This weekend, the Tour De France comes to Yorkshire – visiting places like York, Leeds and Harrogate – plus Webanywhere’s hometown, Keighley!
Le Tour Yorkshire is a significant date in the calendar for both sport and for Yorkshire – and we’d like to help schools celebrate. If you are planning classroom activities to mark this weekend’s event, you can download our free Le Tour Yorkshire worksheet below.
The free worksheet can be coloured in by pupils, who can give their rider and bike a striking design – and then name their cycling team!
To download the free Le Tour Yorkshire worksheet, simply click on the link below, then right-click your mouse to save to your computer. You can then print out the free worksheet and hand out to pupils in your classroom.
When your children have completed their classroom worksheets, send them back to us – we’ll pick the best one and award their school our blogging app!
Completed worksheets should be sent to Le Tour Yorkshire Competition, Webanywhere Ltd, Aire Valley Business Centre, Lawkholme Lane, Keighley, BD21 3BB. You can also attach your completed worksheets to an email and send them to info@webanywhere.co.uk. Please include your school name when you send your worksheets through.
The competition winner will be announced on Friday 11th July.
If you’d like to know more about classroom blogging, and using it to improve literacy skills, sign up for our blog – Improving Literacy Skills With Blogging, which takes place on 16th July. Find out more here.
Le Tour Yorkshire Worksheet

Webanywhere’s Corporate division has been working with the British Safety Council for some time. We have provided them with their learning platform for delivering health and safety training – and now, we’re working with them to help keep secondary school students safe on work placements.
 
Off the back of recently published Health and Safety Executive (HSE) statistics – 148 people were killed and 21,000 seriously injured at work in the UK last year; a young worker is 50% more likely to have an accident – we’re helping them to provide safety training courses to schools.
 
British Safety Council’s Entry Level Qualification in Workplace Hazard Awareness is designed for 14-19 year olds, and is an ideal way of preparing them for work experience, or leaving school and entering employment.
 
You can purchase qualifications for your students now – and, if you’re a Webanywhere customer, you’ll have received an email this week offering you an exclusive discount on bulk ordering of assessments!
 
If you want to find out more about the Entry Level in Workplace Hazard Awareness, click here.

Since February, Webanywhere has been releasing new education apps every few weeks. So far, apps we’ve launched have included a blogging tool, a school surveys builder, a learning sites tool and an online rewards and behaviour management system.
Now, we’re looking for the next big idea – and this where we need the help of the people who use our apps day in, day out – teachers and pupils.
The development of all our apps has been based on comments, suggestions and feedback from teachers – so we’re launching a competition, Think Of An app, where we’re asking for you to give us your ideas for new apps we can develop.
The best app idea will be rewarded with a full suite of apps, worth £7K. Three runners up will win School Merits and Bloganywhere for their school.
You can register your school and get your Think Of An App Competition information pack here. The closing date is Friday, 18th July, 2014.
If you have any questions, just email competitions@webanywhere.co.uk.
Our last major competition, Create Your Character, saw primary schools across the UK designing new avatars for our primary VLE. Winners were awarded with a subscription to Learnanywhere, and many, like pupils at St Thomas Aquinas School, Stoke appeared in local papers.
Good luck!

Since the launch of Webanywhere’s brand new e-learning apps in February, Learn and Merits, we’ve added many more to the list – in fact, we now have 12 apps either about to be launched, or currently available!
So you can get an overview of what these are and how they work, we’ve put together an easy-to-digest guide.
This will help you choose the combination of apps that will most suit your school – i.e those that will save you time, engage your pupils and improve your home/school connections.
You can download the guide, 12 Education Apps That Will Benefit Your School, here.
Once you’ve taken a look, find out more about our brand new range of app packages, or book a demo to see the apps in action, by clicking here.

Webanywhere offers an end-to-end LMS service.
Now, we’ve taken our services one step further, and developed our own range of plug-ins – which we call our Apps – to help make your VLE more engaging, useful and easier to use.

These exclusive apps are only available from Webanywhere, and all of them are already being used by leading independent establishment St Alban’s School. We’ve given an overview of each one below – but to find out more, simply get in touch and book a demo here: https://www.webanywhere.co.uk/contact
Team Organiser
Create and organise teams for sports events. When you select students to be a part of these teams, they’ll automatically get a confirmation message to say they’ve been chosen, along with event details.
Stock Management
Keep track of equipment lent out to students, and make sure everything gets returned!
Group Communicator
Send group emails or SMS messages to parents, students or other members of staff.
Sanctions Management
Manage and keep track of detention sessions and sanctions given to students.
Output As
Print data from other modules into PDF format.
Forward Planner
Create a school diary for printing – and send key dates and events direct to your school website, all in one simple process.
Academic Reporting
See information about every student – from grades to notes from other teachers
Helpdesk
Log calls and see their status  – and view the information on multiple devices.
Timetables
See a full display of lesson plans for students and staff. Clicking on a session within the timetable will take the student to the course that they have to do.
Absence Overview
Get an at-a-glance report of who has attended classes – and who hasn’t!
Scores Viewer
Display house or team scores on the homepage as a graph.
Resource Booking
Book any resource (for example, rooms or cars) for any length of time. This module also integrates directly with PASS.
Teacher Cover Management
Input a lesson plan for a cover teacher to pick up – before they even arrive at school. Can also be used for normal lesson planning.
Messenger
Get notifications when messages are received via other plug-ins/apps. A number appears on the menu bar to denote a new message; clicking it will take you to where the message is.
Training Requests & Courses
Manage staff training. Maintain training budgets, nominate staff members for training and keep track of where repeat training is needed. Staff can also request new courses.

Last month, Webanywhere invited schools and teachers to take part on a e-safety questionnaire (you can see our original blog post here) – and last week, we compiled the results. If you took part- thank you! You’ve helped us build a picture of the state of e-safety in UK primary schools – and here are the results.
The survey revealed that, astonishingly, 63% of teachers don’t feel they have any influence over whether a child uses social networking sites, such as Facebook. Facebook, incidentally, has a minimum user age of 13.
And almost a third – 30% – feel they haven’t had adequate training on how to deal with cyberbullying.
The survey also revealed that 55% were aware that between one and five pupils had been a victim of cyberbullying at their school in the past 12 months.
The purpose of this questionnaire was originally to get a better insight into how schools feel about -and are affected by – e-safety issues. However, since seeing these results we decided to speak one of our customers about the issue – as well as an independent e-safety expert.
Jo Corrigan, Headteacher at Eastlands Primary School in Rugby – who hold an SWGfL 360 safe accreditation and has two members of staff registered as CEOP Ambassadors – took part in the survey and said: “The teaching and learning of internet safety is extremely important from an early age. Key to educating the children is ensuring staff are appropriately trained.
“At Eastlands Primary School we try to develop innovative ways of engaging parents and children with the safe use of the internet – for example, ‘speed-e-learning’ workshops.”
John Carr OBE, Secretary of the UK’s Children’s Charities’ Coalition on Internet Safety, said: “Teachers can’t teach if they don’t feel confident in relation to the subject they are meant to be teaching about. This survey shows that too many teachers do not feel they have been given proper support to enable them to do their job. That has to be fixed, as a matter of priority.
The full results of the survey, in colourful pier charts, can be seen below. If you’d like to find out more about e-safety, or if you would like to learn more about our free e-safety events, please email info@webanywhere.co.uk.
 

Blogging is becoming more and more popular in schools. At Webanywhere, we’ve often had teachers asking us if we could help them with creating blogs that their school could use. So, we’ve developed a brand new app, Bloganywhere, which makes creating blogs and writing blog posts easy for both pupils and teachers.
The Bloganywhere app is part of our Jotter Suite – which means pupils’ blogs can be accessed via one log in page within your school. We’re also developing the app so that, in the next month, it will allow you to post your school’s best blog posts direct to your School Jotter website.
Blogging itself ticks many curriculum boxes – from improving literacy and typing skills to encouraging online collaboration and reflection. Find out how your school can benefit from blogging by downloading our free guide, 7 Reasons Why Schools Should Blog here.
You can read about Bloganywhere, our featured app over at schooljotter.com, here.
Or, if you’re ready to get blogging straightaway, book a Bloganywhere demo here.

Pupil Premium grants for schools increased at the end of last year – although, as you may have noticed, Ofsted has stepped up its requirements around evidencing the impact of the spending.

It means every school is now accountable for every penny spent – so making sure the money is spent wisely and effectively is of paramount importance.
In November, Professor Steve Higgins from Durham University led a discussion on Pupil Premium with the National College online community (you can see the full transcript on the DfE website (here). He covered purchasing technology to have a positive impact on learning, and provide evidence of improved learning. “Invest in technologies which you see will work well with your children and families, but look carefully at impact,” urged Professor Higgins.
Last month, we launched School Merits, part of our suite of e-learning apps, and it’s a perfect example of how technology can be used to help improve engagement as well as evidence the improvements. School Merits is a reward system that allows learning to be tracked and recognised, as well as flagging bad behaviour. It’s such a perfect tool for helping to engage learners that, this month, we will be running a webinar to show how it can help make a difference.
The webinar will cover behaviour interventions, feedback interventions, mentoring interventions – and then explain how the reporting feature within School Merits will allow you to evidence the subsequent improvements in attainment.
Making A Difference With Pupil Premium will take place on 28th March at 12pm. To sign up for the webinar, simply email your name, school name and school postcode to events@webanywhere.co.uk.

Last Wednesday – 26th February – Webanywhere officially launched the two brand new apps, Jotter Learn and School Merits. These can now be purchased and integrated with your School Jotter website – or as standalone e-learning solutions.

We launched the apps with two webinars. Tracey Gentle, our trainer – and on-house CEOP Ambassador – talked about why the range of apps, the Jotter Suite, had been introduced. Tracey then explained how the new dashboard works, integrating your School Jotter website with Jotter Learn and School Merits, plus Blog and Forum, which will be available in about a month’s time.
Tracey provided a walk-through of both Jotter Learn and School Merits, showcasing how they are simple, easy-to-use solutions for engaging pupils and improving performance and attainment.
Every school that attended the webinar was entered into a prize draw to win the new apps, and we announced the winner – Barley Hill Primary School, Oxfordshire – at 5pm. Already a School Jotter user, we’ll look forward to seeing how they integrate Jotter Learn and School Merits into everyday teaching!
Following the launch, the App Store went live. This is where you can purchase any of the new apps, or just take a trial to see what you think. The App Store is accessible to anyone who has been upgraded to the new dashboard (find out more about the new dashboard here).
For School Jotter customers who have been upgraded to the new dashboard, our e-learning expert Keith Taynton has created a training video.
If you have any questions regarding the Jotter Suite, or any of the apps within it, get in touch with us here.