Online Learning Platforms
Create engaging and measurable learning experiences that keep children on track and continue to fire their imaginations.
Digital workflow platforms enable teachers to easily share work with learners that can then be completed and sent back to the teacher for them to assess. Their assessments can then be shared with the learner. This entirely digital circular workflow can provide a virtual process that is as close to classroom practice as possible. Apple have always championed Digital Workflow apps and the multimedia capabilities of their devices mean that they are the perfect technological tool to run such apps on.
Pick the best app that works for you and your learners.
For more open-ended and free-flowing tasks, children can add work to the ‘class journal’. Think of the class journal as a ‘Facebook Wall’ of learning posts. On the journal, children can use any of the aforementioned multi-media tools to create and post-work. Throughout any of these processes, teachers can post ‘Student Announcements’.
At any point, the teacher can print off a learning journal, showing any individual learners progress. It really is a great all-rounder that turns teaching and learning into a digital workflow that is as close to classroom practice as possible.
It's fun, easy to use and engaging. See Saw is a brilliant option for any school that needs to set something up quickly as its intuitive nature will ease the process.
Read more information on See Saw here.
Showbie is an incredible digital workflow tool that many schools have been embedding into their day-to-day practice for years. Again, it’s easy for teachers to create classes and import all of their pupils into a shared digital space. When the class is set up, teachers can collate assignments in to separate folders. The assignment folders can then be filled with lesson materials.
The lesson materials can be a mixture of different file types. You can upload videos, photographs, audio clips, PDFs, Powerpoint, Word Docs etc. Apple devices are capable of supporting all of these file types and of course, you can use the camera and microphone on your iPad or MacBook to create the file in the first instance. Teachers can also write comments amongst or above the files that they upload in order to advise their pupils on what they need to do with the materials. Weblinks can also be posted via the comments. On top of that, Showbie is linked with ‘Socrative’. Socrative is digital quiz generator . This addition means that educators can easily attach assessment quizzes to their lesson materials. Not only can the students gain access and use the materials but they can then test their knowledge and provide their teachers with assessment data by attempting the Socrative quiz.
Students have all of the same capabilities as their teachers. They too can upload all of the different file types to the shared assignment folder. Therefore, a teacher can assign some work to be completed on a Powerpoint template (for example); the student can then download the template onto their Apple device and complete the work before uploading their finished assignment. If the teacher has posted a PDF worksheet students can annotate the sheet onscreen. Showbie’s powerful digital annotation tools mean that a lot of work can be completed without any need for downloading materials and uploading them.
When the children respond to work via annotation or by uploading files, the teacher can then grade the work or use the same annotation tools to provide detailed feedback. The inbuilt grading system keeps tabs on learning progressions and makes it easy for teachers to consolidate their assessments in one place. Rather than all of the work automatically being collated into a journal, the teacher can choose which files they would like to add to each individual child’s learning journal. With a combination of the digital annotation, grading and journal generation, educators can build an extremely comprehensive overview of any individual learners developments
Showbie's interface reflects a file finder style browser. That facet coupled with the uploading and downloading that I detailed before means that it is aimed at slightly older children. However, it is very intuitive and a brilliant all-rounder for multi-media digital workflow.
Google Classroom works in conjunction with all the other Google Apps to provide a brilliant platform for digital workflow. It is all available for free on the Apple App Store. The beauty of Google is that it is universal and obviously, many of us already use the platform in some form. However, for teachers and pupils gaining access to Google Classroom and the apps that work around it is slightly more complicated. Everyone involved needs an account. School technicians can create Google Education accounts quickly and easily in order to distribute them both teachers and pupils, but it is fair to say that this is not a solution that an individual teacher can pick up and run with. At JTRS, we can help to facilitate this solution quickly and support schools to share all of the details needed for their pupils to access all of it via their Apple devices.
However, if you already have Google Accounts or if you are willing to create them now, Google Classroom is one of the best digital workflow platforms out there due to the range of multi-media apps that are intrinsically linked to it.
Google Classroom itself is a simple platform that displays learning actives in an easy to follow list. Teachers can make announcements and leave assignments on the Google Classroom wall for all their pupils to pick up on. The assignments and learning objectives can be set up or responded to utilising a huge amount of Google apps. Pupils and teachers can work on Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Jamboards, Sites, Forms, Blogs etc. These apps are built for education and all have collaboration capabilities. Not only can the teacher and a pupil collaborate on a Doc (for example) together, but pupils can collaborate live as well. All of the work is then automatically collated in to ‘Google Drive’ making it easy for the teacher to open up the assignments and mark them at any point in the learning process. Google Classroom essentially works as the springboard. The pupils start on the wall, read what they have to do and then jump on to any or all of the apps mentioned.
One huge advantage of Google Classroom is its ability to embed ‘Google Hangouts’ as well. Google Hangouts is a live video chat solution. Therefore, a teacher can make communication with their pupils face-to-face before, during or after a learning activity. Learn more about Google Hangouts here.