Schools without a Learning Management System in 2020 were forced to scramble for technologies that would allow them to share learning materials and communicate remotely with students.
Needing to act quickly, many schools embraced real-time collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams or the Google Apps for Education suite to enable their remote learning environment.
While these solutions served an important, foundational role in enabling communication with students, leading educators recognise that these technologies on their own are not enough to fulfill their school’s needs.
Let’s investigate some of the reasons why schools are looking to extend their edtech and embracing an LMS like Schoolbox.
Delivering consistency, without the workload
With common assessment tasks and rubrics providing consistency in how students are evaluated, many schools are now seeking technology solutions which will easily support curriculum management and continuous feedback, within a common reporting and assessment framework.
Faculty collaboration allows for a streamlined approach, with the whole team working on assessments and learning resources, ensuring students receive the same learning experiences. While classroom-based tools have some capacity in terms of curriculum development, by using an LMS like Schoolbox, schools can easily deliver courses aligned with the curriculum, ensuring a level of quality and accountability of learning delivery across the school.
By aligning the course with the curriculum, Schoolbox allows schools to build courses and roll out those courses to all classes and teachers in a specific subject area. This allows for the delivery of a common assessment task, which is much harder when using a tool that is classroom based and doesn’t facilitate sharing across a cohort.
Schoolbox offers transparency over assessment delivery. Using the built in course and unit structures, a faculty head can facilitate the creation and completion of common assessment tasks, while viewing which assessments have been delivered in a class, which have been completed, and which have been given feedback.
The Schoolbox approach to course development ensures that at the beginning of each school year, teachers have their course already built and ready to be populated into their digital classroom. This benefits educators in the following ways:
- Reduced duplication for teachers in setting up class materials and assessments
- The ability to apply course structure to multiple classes, ensuring a consistent course delivery across all classes
- The ability for educators to assess students across a cohort
- Student experience and assessment are consistent, regardless of the teacher
- A consistent parent experience can be achieved through continuous feedback and reporting, something which can’t be achieved with classroom-based tools alone.
Is continuous feedback and reporting important to your school?
From enhancing the student experience, to engaging parents in their child’s learning, there are major benefits to providing continuous feedback. When feedback on an assessment is delivered in real time and is task-specific, students are supported to learn and grow at their point of need. When it comes to parents, continuously receiving feedback on their child’s learning activities and progress is a powerful tool for increasing their engagement.
When the delivery of continuous feedback and reporting is supported by a Learning Management System, schools can ensure their staff provide consistent and timely feedback to students and their parents. With the Schoolbox LMS, parents and students are notified when new feedback is made available, with the option to send push notifications to a parent’s mobile phone, providing a convenient and effective way to engage parents in their child’s learning.
“Schoolbox ensures educators have a consistent, low effort, high quality continuous reporting solution that can be deployed across the whole school.”
Easily scope and sequence within an asynchronous learning environment
In addition to continuous assessment and reporting, a top priority for many schools is providing students with an asynchronous learning environment where learners have the flexibility to access reading, homework, and classes over a longer period of time.
Leaders in the synchronous learning space, Microsoft Teams or Google Meet have proven to be effective solutions for enabling live discussion or interaction. However, with most online learning happening in a student’s own time, educational leaders are now looking to extend beyond these technologies and offer students the opportunity to learn at their own pace.
By enhancing real-time collaboration tools, the Schoolbox platform enables self-directed learning, empowering students to learn at their own pace and consume learning materials while still aligning to scope and sequence as defined by the teacher.
Playing a particularly important role in a remote learning environment, synchronous real-time tools lack the ability to set a scope and sequence. However, thanks to its sophisticated learning management system, Schoolbox empowers educators with the ability to define the scope of work and the sequence in which the students can access course content.
Undoubtedly excellent facilitators of communication, these real-time collaboration tools are not enough on their own to deliver a consistent, asynchronous learning environment. However, when used in conjunction with Schoolbox, this forms a powerful combination to support communication, collaboration and learning in a remote learning environment.
By extending and enhancing the capability of these classroom-based tools, Schoolbox ensures educators have consistency across assessment + reporting. Furthermore, the progressive reporting functionality in Schoolbox supports parental engagement through the consistent collection of data over time across the three pillars of a student’s progress (attendance + assessment + wellbeing).
With a portal, intranet and LMS solution, the Schoolbox platform brings everything together to deliver a consistent approach to learning, leading to enhanced student performance. To enhance your school’s capability to deliver a more consistent approach to learning, book a Schoolbox demo today.
