Five years ago I took the plunge into the wonderful world of the smartphone. I’d been using the mobile web on-and-off for a couple of years on my low-powered old Samsung phone, but it was a thoroughly unpleasant experience, rife with poorly-designed mobile websites hiding information behind labyrinthine menu structures. With my new HTC Desire though I’d be able to experience the web as its designers meant me to.
I was rather surprised, therefore, to find that I was getting roughly the same mobile experience on my high-end smartphone as I was on my low-tech feature phone. None of the websites I’d visit in the phone’s browser seemed optimised for mobile browsing, it was an overall unpleasant experience. I ended up having to use a browser (Dolphin) which let me spoof a desktop user-agent so I could actually see the content I requested.
Three years ago, the Desire having outlived its usefulness, I upgraded to the phone-du-jour, a Galaxy S3. I hoped that, in the intervening two years, with smartphones getting huge, I’d be able to dispense with my habits of browsing desktop-optimised websites on a (relatively) small screen, but this was not to be. Despite the upgraded power of the Galaxy, websites were just as sluggish and unresponsive as when I was browsing with the Desire.
I’m a bit of a tech geek, so I tend to upgrade my phones relatively often, so 2014 saw the purchase of a shiny new LG G3, with a bigger screen and a frankly silly screen resolution. Due to inertia and habit, I continued to browse using Dolphin, as I did five years ago, requesting desktop versions of mobile sites, unaware of the shifts going on behind the scenes. With Google’s algorithm changes in April 2015, responsive web design had suddenly become not only useful but entirely necessary. Despite carrying a mobile supercomputer in my pocket, the mobile web still looked pretty rubbish to me.
And so recently, on a whim, I switched browsers to something a bit more modern. While it might have won awards back in 2011 and 2012, Dolphin’s showing its age a bit, so I decided to try out Mozilla’s mobile offering and started using Firefox. It seems that, while I’ve been ignoring it, the mobile web actually became usable, and it’s all thanks to responsive web design. No longer do I have to go through the cumbersome process of requesting desktop sites then trying to navigate the tiny menus to get to the page I want. Everything from my news sources to my social media is presented in a mobile-optimised format, the information isn’t hidden behind awful mobile websites or splash screens asking I download an app.
What does this mean for schools? It means that if your website isn’t responsive, you’re missing out on engaging parents. People getting their first smartphone now won’t be using Dolphin, they’ll be using Chrome or something similar – they won’t be requesting desktop views, they’ll be wanting the information right underneath their thumbs, and you need to provide it to them. 60% of web browsing is now done on the phone, can you afford to cut them out or give them a substandard experience?
Is your site responsive? You can check it using Google’s own mobile-friendly test tool. Come up negative? Give School Jotter a try. All new Jotter school websites are fully responsive and mobile optimised.
On May 21st Webanywhere awarded Bush Hill Park primary school with our first ever Flagship School status as a reflection of their superb website and embracement of e-learning and technology within the classroom.
The standard of e-learning at Bush Hill Park has been marked as a huge success in the UK, with their site embracing modern, responsive design that works just as well on mobile, tablets and laptops as on any standard PC. Their use of the Blog, Learn and Messages app within School Jotter also reflects a school that truly believes in an e-learning future, and with a large stock of shock proof iPads they have the hardware to back up the rhetoric.
Bush Hill Park’s Computing Teacher & Subject Leader Mr Fateh Singh accepted the award in a ceremony hosted by the school. When asked about how he felt about receiving the honour he told Webanywhere “It’s been a great success to get to where we wanted to be. We love the website, we love the design, we love working with Webanywhere.”
The award is the first of its kind to be handed out, with Bush Hill Park being the first to achieve the standard of excellence Webanywhere is hoping to bring to schools across the country. With more nominees in the pipeline however, it won’t be long before another one of the Flagship School plaques finds it’s way at another one of these exceptional schools – it might even be your school next!
To see how the event went, check out our mini-documentary on Bush Hill Park and the future of e-learning:
If you’re a Webanywhere customer and you think you’ve fully embraced e-learning and are utlising technology within your school, feel free to contact us at events@webanywhere.co.uk and apply to be a flagship school.
Related Webpages
School Jotter – Find out about the online platform that Bush Hill Park Primary School use to create and manage their website and e-learning facilities
One of the biggest topics in e-learning at the moment is “gamification”, but there are a few misconceptions about what exactly this is, how you can implement it and how it can help students to learn. We’ll be covering these below, but in its essence, it’s taking concepts from video games and applying them to learning.
What gamification isn’t
Some educators see the word “game” in the title and baulk, having memories of substandard and outdated education software with more focus on entertainment than teaching. Likewise pupils might be sceptical of approaches to insert educational concepts into what’s traditionally seen as a “hometime” activity. This isn’t gamification though. While there’s certainly merit to a synergy of education and entertainment, gamification instead refers to methods of incentivising more traditional approaches, turning tasks into “games”.
What gamification is
Video games generally work on ideas of work/reward relationships – by putting in the work, you get a reward, for example defeating an opponent leads to the player gaining a piece of treasure, or completing a level and receiving an achievement. These can then be compared with others’ results, adding in elements of competition. This contrasts with learning environments, where aside from the long-term educational benefits, students generally have relatively little to gain in the short-term. By introducing achievement points & light-hearted competition, you let students track their own progress.
How you can implement it
The easiest and most efficient way to apply game-based principles to your teaching is through use of a VLE or other online environment. An open-source VLE has the ability to award badges which can display achievements and track progress. These can then be shared and compared with others, with rewards (both digital and physical) given to high achievers.
By a similar token, our own Merits system (free to School Jotter users) uses the concept of Merits as a currency for students, which can be spent either on customising their avatar or purchasing physical goods. This applies the rewards concept to learning and behaviour.
What this means for you
Gamification means more engaged students, who spend less time passively learning and more time actively discovering new information, for a proper flipped classroom experience. By incentivising hard work we appeal not just to students’ desires to better themselves but to show that they’ve bettered themselves. Engage your students, reward hard work and improve your results – gamified learning is a fantastic way to teach.
Webanywhere are proud to announce a partnership with CustomTech for distributing our School Jotter e-Learning platform in Australia.
CustomTech have a wealth of experience in deploying and supporting software in the Australian market, and we look forward to a fruitful and productive relationship with them. They specialise in public and private cloud solutions, so are a natural fit for our blended-learning approaches..
With over 25 years of experience, we feel confident that customers in Australia will be very happy with the service and support CustomTech can provide.
Find out more at their website, www.customtech.com.au
It’s in the news at the moment that British children spend more time on homework than most other European nations, and while we, at Webanywhere, are all for the high educational standards this produces, we have to ask the question of whether or not this time is being used effectively. With our suite of apps on the School Jotter platform, we can make the task of homework more efficient, productive and even fun! We’ve included the ways our apps can help out below, and all these apps are available for trial in the School Jotter app store, or you can request a demo here.
Portfolio
With our Portfolio app, it’s simple for students to create their own online learning journeys, in order to create a digital roadmap of their work. The simple, easy-to-use interface (which will be familiar to anyone who has used our Site platform to build their website) lets students and teachers add text, images and other media to create an attractive, interactive display. Teachers can set work to be completed online, then leave comments on pieces, giving quick feedback. As well as this, parents are able to log in and see what their children have been doing, giving a bit or parental oversight to the whole process.
Learn
Consider this the staff-side version of the Portfolio app. As a teacher you can create Learning Sites within the school website. These act like real websites but are accessible only by pupils and teachers, and content such as lesson plans and homework can be uploaded and displayed. Combining this with our other apps will really help to streamline your homework process.
Blog
Promote social collaboration with your students through our Blog app. Anyone who’s used a blog before will be instantly familiar with how this works – both students and teachers can create blogs and posts, as well as comment on them. Let your students take their group work online and collaboratively produce great content. Particularly good blogs can be shared or posted elsewhere – an added incentive to perform well!
Spellings
Coming soon from Webanywhere is our Spellings app! One of the most universally set pieces of homework in Primary Schools is the spelling test revision. As with any list memorisation there are various ways that each child might go about committing the information to memory, but we think our spelling app will help to make this both simple and fun. Easily create spelling lists for your pupils and embed the app into your school website for access at home. Users are shown a word briefly then asked to spell it out again – the gamification of revision in this way can really take the strain out of homework.
