A visit from Dacre Braithwaite

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Last week, one of our customers popped into the office.

Cath Lassey is the headteacher at Dacre Braithwaite Church of England Primary School. As a user of our primary learning platform, Learnanywhere, she came in looking for our input and opinions on how the system was being used in her school.

As Cath lives quite close to our offices, she often pops in to see us for advice, rather than talk on the phone. It’s something I’m really keen on. Despite the fantastic technology we now use in every day life, meeting face to face is still vital for building strong relationships with our customers.

During the visit, Cath spent time with one of our technicians, Matt Naylor, and discussed Learnanywhere in depth. Now she’s returned to school, Catherine will be hopefully be able to pass on the extra knowledge she picked up from Matt.

The meeting was useful for me too. It’s always good to get feedback on how our products are working in the real world and Cath had plenty to say about the service. In particular, I was pleased to hear some of the praise she had for the efforts of our training and support staff.

It’s always nice to have visitors. But, now the half term break is over, I’m looking forward to getting back out into schools, meeting more teachers, and discussing how we can help make a difference in education.

Friday morning at Whitehill Academy

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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!

Back to School!

This term I’m going back to school for the first time in a good few years!

I’ll be touring the country to visit Webanywhere customers, offering advice on the current challenges facing schools.

I particularly want to talk about how technology can inspire, engage and assist teachers and pupils alike; and how schools can use technology to fulfil their development plans.

You can follow the journey here or send me an email if you’d like me to drop by.