“Simply put, we can’t keep preparing children for a world that doesn’t exist.”
Cathy N Davidson
As an Apple Distinguished School (2021-2024), we’ve seamlessly integrated technology within our pedagogy and practice across the school. The SJB school community fosters a culture of innovation that strives to instil a love of learning; to prepare our students for their future, we must ensure that they are digitally literate so that they will develop the 21st century skills required to be successful in life – creativity; collaboration; curiosity; and communication.
CORE APPS & STRAGEGIES
Our core apps wheel contains 13 apps and strategies that we use all the time; they all help develop 21st Century skills. The 3 central apps should be used in every lesson, the apps round the outside have been identified as ways to transform our teaching, ensuring our students are inspired, creative and empowered.
LEARNING TOOLS APP
We have created an easy to use AfL tool that allows students to communicate the progress they are making in relation to learning. The app includes traffic lights, target setting, true or false and a SPAG proof reading checklist that allows students to check their own work.
SHOWBIE APP
Showbie is an app every department uses to assign, collect, and review student work. Teachers share lesson resources, and provide rich feedback in the form of voice notes, annotations, and videos. Likewise, students can annotate worksheets directly in the app as well as submit work from virtually any other app. Showbie can also be used on a desktop so is designed to be used with all key stages. You can learn more about the app in a short how-to video we created for staff. Visit the section on workflow to see how departments organise Goodnotes.
GOODNOTES APP
Goodnotes is a notetaking app that students use to organise and store their work. Work is organised into folders by subject and within the app students can sketch and annotate by hand or by typing. Visit the section on workflow to see how students should organise their learning within this app.
- Apple Clips – a powerful video-editing app.
- Quizlet – digital flashcards, matching tasks and live quizzing
- Keynote – presentation app
- Socrative – formative assessment tool linked to Showbie
- Onedrive – file hosting service used for collaborating
- Seneca – effective and engaging revision website with self marking formative assessment.
- Modelling – using visualisers and recorded videos to model concepts and skills to students.
- Quizizz – engaging formative assessment tool
- Padlet – app/website that acts like a digital noticeboard.
- The Day – subscription with a wealth of news articles.
DIGITAL LEARNING RESOURCES
More information about all these apps as well as other useful tech resources can be found on the Learning & Teaching Website
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