You might have heard a lot of talk about School Jotter’s function as a VLE. While a repository to store learning materials is all well and good, a VLE really needs a way to actually assess students’ learning – it’s a good thing, then, that Resources and Learn (bundled together) offer this capability!
First of all, you’re going to need to go to the Resources app from your School Jotter dashboard (you can also create Quizzes from within Learn itself, but we’ll do it this way as it’s much the same method). Click Create Resource at the top of the page, then choose Quiz from the dropdown.
Author: Webanywhere
How To Avoid Getting Phished | Webanywhere Blog
Published: March 2, 2016
We’ve talked in the past about staying safe online, but phishers use tactics specifically designed to get around the defences you build up. Here’s our top tips for avoiding getting caught out:
How to Design an Awesome School Website
Category: Development,Infographics,Ofsted
Published: February 29, 2016
Website Design For Schools In The UK
This is a tricky issue for non-experienced website designers. While wanting to save on costs by doing their school web design themselves, schools should make sure they meet the Ofsted requirements when it comes to website content and structure.
One of the problems many school website designers encounter is that they use too many colors making their content very difficult to read. What follows are some tips to help create a beautiful website design for schools in the UK.
Defining Your School’s Brand and Content Strategy
Knowing your school’s brand and what you stand for will help you write the content for your school’s website. You need to understand the school’s core values as well as what your school stands for.
Then you need to understand what your school does well and what problems it can solve for its students. There are other key questions you can ask yourself before you start creating a content strategy.
That strategy will revolve around the answers to all of those key questions. Plus, understanding the purpose of your school will help you create a unique website look that stands out from the crowd.
What also is involved in defining your school’s brand will be the following elements:
- Develop your school’s promise to potential parents and students
- Add a tagline that reflects the purpose of the school
- Create your school’s identity- this includes creating a logo, finding your voice, the imagery you want to use, and the colours you want to use.
Defining your school’s brand is a wide range of elements that help potential and current students know who you are. That makes your website more attractive than using a number of bright or other colours.
Building A Solid User-Friendly Experience On The School Website
In the world of web design, there are a lot of options you can use to build complexity to your school’s website design. However, the old sayings ‘keep it simple’ and ‘less is more’ are key guides you should use when creating a primary school website design.
Yes, having fun things like pop-ups, interactive polls, and lots of videos can help but often those elements and other ones turn the user experience into something far more time-consuming than parents want to go through.
The key to building a good user experience on your school’s website is to follow these key tips:
1. Keep The Website Focused On Current School Parents
Make sure the relevant information is easy to access and find. Those important issues of tuition costs, teacher contact opportunities, and school events all should be very easy for the current school parent to find.
2. Focus On Enrollment
Make your enrollment process a priority. Part of the school’s website design is to attract new students to your school. This can partly be achieved through your About Us web page.
3. Help Busy Parents
This is done by having a clear school calendar on your website. Then make it easy to access for those busy parents who do not have the time to waste doing complicated searches or bypassing pop-ups, etc.
4. Miscellaneous Pages
These include contact information, a news and media web page, and more. You want to keep your school web design interesting without making it hard for parents to navigate through all the pages to get the information they want.
Add Interactive Features and Compelling Content for engaging the audience
Once you have understood your school’s identity and purpose, and then fleshed out a content strategy, now is the time to add some more interesting elements to your school website design.
Look for key features that can incorporate interactive activities. These will help engage both parents and students. Then make sure to have someone write excellent content that will be of interest to those school parents.
Content is still king and will help boost your school’s website in the search engine rankings. Bad content is one way to drive prospective students and parents away from your school.
Some Additional Words
Since 2003, School Jotter has been working with thousands of schools across the UK and worldwide to develop the best school website and e-learning software. We always make sure our school web design reflects the ethos of each school.
Contact us today to see how we can help make your school website design more attractive and user-friendly. Our experts will be glad to spend time working with you to enhance your public face.
From our emails, you might think that all we do around here is write blog articles, create websites and develop learning platforms, but there’s actually a lot more to Webanywhere than just that! We did a staff photo shoot this week for our new website (ooh spoilers!). Here’s some of the… beautiful outtakes.
Lawrence is one of our secondary elearning consultants. In this photograph we can’t quite tell if he is mid sneeze or showing off his selfie face. You decide.
Ellie is a Primary elearning consultant at our Webanywhere, we didn’t have the heart to tell her she was a bit late for the Great Ormond Street bad hair day.
Tom, a delivery consultant perfected this pose whilst on a first date at the zoo. We wouldn’t buy a hat just yet for that wedding.
Our Marketing Campaigns Manager Sally holds three world records in “hand surfing”. No-one else in the office has ever asked what that is.
Ways to integrate technology in the modern classroom
Category: e-Portfolios,Education Technology,School Website Content,School Website Design,School Websites,Social Media,Technologies
Published: February 25, 2016
As discussed previously, integrating technology in the classroom helps to improve engagement, it encourages individual and collaborative learning, provides students with useful life skills as well as it benefits teachers in many ways.
Social media
Most students are already using social media outside the classroom. Embracing social media in the classroom can instantly engage with students and to make learning more fun. For instance, Twitter or Facebook can be used to start a discussion on a particular topic. You can also use social media for making school related announcements, posting reminders about deadlines, uploading pictures or videos.
Blogging
Blogging is a great way to promote collaborative learning and to encourage open reflection by letting students share their work with others. What is more, blogging helps to develop reading and writing skills. Blog can be used for homework, assignments or for discussing topics of interest.
Podcasts
Podcasts can be very useful for recording lessons or for providing students with additional learning materials. There are many ways that podcasts could be used in the classroom. For example, recording a class discussion, reviewing a book, conducting interviews or broadcasting classroom news.
Video conferencing
Using video conferencing in the classroom creates exciting opportunities. Students can make friends by interacting with other students in different countries or they can learn by participating in virtual seminars with guest lecturers.
Online resources for learning and assignments
Teachers can test students by using online resources or they can make studying more fun by letting students undertake online quizzes to practice different subjects online.
Use videos
Videos can be used for demonstrating practical examples related to subjects taught in the classroom as well as for providing different approaches to subjects. Videos are useful for making learning more fun and engaging and these are the factors that lead to increased knowledge retention.
Games
Consider elements of gamification to improve the way you deliver the teaching content. The main idea behind gamification in the classroom is to increase motivation through engagement by using elements of video games. Some of the ways to gamify your classroom include: gamification of grading, awarding students with badges, using educational games, implementing a rewards system or gamifying homework.
If you want to learn more about different ways of incorporating technology in the classroom, contact the Webanywhere team.
Tom Starkey – Clunk | Webanywhere Blog
Category: Education Technology,Learning Management Systems,School Website Content,School Website Design,VLEs
Published:
Given the current focus in schools, colleges and other educational institutions on shifting resources online and the growing emphasis on sharing information digitally to streamline processes (perhaps freeing up some of that precious, precious time for teachers to actually go and and do some of that weird ‘teaching’ malarky they’re always on about), it never ceases to amaze me that, when I talk to fellow educators about their in-house VLEs (Virtual Learning Environments), the chatter is often about clunky, difficult to navigate, user-unfriendly (sometimes downright hostile) systems that seemingly do the opposite of what they were designed for.
Now, if I’m teaching, the very last thing I want to be doing is spending any extra time fiddling with a VLE to get it to behave. I don’t want to waste hours on end uploading and re-uploading and re-re-uploading resources because (for some reason only known to the system itself and Dave from IT who’s on long-term sick leave) it just didn’t take the first time. I don’t want my index finger to go numb as I click 48 different links to get to where I know that document is, only for it to be locked because a lesson pro forma is far, far too sensitive to be sharing with the people who actually use it. What I want is to spend my free periods drinking really bad coffee and planning really good lessons, not sat in front of a screen wondering if they would fire me if I just chucked the whole damn thing out of the staffroom window.
Because, as a teacher, time is just about the most precious commodity there is. We’re already well short of it, so if more is taken away by an unwieldy system, it’s taken away from somewhere else. That “somewhere else” might actually be important.
And that’s just us; if you want student buy-in, you best be sure that the product is damn-near flawless, otherwise you’re basically handing them an excuse to do absolutely nothing:
“Did you do your homework?”
“Sir, I couldn’t even find it on the system.”
“Likely story. Let’s just bring up the…oh. Oh OK. I’ll write it on a post-it not for you next time.”
Students won’t use something that doesn’t work. Heck, they won’t even use something that is vaguely difficult to work. And to be honest, I’m right there with them on this. Why should they? VLEs are supposed to augment the learning process, not act as yet another barrier to it. If a school wants to share information in this way than they need to get it right; not only for the sake of teachers’ sanity but also to increase the educational chances of those who are most important in the process.
At its best, a VLE system should be intuitive and reliable for both teachers and students. It should be specifically designed as bespoke to a particular educational organisation because (as is often so easily forgotten) no two places are the same. It will enable learning but be so efficient, that it’s almost invisible as it does so. And what they should never, never do is make a teacher or a student’s life any more difficult than it is already. They should work for us, not the other way around.
But enough with this negativity – in my next blog I’ll be harping on about the joys of using an EFFECTIVE Virtual Learning Environment and how it can benefit teachers (and not just in the ways you might expect). Thanks for reading.
Tom Starkey is an educator and consultant based in Leeds. He’s written for the Times Educational Supplement and Teach Secondary magazine. He tweets at @tstarkey1212 and writes at stackofmarking.wordpress.com.
Not everyone is proficient when it comes to using the keyboard, and this is especially true when talking about students – certainly in the early years, even spelling their own names and passwords can be tricky for some.
That’s why, in the latest version of School Jotter, we’ve added Picture Logins as a feature. Rather than entering names and passwords using a keyboard, pupils (or teachers – we’re not here to judge) can log into their Jotter account by entering the correct series of icons from a grid. Setting it up is easy too!
Top 6 benefits of using technology in the classroom
Published: February 18, 2016
It is important to acknowledge that students are already interested and engaged in using technology, this creates many amazing opportunities for schools and teachers to benefit from integrating some forms of technology in the classroom and to make teaching and learning more effective. Here are some of the main benefits of using technology in the classroom.
Improves engagement
When technology is integrated into lessons, students are expected to be more interested in the subjects they are studying. Technology provides different opportunities to make learning more fun and enjoyable in terms of teaching same things in new ways. For instance, delivering teaching through gamification, taking students on virtual field trips and using other online learning resources. What is more, technology can encourage a more active participation in the learning process which can be hard to achieve through a traditional lecture environment.
Improves knowledge retention
Students who are engaged and interested in things they are studying, are expected to have a better knowledge retention. As mentioned before, technology can help to encourage active participation in the classroom which also is a very important factor for increased knowledge retention. Different forms of technology can be used to experiment with and decide what works best for students in terms of retaining their knowledge.
Encourages individual learning
No one learns in the same way because of different learning styles and different abilities. Technology provides great opportunities for making learning more effective for everyone with different needs. For example, students can learn at their own speed, review difficult concepts or skip ahead if they need to. What is more, technology can provide more opportunities for struggling or disabled students. Access to the Internet gives students access to a broad range of resources to conduct research in different ways, which in turn can increase the engagement.
Encourages collaboration
Students can practice collaboration skills by getting involved in different online activities. For instance, working on different projects by collaborating with others on forums or by sharing documents on their virtual learning environments. Technology can encourage collaboration with students in the same classroom, same school and even with other classrooms around the world.
Students can learn useful life skills through technology
By using technology in the classroom, both teachers and students can develop skills essential for the 21st century. Students can gain the skills they will need to be successful in the future. Modern learning is about collaborating with others, solving complex problems, critical thinking, developing different forms of communication and leadership skills, and improving motivation and productivity. What is more, technology can help develop many practical skills, including creating presentations, learning to differentiate reliable from unreliable sources on the Internet, maintaining proper online etiquette, and writing emails. These are very important skills that can be developed in the classroom.
Benefits for teachers
With countless online resources, technology can help improve teaching. Teachers can use different apps or trusted online resources to enhance the traditional ways of teaching and to keep students more engaged. Virtual lesson plans, grading software and online assessments can help teachers save a lot time. This valuable time can be used for working with students who are struggling. What is more, having virtual learning environments in schools enhances collaboration and knowledge sharing between teachers.
6 Benefits of Using Technology in The Classroom
Using technology in the classroom offers many benefits for both students and teachers. Today’s students are already interested in technology; blending it into lessons can make learning more fun and engaging. It helps students improve knowledge retention and allows for individual learning, catering to different learning styles and abilities. Technology also encourages collaboration, meaning students can work together more easily.
Technology provides teachers with valuable resources and tools to enhance traditional teaching methods. Virtual lesson plans, grading software, and online assessments can save time, allowing teachers to focus more on students who need extra help. Technology also helps develop essential life skills in students, preparing them for future success.
To learn more about different ways of incorporating technology in the classroom, visit the Webanywhere website.
Now fully available for your school – Office 365 integration
Published:
We’re pleased to announce that Office 365 integration is now fully up and running for anyone using our School Jotter platform. You can now take advantage of the full range of Office 365 features within the School Jotter ecosystem, complete with single-sign-on and file sharing.
Here’s the best new features of integration:
Single sign-on
And it really is single sign-on – with the Office 365 login method, if you’re logged into Office 365 you won’t need to enter anything to get into School Jotter, your computer will handle it all.
Easily add files to your website
Access your OneDrive files from within Jotter, and insert them as items on your School Jotter website. This means you don’t have to worry about taking an image from OneDrive, downloading it then reuploading it to Jotter – it’s right there already!
Outlook Calendar Synchronisation
It’s likely that your school has everything organised in an Outlook calendar already – wouldn’t it be great if this could automatically pull through to your website? The Calendar app can now read from and update from your Office 365 calendars, saving you one more update task.
All your OneDrive files in School Jotter
With the Office 365 desktop app, you and your students can even have access to your desktop files in School Jotter.
Share and collaborate
As well as accessing your own files, you can even share them with others, making it a great way to enable collaboration amongst students.
Interested in the benefits of integration? Contact us for a free demo.
We released an update to School Jotter last week, and it’s added a few new things which I’ll be covering in the coming weeks.
The first new object we’ll be looking at is the (rather strangely-named) Accordion. It’s a great way to create an information-packed page that also embraces minimalism and interactivity. As with all School Jotter objects, you can find it from the Insert menu in Edit mode.
Choose where you want to put it. The accordion will look like a series of headings that stretch across the space allocated to them. They look, once populated with content, something like this:
Clicking a title expands it, as I’ve done with the third and fifth options here. Let’s go back to the Insert page.
Once you’ve inserted your accordion into the page you’ll see this screen. By default there are three sections in the left-most column, but you can add more with the green plus button below. Otherwise, there are three areas to consider:
- Accordion title: The title of the section people can click to expand
- Accordion text: The text revealed when clicking on a section
- Select image: If you’d like to put an image in, you can
Press OK and your accordion will go live. And that’s all there is to it! If you’d like to see the accordions in action, you can visit my School Jotter page at cierandouglass.schooljotter2.com. We can’t wait to see what you come up with!
You might want to use them for class information; we find they work particularly well as templates for FAQs. They’re a really useful tool and we’re pleased they’re now available in School Jotter.
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