it4L

Easy new on-line system that reports on over 30% of FSP skill areas

The West Midlands RBC has forged an agreement with Screen Learning to conduct a free trial programme with schools in the West Midlands region.

Screen Learning’s “Smart Cat Games” is an innovative new software system consisting of 13 fun games that Reception children play unassisted and gives teachers a detailed report on the child’s strengths and needs.

Teachers that have used the system say it’s an “enormous” help, giving immediate results across a wide range of skill areas such as: mathematical development, space awareness, emotional recognition, short-term memory, empathy, sound matching and many more.

Screen Learning will make available its Smart Cats assessment system free-of-charge to the first 200 schools in the West Midlands region that sign up to the programme.
Included in the trial is:
• Free use of the on-line system until Easter 2007
• Telephone helpline, e-mail support and an FAQ page
• An effective security policy to ensure that personal data will be managed securely and appropriately (full policy available on the web-site)

To sign-up for this exciting trial programme, call Screen Learning on 01225 388661 or go to: https://members.screenlearning.com/test-drive/wmnet.php

The Educationblog has moved to this new environment. We’re now going to run a wordpress blog, as we’ve been struggling under the weight of spam on b2evolution. Let’s hope things improve.

You will still be able to get to the blog at educationblog.org.uk, we will just update the referrer. You might however want to update your rss feeds in your aggregator when we move.

So long B2e, and thanks for all the fish.

EDIT The initial hurried message of this post has been enhanced by linking to words and phrases that might have been unfamiliar to some. Please feel free to explore their meanings and their use in this context, and if they still confuse it would be an honour to hear from you via comments so that the whole blog experience will be enhanced for all.

From Tim Lauer’s blog I found Zoho Creator at the Zoho stable, a Web 2.0 app in public beta that lets you build your own database-like web apps quickly, easily and with no coding knowledge. Having spent 5 mins creating a form it reveals itself as simplicity itself to operate. Amongst many other things, it allows you to create a form and email notification to respondents (or leave it public) who simply follow an embedded link to make their responses. Bingo, an instant survey mechanism! Output can be viewed onscreen or to Excel (apparently - haven’t cracked that one yet).
I should think that this is especially useful to those needing to create surveys, since respondents can enter their data by any web-friendly device eg mobile phone, and the data collected with relative ease.
Tim mentions other Web 2.0 apps that do the same sort of thing, namely Ning and DabbleDB, both of which I’m eager to try.
There’s a hastily-created zoho app here if you want to see what can be created in 5 minutes. Imagine what could be done with a bit of thought and effort…

Have you ever considered how to make assessment data more usable in an everyday and practical way. A popular method is to colour code data for example in pupil assessments using the “traffic light” approach - so how do we do it? Essentially the likely environment to do this sort of work will be within a spreadsheet either Excel or the Open Office spreadsheet. The methods etc are very similar and you can download examples for either on the links below:

Excel example

Open Office Spreadsheet example

Of course what ICT can’t do is make sensible best use of the data - that’s where we hit the real teaching and learning agenda!