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!

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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

Paul Hanson from Homewood School & Sixth Form took time out to tell us some of the great things that they’ve been doing with realsmart over the last year.

Homewood have been using realsmart for everything – be it showing more transparency between planning and assessment, or simply helping them achieve over 30% A* in GCSE Media.  From centralising their History homework, to replacing their outdated VLE realsmart has become an integral part of daily life at Homewood.

“To get a whole school approach takes a lot of effort…but the rewards that you’ll reap after a year or so are enourmous – they’re fantastic!“.

Paul Hanson, Homewood School & Sixth Form Center.

Click on the videos below to see how all this happened (and more)……

Skip Your VLE!!!

OFSTED

GCSE Media

History Homework

CPD

The Xtra Factor

AS10

What do you get if your learners collaborate across key stages, communicate with, and feed back to other learners they have never even met?

Well, apart from seriously engaged pupils, at Homewood School in Kent they also won the BIMA Award for the Inspiring Future Talent, Digital Schools Challenge 2010.

Along with this, Homewood are using realsmart across the whole school to deliver individual subjects. Pupils have even been training their teachers to use realsmart.

This is a tool to really get the pupils excited about learning!

“What realsmart allowed them (the students) to do was communicate with other students who had particular skills across the school – that they did not know … to this day they’ve never met each other.” Paul Hanson (Homewood School & Sixth Form)

“The communication between myself and the students has vastly improved….” Pete Sparks (Homewwod School & Sixth Form)

“It’s easy because I actually do my homework now, so I don’t loose it anymore.” Homewood Student

“We made the jing videos because it would be much easier for other students to hear how to do things from students about the same age…. Students don’t need to listen to another teacher droning on, they can hear people their own age, and I think that’s really helped.” Homewood Student

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)

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)

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.

How do I quickly give a worksheet / assignment / homework to a class then see who has and hasn’t filled it in / completed it?

You would set the learning activity as a criteria in rafl, and put any files into the guidance of that criteria. Students can then access the resources, and upload their completed assignments as evidence to the same criteria, and assess how well they did it. This allows you to present the task in context with their learning, giving them reason to do it as they have a greater understanding as to why they are doing it.

You can see as a mentor who has and hasn’t done it in your rafl mentor view by clicking on the ‘group’ icon. You can even open up all the evidence from all the students by clicking on the multiple spyglass icon at the top of the group view. This is great for peer assessment in class, and sets a high expectation in the class if they know that you will be going through everyone’s completed work.

You will most likely already have created an rafl covering the learning objectives and activities of your unit of learning. You can add extra criteria on the fly to rafls and this will automatically update the shares.

If you haven’t already got an rafl, you can create one, to just deliver homework if you wish, in seconds.
LEARN MORE…

No matter what qualifications or courses you run now, or will run in the future, realsmart delivers…

Think about a qualification that you deliver as a teacher.

Would you like to:

• Present the learning objectives (what you will learn) alongside the activities (what you have to do to learn it) and be able to add guidance (such as text, files, links, pictures, videos etc) to these success criteria?
• Collate evidence that your students have submitted?
• Have your students independently track their progress?
• Have an overview of your class’ progress and be able to respond to their issues?
• Have your whole department teach from the same consistent outcomes?

If you want to do this, you can set this up in realsmart in between 5-30 minutes.

View the video!

Our new 0-6 month guide is designed to get you safely and successfully through the first 6 months of your realsmart life. It’s full of practical help and support, and will be your guiding hand to cope with the first few weeks and beyond.

Copies have been sent to all our schools and further hard copies can be ordered by contacting support@smartassess.com

To download a pfd of this guide click here