This morning I paid a visit to Whitehill Academy in Halifax. Whitehill were one of the first schools who signed up with Webanywhere so I thought it would be great to go there and see them making use of our products and other great tools in the classroom. I was blown away by the quality of what I saw at the school. 2 ICT suites were fully kitted out with Apple Macs; iMacs were on view in all of the classrooms and in every classroom there were pupils making use of ICT to support their learning.

The staff at Whitehill Academy are really enthusiastic about their use of ICT and demand a lot of the products they use to enhance their pupils learning experience. Mr Sayles, the Deputy Headteacher, was particularly keen to find out how Webanywhere could support the development of use of ICT at the school. We looked at the way that the pupils are currently using a range of products and quickly identified a few areas where we could help out.

The issues that came up are quite common ones but we think we’ve found some solutions to them:

Parents are unsure how to help pupils doing homework: We’re helping the school create a series of guidance videos which parents can watch to see examples of similar tasks being done in school.

Building courses for Learnanywhere: We want to make sure our VLE for Primary schools is really well used so we’ve agreed to send our Education Advisor in to help them build some really effective courses.

Training and CPD: Whitehill have run some great training events in the past and are planning some more. We’ve promised to help organise and promote these and we’ve started planning a training event based on the creation and use of rapid content creation games to enhance teaching and learning.

One thing that surprised me whilst in the school was that a lot of the pupils are doing the Digital Creator course. I’ve seen this course in a lot of secondary schools before but to see Year 5 and 6 pupils engaging in a course that is normally studied by 14 to 16 year olds was inspiring!