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)