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  From centralising their History homework, to replacing their outdated VLE realsmart has become an integral part of daily life at Homewood.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

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.

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

Given the choice of doing something well or doing something GREAT, we’d all choose GREAT – every time!

Sharing best practice is a vital way for teachers to celebrate success, build on their own knowledge and skills, and share this with other staff.

realsmart allows you to do this simply and easily via it’s collaborative technologies, be it across departments or whole school, policy development or curriculum design…..this list is endless.

So let’s shout about what we do well. It’s good to share!

View the video!

Here at realsmart HQ, it’s always great to hear how our schools are using realsmart, and even better, how much they enjoy using it!

The following quote was written by the Literacy teacher at Hirst Park Middle School to the Acting Headteacher following a training session we held for them earlier this week. It was so ace, we just had to share it with you… (more…)

Welcome to the realsmart blog.

The aim of the blog is to act as a central point to get help with your realsmart tools. The blog will be regularly updated with the latest news and any support topics we think may be useful to realsmart users.

The realsmart platform features ‘callouts’ (that’s what we call those helpful yellow balloons!). These aim to enhance your realsmart experience, offering useful advice about the tools you are using. They are intelligently programmed to show just when you need them; you can close them at any time.

Should you need further help, just head to the ‘help’ menu at the top of the tool pages and you will be directed to a support page for that tool; if required, this post will also contain a link to a video tutorial.

The blog can be accessed from many of the pages within realsmart:

From the dock:

The main dock within realsmart has callout help balloons which show what features are available and what they can do for you. The help dock help callout can be turned on and off from your ‘my profile’ page.

The question mark at the top right of the dock will bring you to the blog to start searching for the help you need.

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rmap is an extremely powerful but simple graphical organiser, mind and concept mapping tool. You can graphically display concepts, units of work, models, tasks etc, and allow learners to mark their progress through the understanding of the concepts, providing media-rich evidence of their learning. If you are using a concept or mind-mapping tool at the moment, imagine if your maps could be shared instantly and collaborated on, and allowed learners to show their understanding by providing collated evidence.