So you’ve bought realsmart, but don’t know what to do with it. Where do you start? Recently we helped Hastingsbury Business & Enterprise College realise the full potential of realsmart.

When John Kane took over the realsmart reins  at Hastingsbury, he was keen to get it up and running, and embed its use across the whole school. Following  some consultation and training, John began to pilot realsmart with his 6th Form Drama group and found the results were extremely positive. So much so that this year they are adopting it across the whole school!

“…it’s interactive, it’s immediate….I can track the work, I can assess the work and I can feedback – within a matter of minutes! …because realsmart also allows the students to have clear guidance, there’s so much more clarity in terms of what it is they need to achieve… and the students have loved it.” John Kane (Hastingsbury Business & Enterprise College)

School closed?

Too cold for learning? Need to send some work home to students quickly so you can go and play in the snow?

We wanted to remind you how easily realsmart allows you to share high quality learning opportunities with your students to complete at home.

James Gough of Aston Manor schools talks to us about how they use realsmart to ensure high quality teaching and learning materials are ready for teacher absences. We are sure that students at Aston will be continuing to get realsmart during the snow!

When we asked James how realsmart was helping them get through the snow closures this week he said “We’re walking in the air”.

Nice one James!

Don’t forget to look at the “Community items” for some great resources created by realsmart users that you can share with your students in seconds.

We unfortunately cannot give passwords out over the phone, as we have no way of verifying that the account in question belongs to you.

If you lose your login details, then you need to contact your realsmart administrator, who will be able to give you this information.

We can tell you who your administrator is if you do not know; All schools will have at least one administrator.

By adding a success criteria to student work artifacts can be peer assessed constructively.

rcast is an excellent way of collecting quick peer feedback. In my own teaching I used a great bit of web 2.0 called goanimate this allows users to create animations quickly online without having to be a good artist. I wanted students to model what a good learning conversation looks like and this was easier and more engaging for most students than role play. We agreed on what success would look like and shared this in the top post of our cast. Each student then created their animation and shared it with the group by embeding it in a post on the rcast. Peer feedback was then given using the comments function against the agreed success criteria.

Have a look at this tutorial on embeding items within a webcell.

Embedding HTML in realsmart web cells from realsmart on Vimeo.

In collaboration with Frogtrade we have created a widget that allows your users to sign in to realsmart from their Frog VLE without the need to enter an additional user name and password.

If you would like a widget made for your Frog platform then please send a request to support@smartassess.com

Take a look at this video to find out how to install the SSO widget on your FROG box.

realsmart frog single sign on

We would like to share this document with all of our users. Every now and then we get calls saying realsmart isn’t working properly for us. This is usually to do with the way things are set up at your end, this non technical document will talk you through everything you need to know in order to be up and running again in no time. Read on….

Sharing is a fundemental part of harnessing best practice in teaching and learning and realsmart is set up to make this as easy is possible.

With our new MIS integration you can now have dynamically updated class lists within realsmart.  This means you can easily share the right resources with the right students.

If you look at “my content” there are 4 areas;

• My items – items created by you

• My Site – items created in your school that others have shared

• rcommunity – items created by realsmart users nationally

• realsmart items – items created by realsmart (these are pretty good!)

Once you have created an item you can choose how to share it.  If its just for you and your students just go through the sharing system in the following way.

How to add a new share;

1. Share with groups, individuals, or  yourself – click next

2. Choose mentors – by default this is you but you could add additional mentors, perhaps someone you team teach with, share a class with a teaching assisstant or your head of department.

3. Acitivity – I think of these as subject areas or activities i.e. Maths, English, Science, but activities could include Student Voice, Key Skills, PLTS, etc.

From here you can select “Finished! Create My Share”, which will place your item in the “My Learning” Activities area of yours and your selected learners accounts.

Click here to see the sharing tutorial video

The realsmart team are proud to announce that we have appointed Simon Brown to head our training and support team.

Simon comes to us from Cramlington Learning Village, one of the best and most forward thinking schools in the UK. He’ll be joining realsmart next month and can’t wait to get stuck in.
At Cramlington, Simon was responsible for their online learning environment and championed the use of realsmart across the school since it was launched at Cramlington 5 years ago. His role within our team is to develop our proactive customer implementation, support and training, and to build an active online community of users.
Schools are able to book Simon for training and implementation sessions now by contacting him on simon@smartassess.com
Simon says ‘the use of realsmart in Cramlington has been pivotal in the development of our pedagogy and I can’t wait to share my experience of its uses with as many schools as possible’.
We can’t wait either Si!

De Bono’s Thinking Hats allow us to examine a concept or problem through a variety of lenses or ‘Hats’.

Each ‘Hat’ in turn helps us think about the problems, benefits, ideas, emotions, suggestions and negative.
Using an rmap will allow you to share your thinking with your peers through the ‘Hats’. Get it from the community.

We now offer an automated integration link, that allows you to populate realsmart with your member data as often as you want from two of the most popular MIS systems, Serco Facility and Capita SIMS. This means that any changes to classes will automatically be picked up. You can set the data transfer for once a day, once a week, once a term…you get the idea.

This service will automate the collection of users and groups to administrate your realsmart account. You won’t have to bother your network manager or administrator again once this is done! This service is normally charged out at £300, but for our existing customers we are offering this service for free. All you need to do is contact us before the end of July 2010 to book a time slot.
Click here to contact the realsmart support team now