Last week, Webanywhere launched the Create Your Character Competition – a chance for primary schools across the country to win thousands of pounds worth of e-learning prizes.

It’s also an opportunity for school children to get creative – and possibly even see their work incorporated into our learning platform, Learnanywhere.
We asked primary schools to get their pupils creating new des
igns for avatars – characters – like the ones currently available in Learnanywhere. Avatars are a great aspect of Learnanywhere: Every time a pupil creates a good piece of work, or achieves a good test score, their teacher can award them ‘points’ on Learnanywhere. These points can then be used to purchase accessories for their avatar. Therefore, the avatars provide a great incentive to work harder – and children love them!

Our assembled judging panel will review all the entries – and five winners will see their characters created for Learnanywhere by our designer.

There are also thousands of pounds worth of prizes to be won: the five winners will receive e-learning packages for their school. Five runners up will receive mini e-learning bundles, and their avatar made into an exclusive poster for their school.
If you fancy getting your class, or your school, involved, there’s still time to register for your teacher’s pack. This will help you plan lessons around creating the characters for the competition, plus give you vital information and guidance when submitting your work.
October 4th, 2013 at 4pm is the closing date – so register now and get creating! Just go to www.webanywhere.co.uk/createyourcharacter. For more information about this competition, including terms and conditions, email competitions@webanywhere.co.uk.

Our MD Sean Gilligan has recorded a video to thank our customers, both old and new, for all their support over the years as we reach our 10th birthday.

This is a big landmark for us, having come a long way in a decade. The company has grown quickly in the last few years, but we remain true to our founding vision and values – to innovate, to stretch beyond expectations, to create jobs, and to improve learning outcomes.

It is an exciting time in the educational technology sector, as online tools become the norm and are having an ever greater impact upon learning, and providing access to knowledge for all around the world. Here’s to the next ten years, to new markets, new innovation, new growth – but the same appreciation and regard for our customers, the core of our business.

Doesn’t July seem like just five minutes ago? It won’t be long now before you’ll be welcoming children into your classroom for a brand new term, the sunny, laid-back days of August a distant memory.

If you’re responsible for updating the school website – or even if you’re yet to try using your website as an engagement tool – here are five things you might want to consider to prepare it for September.
Upload Information About Topics To Be Covered In September
This is a great way to get parents and pupils back into the mindset of learning. For those more proactive parents, it provides them with an opportunity to look at those topics at home with their children; for all parents, it will help them feel more engaged with your school.

This works even better if your school website has a smartphone app; uploading information to your news pages will be pulled through to the app on parents’ phones – meaning they’ll get a notification that there’s something for them to look at on your website! For more information about smartphone apps for school websites, just ask Webanywhere here.
Upload pictures Of Your Newly-Decorated Classroom
As the term progresses, you’ll be decorating the classroom with children’s work. For now, get some exciting photographs of what you have prepared in the classroom so far, giving children a taster for the fun they’ll soon be having in lessons! If your classroom is exciting enough, your children will be itching to get back to school!
Begin Tweeting
Social media is a vital tool for communicating with the world, and schools are using it more and more. If your school uses Twitter already, make sure you start ramping up the number of daily tweets as we approach the start of term, hinting at things to come. Make sure you direct to your school website; if your school website has a Twitter feed, even better.
Check Website Stats
Many school website systems will allow you to look at stats; you may also be able to do this through Google Analytics. If you have it, use this facility to look at the most popular areas of your school’s website – this will help you to determine which areas are most popular/useful for your website’s visitors, and it will also help you to prioritise which areas of the website to concentrate on most.
For example, many schools may find that their term dates is the most popular section of their website. Therefore they may decide to have all term dates uploaded before school starts, for those parents who may forget which day their child goes back!
Have A Spring (Well,  Autumn) Clean
There’s nothing worse than visiting a website and seeing the same content that was on there six months ago. You should always ensure your school website is up to date with the latest news, pupil achievements and the like – but now is also a good time to have a scout through it and remove any content that is either no longer relevant, or is just taking up valuable space.
If possible, try to replace old content with new – but always make sure you have no content that’s going to undermine the website. Scrolling banners inviting people to the upcoming Sports Day – which was two months ago – are among the worst examples.

School Jotter 2 is being constantly developed, and the latest update has some interesting new features for users.
Existing users signing in now will see an updated file manager, that looks and feels easier to use. The file upload section now allows you to ‘drag and drop’ files, which makes adding files is simpler than ever before.

Plus, you can add a profile picture when you log in – making your log in to School Jotter 2 a little bit more personal!
If you’re not a School Jotter 2 user, contact us today to find out more about this innovative easy-to-use school website system – and find out the full range of features and benefits that come with it. Just fill in the form here.

Last week, Webanywhere’s Managing Director, Sean Gilligan, shared his story and experiences with Year 9 students at Holy Family Catholic School, Bradford, for their Enterprise Day. Sean inspired the school by explaining how starting up your own business can be an exciting and rewarding career choice for school leavers.

After his presentation Sean set an Apprentice style task, where pupils were split into groups of eight. Each group had to pick a name for themselves and assign a Project Manager, who then led their team in completing the task, which was to identify a problem in the school and solve it.

After a brainstorming session, each team presented to the rest of the Year 9 students and teachers, with innovative and inspired ideas. These included a salad bar for the school and a student support service. The teachers then scored them out of ten in the style of the Strictly Come Dancing judging panel.

The winning idea was thought up by the group ‘8 Minds’. They came up with the idea of having an ‘Electro-card’, a swipe card that could be used to pay for things in school, for example dinners or trips. This card could then be topped up by parents, avoiding the need for cash in school.

The teams who presented the top three ideas were all given Webanywhere goodie bags.

Sean Gilligan said: “Enterprise Day was a great exercise for Year 9 students to generate creative business ideas. Starting your own company can be within anyone’s grasp ­ and I hope some of these young people at Holy Family Catholic School will be business leaders for Bradford and West Yorkshire in years to come.”

For more information about what Webanywhere do for schools, or to learn more about our work with the community, email me at lucy.smith@webanywhere.co.uk.

Here at Webanywhere we’ve had a busy few months, packed full of events. The season kicked off with Getting I.T Right in Hull at the end of April. Since then we’ve attended over 16 others, including COBIS, E2BN, Imoot, as well as hosting our own Nurturing Online Learning series.

Continue reading →

If you want your website to stand out from the crowd, using video could be the way to go. If a picture paints a thousand words, as the saying goes, imagine how much more you can communicate on film!
Web video has never been so popular, with 72 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube alone every minute. We’ve seen our School Jotter community enthusiastically adopting this trend – particularly the use of video tours of their schools. It’s really simple to upload your own videos to Jotter, and nowadays most schools have access to filming and editing equipment.

If you want a little help however, we do offer a video production service to schools, including planning, filming, editing and publishing your video. Here are a couple of examples of recent videos we’ve produced. You can see more on our Vimeo channel: http://vimeo.com/webanywhere
(if you’d like us to make your school video – email Dave at david.smith@webanywhere.co.uk)

 

Webanywhere’s Managing Director Sean Gilligan was a guest on yesterday’s BBC Breakfast News TV show presented by Susanna Reid and Bill Turnbull, discussing the possibility of including gardening as part of the revised National Curriculum.

Sean was interviewed alongside Chris Collins, Blue Peter’s resident gardener, who participated from his own back garden in London promoting the benefits this new subject could bring to the children, such as physical exercise and team work.
Sean expressed his support too, stating that what he would like to see is “gardening combined with entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial education”. “Kids need to get out of the classroom. Their learning environment affects their engagement, and engagement in education is so, so important” he added.

During the interview, he highlighted the importance of having an entrepreneurial mindset even at an early stage. From his point of view, employability is fundamental for the education process, and should start at Primary schools.

You can watch Sean’s appearance on the video below.