realsmart allows users to appoint additional editors on any item they wish. This allows for small groups of students, or even entire classes to edit and work on an item together.

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Your realsmart items can be shared in more ways than just the one.

You can actually embed them as you would with any other web content. Items be put inside WordPress posts, emails, or even inside of other realsmart items. This is particularly useful if you want to use an item as evidence within another realsmart item.

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Sharing is not the only way to distribute your realsmart items. By setting your items’ access you can share the content with fellow mentors so they can edit the file like it’s their own.

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Occasionally learners and mentors may want to remove their shares without completely deleting their items. This can help realsmart users’ keep their ‘My Learning’ section organised and uncluttered.

How to remove unwanted shares

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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!

What’s more, we’ve uploaded this using ‘Issuu’ so that you can browse the guide in this page, rather than having to download the PDF. Click on the image below to read the guide at your leisure……

To download a copy of this PDF click here.

Q: How much learning time is wasted finding passwords?

A: None!

ANY teacher can find out the usernames of their students and reset their passwords 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 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.

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 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!