CLA – online service has potential to ease teacher workload
A service launching this autumn for schools aims to reduce the amount of time involved in lesson preparation by delivering digital books needed for the classroom on a single online platform. Eela Devani explains. At a time when government and educational publishers are focused on improving digital access in schools, the traditional processes of lesson preparation – often involving teachers in time-consuming photocopying of chapters and extracts from physical books – are becoming increasingly outdated. Stretched resources don’t help to reduce the workload involved in lesson preparation. So the continuing shift to digital offers a better way to manage time and get the job done more effectively. An online education platform for books is currently being tested by a number of schools before its launch in the autumn to all schools licensed by the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) across the UK. The platform allows teachers to access thousands of digital copies of the books that the school owns. Digital library offers flexibility Digital access to books brings significant advantages. A digital library gives schools a complete view of the books they own and helps teachers make the most of them. The platform gives teachers the flexibility to access their school’s books remotely without needing physical copies. Teachers access their school’s books remotely on any device to make copies without needing the physical book to hand. They share them with students by sending a link in an email direct to their device, linking through the VLE or printing a hard copy for use in class. The platform, which is available at no cost to CLA-licensed schools, allows teachers to make digital extracts of books that the school owns and share with colleagues and students. For students, whose personal lives are spent predominantly in a digital world, online access to learning content fits neatly into their comfort zone. Schools can read more about the CLA Education Platform at a dedicated website educationplatform.co.uk. It provides a searchable database of books, with content summaries provided by educational publishers, and details of how the unlocking process works. Eela Devani is Strategy and Digital Director of Copyright Licencing Agency. As a non-profit organisation, CLA ensures that schools can legally access, copy and share the published content they need, while ensuring copyright owners are paid fair royalties for the use of their work. Find the CLA on Twitter, Facebook.com and Linkedin.com.
Ready-made lesson plans and worksheets
Wand Education is a new teaching platform developed for both primary and secondary schools, that was trialled by West Exe and Cranbrook Schools in Exeter. Wand is an education tool that provides teachers with quick and efficient means to access or edit quality ready-made lesson plans and worksheets. It is adaptable to any type of content and schools can, if they wish, upload their own schemes of learning and power them by Wand. Wand Education is working with a variety of content providers and when launched it will already have high-quality content within it including a phonics, history and geography scheme of learning – the latter two linked to the AQA syllabus for GCSE. Key features of Wand include: • Reuse, edit or create own lesson plans Teachers can reuse and edit premium content, upload their own schemes of learning, search for activities created by other teachers or reliable authors and publishers, or create their own content using 20+ pre-built activity templates, with all lesson plans mapped on learning objectives. • Project or deliver to student groups Teachers can either project a lesson or send it to an entire class, or to a group of students, making it easy for teachers to differentiate instruction according to student ability. • Engaging worksheets Wand Education provides teachers with a worksheet template that replicates the paper-based worksheet, while adding the benefits of the digital technology on top of it. • Get actionable data on student progress 67% of teachers complain on the quality of student progress reports[1], with most tools providing either simplistic or data-heavy reports. Wand Education provides teachers with visual reports on student progress and actionable data that need to be addressed for students to improve their work. Teachers get live overview on student progress, with options to grade and annotate open-ended answers in a similar fashion to the paper-based activities. And they can download a printable report which includes both an aggregated set of analytics with student activity and areas that need to be improved, as well as the actual activities performed by the student, with answers, marking and teacher annotations. For more information on Wand Education’s lesson plans and worksheets, just go to wand.education 1 http://www.teachersknowbest.org/reports/making_data_work