“This looks brilliant!”
Jon Brown, National Leader of Education, Executive Headteacher, Discovery Schools Academies Trust
Great teaching is a key factor in students’ chances of success. Investing in staff professional development is therefore extremely important for any school wanting the best outcomes for the children and the young people it serves. But, having staff spend time away from the class on training courses means they’re not able to fulfil their vital tasks at school. External training and supply costs are also really expensive, at a time when budgets are under increasing strain.
A new destination for high-quality CPD. We have developed Spongy Elephant to ensure staff quickly pick up new skills and remember them in bite size chunks, without the need to take time away from school. Our platform is for school leaders, teachers, teaching assistants and support staff, adapting to their role and enhancing confidence levels in a seamless manner.
Spongy Elephant use short-burst learning, webinars and gamification nested into a platform bursting with bitesize videos by expert teachers demonstrating how to use IT in the classroom and more widely in schools. Although technology is not the driving force behind student learning, it amplifies the real driving force: high-quality teaching. Getting up to speed with, and feeling confident using technology in the classroom is key to enhancing the quality of learning and teaching. Spongy Elephant is an easy and fun way of doing this and it only takes a couple of minutes to get going.
A revolutionary new approach to CPD. Schools tell us all the time about the challenges they face when it comes to continuous professional development, particularly around retention, updating skills and supporting induction for new staff. With Spongy Elephant, every moment you spend learning new skills and ideas is logged in your CPD Record. The more you do, the better you get. Need help? You’ll be able to see how others in your “herd” are doing so that you can support each other better. When you’re done, print out a certificate and log evidence on the impact of your newly acquired skills.
Spongy Elephant is the future of professional development by teachers for teachers. Spongy Elephant is the first platform to combine peer-led, bite-sized video training with online coaching and mentoring. It is a platform that can be used by teachers themselves to share best practice with peers at school, across a MAT, nationally and internationally. It is a platform that is architected to amplify great teaching by embracing peer networking and user feedback.
So what products and services do we support in EdTech? We are adding Learning Trunks every day and you can already instantly access hundreds of short-burst videos for free that we have curated from credible online sources. For a school subscription you get content that we have created ourselves covering areas like GSuite, Microsoft Office365, Virtual Reality, GDPR, iPads in the Classroom and collaboration tools for teaching and learning. If it is EdTech, you’ll find out how to make it count in Spongy Elephant.
Find out more on Spongy Elephant’s website, and at Bett 2018, stand FS5.
