Winton School have taken realsmart fully on board and are starting to roll it’s use out across the whole school.

Whether it’s using rafl and rpassport on whole area Project Days which incorporate Modern Foreign Languages, ICT, and English, to using rcast to blog minutes of Leadership Meetings, the staff have become enthused and the kids are loving it! The Head has even started presenting at conferences using rmap instead of Powerpoint! On one of our support visits we talked to some of the staff about why they liked realsmart, what they were currently using it for, and their hopes for the future.

Click on the videos below to find out more.

Click  here to see Winton on youtube, where amongst other things they discus the merits of using realsmart.

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

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.

• Assess the competencies, characteristics, qualities or habits of a learner.
• Ideal for implementing frameworks such as PLTS, SEAL, Opening Minds or the 5Rs.
• Build your own passport for any award or achievement that requires evidence across a period of time.
• Build timelines of evidence showing progression against multiple criteria.

Many schools are introducing the concept of competencies as a way of assessing a student’s progress towards being an effective learner. There are many models of competencies such as Opening Minds, PLTS, SEAL, 5Rs and all can be effectively assessed using rpassport.

Watch the movie here!

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

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is central to school improvement. A well resourced programme that is effectively led and coordinated, and involves people at all levels, creates a positive climate where professional development can flourish to the benefit of individual pupils. The programme needs to be linked effectively with performance management. In doing so, it also needs to build on and share the knowledge and skills of staff, and meet the needs of individuals and teams, as well as those of the whole school. We now have the 5 following Professional Standards built as passport pages within realsmart:

• Qualified Teacher Status (QTS)
• Core
• Post Threshold
• Excellent Teacher
• Advanced Skills Teacher

You can duplicate these now from our community area. Just click the community tab in your ‘my content’ area, and search the titles.

Did you know that you can upload any stamp pictures to your realsmart site, that members in your school can choose from when assigning pictures to their stories? These story pictures will appear on the rpassport . Add a story page for members to choose from.

If you would like to upload some stamp pictures to the rpassport tool in your site, please contact your realsmart champion to arrange this with the realsmart administrator.

If you are an administrator for your site, you can upload your stamp pictures in the admin area by clicking the ‘content’ menu.

Secondary SEAL is a whole school approach to promoting social and emotional skills that aims, when fully implemented, to involve all members of the school and all aspects of school life.

Are you delivering the SEAL competencies in your school?

We now have all the SEAL competencies created in realsmart as passport pages.

You can duplicate these now from our community area. Just click the community tab in your ‘my content’ area, and search ‘SEAL’.