Aston Manor, Bartley Green, and Wheelers Lane are 3 Birmingham schools who’ve used realsmart to reduce their workload.

By writing their OCR Nationals ICT units in realsmart using rafl, and then setting them to the community area, they were able to share the work they had created and duplicate units the other schools had built. Students are able to track their progress and teachers can feed back on coursework at any given time. This, along with other uses and benefits that realsmart offers – collaborative student voice forums (rweb), Headteacher blogs (rcast) – have really opened up what these schools are doing. Click the thumb nails below to hear them tell you how easy it is to use realsmart.

If you want to achieve similar results but don’t know how, click here to contact the realsmart support team.

“realsmart’s just been a great tool to share ideas, share resources and just to get our message across – to save us re-inventing the wheel.” James Gough (Aston Manor)

“…we can collaborate with other schools by each writing a unit and then sharing it – so sharing the workload.” Sharon Fletcher (Wheelers Lane)

“When pupils come into the lesson realsmart is their first port of call. The focus is immediately there as soon as the kids enter the classroom. You can use it in many different ways – directed teaching, where by in a lesson you use a specific objective and that’s what you’re going to work on in a lesson, you can use where by you develop independent learning and pupils will learn at their own pace.” Olivia Burns (Bartley Green)

“rweb has allowed the student council to set up a website, to put any questions, statements, images, or feedback they want on there – to pose to the whole student cohort at the school. They can comment, give feedback, help each other, & they can ask questions to the staff, or to pupils if they feel more comfortable doing that…” James Gough (Aston Manor)

“It’s almost like everybody is part of the student council… everyone’s opinion is heard.” Aston Manor student

“Without putting their hand up and asking, they can see exactly where they’ve got to go, exactly what needs to be done next, and there’s all the guidance in there to help them, so they’re really enjoying it.” Sharon Fletcher (Wheelers Lane)

“It’s good ‘cos it helps you be more independent… you don’t have to keep going back and forth between the teacher – you can do it yourself.” Bartley Green Student

“We came up with the idea of having a Head Teachers blog using rcast… the pupils get to see the Head Teacher in a different light, posing questions to get them to think about other things… to think about what they do, and how they might impact and feed back on their influences and their experiences along side hers. And the nice thing is its available for everyone to see.” Olivia Burns (Bartley Green)

Hornsea School and Language College have embedded realsmart into the “school’s way of life”. Whether it’s using rcast to keep Media production diaries, or rcast to engage difficult to reach students. With little training, they have seen how realsmart can have a massive impact on both students and teachers. Click the thumb nails below to hear them tell you how they use realsmart.

If you want to achieve similar results to Hornsea School but don’t know how, click here to contact the realsmart support team.

I’ve been using realsmart with my GCSE year 10 PE group. I’ve been using it to create a dialogue with my students using rcast as a blog. I’ve extended that recently by uploading exam papers – which has proved really effective. Where is it working for me? I think its enabling me to engage those difficult to reach, C/D borderline boys -particularly with their homework. They’re now the first to do their homework – they’re doing at all sorts of crazy times – and they’re starting to engage with the process. So I think its had a massive impact.” Steve Ostler – Deputy Head (PE)

“I’m using rweb to collate a portfolio of evidence for the IAG Gold Standard with the local authority. I wanted a website so I could upload all of the evidence that we have. I decided to use rweb because it’s a very quick and very simple way of creating a website – just a case of dragging and dropping the pages that you want to create. By using rweb I can then control who has access to these documents (some of them are very sensitive in nature) namely myself, the staff from the school, and the local authority adviser who I’m working with to achieve the Gold Standard. It’s a really really simple and easy way of collating the information that we need, and then people can access it remotely.” Anthony Bennett – Assistant Head (Teaching & Learning)

“We’re using realsmart quite a lot in our particuliar area because the students are  responding to it really well, and it’s making life quite a bit easier in terms of collecting assessment evidence and things like that.” John Hart – e-learning co-ordinator (Music & Diploma)

As one of the most progressive community schools in the UK, Cramlington Learning Village have been using realsmart since its conception and as such, its use is embedded across the curriculum. You will be able to see this for yourself if you visit Cramlington on one of their open days, or even better, at their annual conference in June.

View these six short videos for a glimpse into how CLV are using realsmart every day in their classrooms

For more information on CLV, visit their website: http://www.cchsonline.co.uk/

Hirst Park Middle School took the initiative and found realsmart easy to roll out across the whole school with very little support. Recently they told us how they’re using realsmart to deliver everything from lesson plans to field trip blogs. Click the thumb nails below to hear them tell you how easy it is to use realsmart.

If you want to achieve similar results to Hirst Park Middle School but don’t know how, click here to contact the realsmart support team.

“There’s two areas realsmart covers that I find really attractive. One is the ease of use – people seem to take to it immediately – five, ten minutes of training and they’re doing stuff. The other thing is the flexibility in there – you can use different sections of realsmart to crack different nuts. We’re using rcast to do blogging, we’re actually using mind maps (rmap) to create lesson plans – so it’s not just one route through.” Brian Cosgrove – Web & Media Developer.

“It’s so easy to lose work sheets, and you don’t know where they are, but – you can’t lose these! realsmart keeps you on track of what you’re doing.” Harry – Hirst Park Middle School pupil.

“It literally took me about 15 minutes to plan a unit of work – using the resources that we already have in school – and uploading them into realsmart. It was just so easy to use, so intuitive.” Charlene Larter – Literacy Teacher.

“It’s easy to use. That’s why I use realsmart instead of some of the other things that I’ve used in the past.” Cameron - Hirst Park Middle School pupil.

“At the moment we’ve got about 50% of our planning actually through realsmart in the English Department, and from next year we’ll be looking at having 100% of our planning – for the department – available on realsmart. We’re also looking at how students get in to using that as well, so that it becomes an environment where the community can engage with planning as well as the teachers.” Louise Hall – Teaching & Learning Co-ordinator.

“A lot of the time I do my projects at home, and it’s literally just a click of a button and realsmart’s on.” Beth – Hirst Park Middle School pupil.

“I’m using realsmart as a way to get the task across to the students, so they can see what they’re expected to do, but also to provide the resources, so that they can go on there and have a look at things that I’ve found, that I’ve selected – links to things – so that they can go home, as well as in school, and continue with their work, and also to help out their parents so that their parents can help them with their enquiries and their research mainly.” Danielle Sykes – Geography Co-ordinator.

“… we can always just check that we’re doing it right. It’s really hard to get confused.” Georgia – Hirst Park Middle School pupil.

“I wanted the flexibility in producing lesson plans. The realsmart mind map (rmap) gave me that flexibility. So now we’ve got our lesson plans as a central resource, with everything linked to them. I find it ideal for both myself and the staff. One of the things is how simple it is to use, it’s just a natural progression to develop the whole system – it’s ideal.” Gordon Dickinson – ICT Co-ordinator.