iPod mobile project

I’m Regina Cockerill, Middle School Technology Coordinator at TASIS England, an American-International school in the suburbs of leafy Surrey, England. This is our fifth year using Studywiz. We were fortunate enough to have been provided funding for a pilot study of iPods in one of our foreign language classrooms. This was inspired by Louise Duncan, another Studywiz user and great promoter of iPods in education.

Although the foreign language teacher knew in his gut that a ubiquitous device like the iPod could transform foreign language education, we are riding our own learning curve daily. The past two weeks has required figuring out what to purchase, figuring how to manage an AUP, deciding how much ‘freedom’ to give 11-14 year olds on the device, deciding what apps to purchase, deciding what our learning objectives and outcomes would be, announcing the project to the community, and launching the training and delivery of the devices to students.

The students have taken their privilege and responsibility really well. They are watching Spanish curriculum videos, audiofiles and .pdf files regularly. In addition, they are addicted to Spanish Word Search games where they are given the Spanish word and they must search for the English definition. These are usually played on the bus ride home. Students are already excited about how much better they comprehend their Spanish lessons because they can view or listen over and over again, at their own discretion. This puts constructivist learning in the hands of the student — perhaps the best way to learn.

One of the great surprises was that we, as teachers, were only considering the students’ need to access Spanish class documents from Studywiz. The kids of course, were so excited to find all their homework easily available through the Studywiz mobile interface … and all their eLocker documents available at the click of a button. These students began to realize the instant access of learning material that was available to them. We’re only in week one of a six week study. We’ll keep you posted.

Finding help

If you are using Studywiz and need an answer to a usability question we have three good sources of support for you.

1. Online Help
2. User Manuals
3. Quick Start Guides

As of Studywiz 9.4, you can now access online help from within the Studywiz interface. Help can be found in both the Primary and Standard interfaces at the top-right corner of the toolbar. It’s always there and it is contextualised for student, teacher and parent users.

Standard

Primary

Our user manuals and Quick Start guides are available from the Studywiz Global Community.

The Quick Start Guides are an ideal way of getting a snappy ‘how-to’ for a particular topic, such as creating a specific Studywiz Activity. They are also great if you are running your own in-school training and want to give participants some support material for the topics that you are covering in the session.

If you have any feedback on our documentation and help then please let us know.

Organising links to Websites and Documents

I am often being asked in training whether it is possible to add links to either websites and documents quickly without having either to create an activity within a folder or to use Class Information Panels. Now with 9.4, this is possible. If you create a folder and then, once saved, click edit, you will then have the folder Information Panel which will allow you to add as many web links or document links as you wish. This way, you can organise these within classes and for teams and individuals as well, and they will have quick access to these, particularly if you make such folders featured. In addition, by using the table function, you can organise these is a much more ordered way.

Click to images to enlarge.

Motivating Usage

One of the most motivating reasons for a teacher to use Studywiz, or any other learning platform, seems to come from their students’ willingness to engage with their learning outside of school via the platform.

We get so many teachers telling us about kids logging in at weekends, or during holidays, it’s clear that ‘anytime, anyplace learning’ is, for many, a reality. For teachers who see this type of activity it’s rewarding and an acknowledgement of the hard work that they have put in.

So, for those schools returning from a summer break, try looking at your usage statistics from the holiday period, you might just find something interesting and encouraging.

Studywiz Administrators can access their usage statistics from their ‘utilities’ menu and teachers can find a range of student and class reports from the ‘tools’ menu.

(Thanks to the staff at Hampshire LA who inspired this post).

Using studywiz for teaching and learning

We have had studywiz for nearly four years and now becoming self sustaining. We still have to push now and again but we now have lots of assignments being put on it, all our school reports are written on it, trip and visits use the calendar for pupils out of school, more departments use it for testing and assessing students.

BUT.. there is so much more we can do in terms of learning for children who have excluded, AFL, online books and podcasting. I still feel we are at the beginning but the online world is so exciting and transformational but is so under used. How do others feel, do you have any good ideas to push even more?