core Education, who ardently rose to the challenge to provide us with a bespoke system in the short time-frame we had”, Tony comments.
The school ran two hour workshops for 107 staff in the space of two weeks which required intensive training from experts at Core Education across four of these days. Tony says: “We carried out a very intensive training process which we managed by dividing into smaller teams. This was delivered very effectively by Core Education. We then used the ICT lessons to train the students on how to access TALMOS and what would be expected from them during the school’s closure.” The school set up a switchboard to handle the volume of phone calls from parents and pupils during the closure, although most calls were only to confirm login details that pupils had forgotten.
The school set clear deadlines on tasks which they split into bite-size chunks to keep the pupils motivated. “We often structured tasks so that pupils could only go on to the second task once they had completed and posted the first task to the teacher. I think this created a bit of healthy competition among the pupils as they likened it to a computer game whereby you have to complete one level before going on to the next,” Tony explains.
Tony believes it is important to set the parameters of what you require from a learning platform tightly in order to get the most tailored solution for your school. He recommends: “You won’t get everything you want off-the-shelf even though many schools have come to expect that they can. I think what is needed is a system that allows teachers to efficiently and quickly post work to pupils and lets all pupils, even those who only have dial-up internet access, to be able to complete and post their work back to the teacher. It is important to set a target and work to it – we didn’t have a choice but to jump and not look back and it has worked to our benefit. It is easy to ponder on your choice of product but I would like to think that this could inspire other schools to take the same leap, especially as they work to meet Government targets.”
The school is continuing to work with pupils to help them become more independent learners, which is helped by the fact that they like working online. Tony concludes: “Using TALMOS every day means that by the time our Year 7s reach Year 11 they will be well accustomed to working independently and will be better equipped for life in the workplace.” The school is planning to expand their use of Encyclopædia Britannica and plans to have staff from Encyclopædia Britannica come in and conduct training to support the lessons. The school also plans to promote the use of video clips within the school to excite the pupils through multimedia. Tony adds: “TALMOS is perfect as a portal for holding and posting work. Core Education is now working with us to integrate it with our Management Information System so that we can reach our ultimate goal of giving parents secure online access to information such as their child’s achievement, attendance and progress whenever and wherever they are.”
For further information on the TALMOS learning gateway please contact: Ed Collins, Sales Director for Core Education on: 01482 601100 Email: ed.collins ( @ ) coreeducation dot co.uk or visit Web: www.coreeducation.co.uk.
###
