What if you need to get lots of information out to people in a blog post, but don’t want to take up the full page? Why not cut them in half?!?

Our Managing Director discovered this cool little feature to other day whilst he was running a training session. Instead of having loads of text you can truncate your posts. You get a nice little ‘Read the rest of this entry ‘ message, that allows you to click on it and expand the post.

Click here to see how easy it is to do.

We wanted to pass on a big thanks you to our friends from three of our best schools, who helped us present the realsmart learning journey in a schools showcase presentation, at this years SSAT Achievement Show.

We broke the journey down in to 3 sections: ‘getting started’, ‘making good use’ and ‘next steps’:

1. Making the decision to use online apps, saving money and creating immediate impact at Stretford High School.

Stretford made the decision to get their heads in the cloud in January this year and can already show how this has made a  big impact on teaching and learning. Dan Stucke, Assistant Head teacher, shared with us their rationale for choosing realsmartcloud, how it has saved them money and how it’s having an immediate effect in the classroom.

2. Getting the technology used and making it easy at Winton School.

Vicky Essex, Deputy Head, and Martin Ashworth from Winton School in Hampshire, told us how in less than a year their school has became one of the top users of realsmart.  Vicky showcased some of the great work they have done using realsmart to build learning portfolios, using simple tools to record and share learning across the school.  It was great to see that as a result of this students had built learning language in to their vocabulary.

3. Moving forward and engaging parents at Manchester Communications Academy

John Sibbald, Head of Specialism and Post 16 at  MCA, gave some practical examples of true parental engagement using realsmart to facilitate learning conversations between learners, parents and staff.  The Academy have facilitated their Parents’ Evening using realsmart to review student’s work and believe in true parental engagement, not parental voyeurism. We believe that it’s not good enough for parents to look at portfolios without the wider context. Even less so with grades and percentages. That’s why Manchester Communications Academy provide such a fantastic example.

All of our presenters did a fantastic job, with many schools approaching us afterwards to congratulate them on the brilliant work that is going on in their schools.

A good job, well done!

Want to know how to change your password?

This video shows you how…

We’ve posted our ’0-6 Month Guide’ again because we think it’s the most useful bit of kit we’ve got – and it will help you to start using realsmart immediately!

(more…)

I thought I’d share this with you….. the other day I was building a unit for one of our clients and trying to insert some video clips as guidance.

Everything I was uploading was effectively getting cropped and not displaying properly because the clips were too big to display in the page. This was driving me crazy!

However, there’s a very easy way to fix this which was staring me right in the face. When you’re uploading video content you select the ‘insert audio 0r video’ icon ().

This then displays the following screen;

Select the ‘browse‘ icon () and you can either upload a new clip, or select one that already exists in your file manager. Fairly straight forward – and all done in the ‘General’ section. What I hadn’t noticed was the ‘Advanced’ tab in this window…..

WOW! By clicking this I was presented with loads of options – autoplay, re-size to fit the page, and many more…

This was ace, and meant I didn’t have to spend loads of time trying to work out how to crop / re-size my videos before I uploaded them. I just clicked the ‘re-size to fit page’ option, saved my content and …. hey presto! When I viewed the guidance in my unit it played perfectly!!!

So it just goes to show, you can teach an old dog new tricks!

Click on the link to see how easy it is http://screencast.com/t/GJlq6fGTr

Want to know how to re-size pictures for your realsmart cloud website?

In this new ‘How to…’ video our very own Gwyn ap Harri shows you how, using Pixlr.com

realsmart are proud to announce our workshops at Cramlington’s 10th Annual Conference in their week-long learning festival.

In September realsmart appointed Simon Brown to head up the training and consultancy side of our organisation. Simon works with all our schools and taught at Cramlington for the previous 8 years, during which time he was VLE Co-ordinator, realsmart champion and Head of Music.

Simon is presenting a workshop in the ‘Live Learning’ section:

LI6 :  Using realsmart and Web Apps to save you time, money and unleash the full power of the Internet.
During this session Simon will demonstrate the power of realsmartcloud, a whole-school learning environment that puts the power of the Internet in your hands. He’ll show you examples of how realsmart is used at Cramlington and how schools across the country are embracing realsmartcloud to harness the power of a range of FREE web apps, including Google docs, word processors, spreadsheets, presentations, forms, surveys, email, sites, WordPress, multi-track recording, image editors, and document storage, PLUS collaboration AND anything else on the web for free within their realsmartcloud.

Also presenting as a guest teacher is John Sibbald, Head of Specialism and Post 16 at Manchester Communications Academy:

LI7 :  Engaging Parents in school and schooling
John will give some practical examples of true parental engagement, using realsmart to facilitate learning conversations between learners, parents and staff. Manchester Communications Academy have facilitated their Parent’s Evening using realsmart to review students’ work. Students explained what they had been learning and what they had achieved. Parents could clearly see feedback from teachers, including the next steps in learning.

We believe in parental engagement, not parental voyeurism. It’s not good enough for parents to look at portfolios without the wider context. Even less so with grades and percentages. That’s why Manchester Communications Academy provides a fantastic example. It’s the discussion around the portfolio that is important, with the students knowing that they will be showing their parents, and the school knowing they are facilitating these discussions, and empowering parents to get involved.
-Engage your parents by creating opportunities for talking with their children about their learning experiences the easy way, with realsmart.

For more information, visit http://www.cramlingtonlv.co.uk/festival2011/

Can other teachers copy something I’ve created (if I want)?

The simple answer to this question is YES – other teachers CAN copy items which you have originally set up, simply and easily.

When you are creating a unit, you can allow ‘site‘ or ‘community‘ access (this can only be done when you are in edit mode, by selecting the access tab at the top of the page). This means that any other mentors will be able to duplicate the item you’ve created from the ‘site‘ or ‘community‘ area of ‘my content‘.

You can filter through the items in here via the tag cloud, the tool type or key word search. Once you’ve found the item you want to copy, single click on the item (left click) and then select ‘duplicate‘ from the available options. This will then copy the item in to your ‘my items‘ area of ‘my content‘. You can then edit this and add content, etc. without changing the original item.

Check out the ‘site‘ and ‘community‘ areas of realsmart now, and save yourself LOADS of time! There are hundreds of units that are sitting in here, ready for you to access now – you never know, someone might have already done the hard work for you!?!

related posts….  http://help.realsmart.co.uk/its-good-to-share/

One of our schools recently contacted us saying that parts of realsmart were not working on their thin client network.

After a bit of testing and some investigation, they discovered a group policy on their network that meant everything in realsmart opened in new tabs, and the policy stopped things opening in new windows. This meant, for example, that the window of realsmart rpassport stamps would not appear, and ended up crashing the system. By changing this policy and allowing new windows to appear, as well doing the usual updates on browsers and flash, realsmart was able to run on their network with no problem at all.

If your school is experiencing similar problems please refer to the following document:
http://help.realsmart.co.uk/getting-realsmart-working/

If you still experience problems after you’ve actioned everything in this document, please email us at: support@smartassess.com

Q: How much learning time is wasted finding passwords?

A: None!

ANY teacher can find out the usernames and passwords of their students quickly and easily in realsmart.

• When you’re in realsmart, open up the desired unit that you are working on and select the correct group / class that you’re working with (use the ‘shares‘ tab at the top of the page for this).

• Then select the ‘passwords‘ tab – again this is at the top of the page. This will then display all of the usernames and passwords for that particular group, and give you the option of resetting passwords should this be necessary.

*This negates the need for loads of staff having admin rights. We normally advise against there being more than 2 administrators for realsmart. This is because any changes in the admin area can seriously impact on mentor / learner data and work, and we need to be able to trace accountability – something we can’t do if there are 20 different admin users.