Southampton - case study

Read all about Southampton City Council’s implementation of Studywiz which was chosen as their VLE early in 2009. Training began for staff in schools during September 2009 and this is their story so far…

Southampton case study

Add a little more to your Studywiz Pages

Recently in training I have been using the web site www.magicwidgets.com for examples of how to embed code using the HTML icon in the text box of Studywiz. It is an easy way to make activities and information panels look a little bit special and a lot of teachers were very interested in using it.

On this web site, you can create customised scrolling banners, clocks,  add text to images and create image cubes. Once you have finished creating your banner etc, you will see a code prepared for you that you simply copy, then open up the RTE box you want to put it in, click on HTML, paste in the code, click Update and then Save.

Click on the thumbnails below to see a couple of examples.

Sharing with parents

I have to say, communicating with parents through Studywiz is great. There are so many tools to do so, it’s knowing which ones will work best for your school that’s the tricky part! This post shows the current way we are trying to share with parent, I hope it’s of use!

Each of our year groups has 2 featured folders. The ‘Themes’ folder is shared between pupils and staff in that year group, the ‘Central’ folder is shared between pupils, parents and staff.

In each year group’s ‘Central’ folder there is an ‘eBulletins’ folder which is used to keep all the eBulletins sent to parents in that year group together. These include homework information, general updates and recently in my year group, we have started sending a weekly update with objectives covered in the up coming week, this sometimes includes children’s work from the previous week. If this proves a successful way of supporting learning outside school, we will then roll it out across all year groups. (more…)

Fantastic Resources for Younger Learners

The i-board Collection is a series of open-ended cross curricular topics grouped for Kindergarten (Purple), Year 1 (Red) and Year 2 (Green). Within each topic there are a series of activities designed to model different concepts in an open way. They encourage exploration and creative play.They are easily embedded in Studywiz by using the embedding web link option. Click here to access the site!

Studywiz speaks Widgit

As of version 9.4.3 Studywiz now supports Widgit Insite and Point integration. We’re very happy to have worked with Widgit on this integration, they are a great company and a fantastic group of people.

You can read more about Widgit and their products at www.widgit.com. You may also be interested to read about their Symbol Inclusion Project which was a collaboration between Widgit and Warwickshire County Council.

Although Widgit tools are sometimes traditionally associated with specific learning needs, the Widgit symbols can help all learners and readers, including:

• People learning English as a second language
• People with memory difficulties, senile dementia or other brain damage
• People with dyslexia, dyspraxia or spatial/time/organisational difficulties
• People who are deaf or hearing impaired
• Young children who have not yet started to read.
• People with Autistic Spectrum Disorders

The two Widgit products that Studywiz currently supports are Insite and Point. Have a look at the videos below to see these in action. (more…)