Extendinglearning

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Contents 1 Extending learning beyond the classroom 1.1 Extending children’s learning to the home 1.2 Involving parents in the school community

Extending learning beyond the classroom

Extending children’s learning to the home

One of the great things about having a learning platform is that it enables you to extend the children’s learning beyond the classroom. Many of these activities could also be carried out in the evenings, on weekends, during holidays or periods of absence. For some schools the learning platform was a valuable tool for keeping in touch when heavy snows closed schools for a few days in the winter of 2009/10.

• By letting pupils log in from home you may find that children’s enthusiasm for the community and ability to negotiate their way around the platform will greatly increase. From home they could contribute to forums, set up by the teacher or draw pictures/search for appropriate pictures to add to their gallery (these can be moderated by the teacher before acceptance of course).

• Simple home or holiday tasks could be set that lead into a topic. For example finding pictures of minibeasts that could be added to their own blog in school time or writing some facts about the Tudors/Egyptians/modes of transport etc. they have researched in a blog (“Did you know...”).

Involving parents in the school community

The Learning Platform is also a good means for promoting home-school links and involving parents in the school community. By creating parent accounts, parents can log in from home and check on their children’s work, school events and dates entered on the calendar. Parents will obviously greatly appreciate the openness and ready access to various aspects of school life, especially those that are unable to visit the school much due to other commitments.

Through a ‘Parent Community’ forum, parents can receive up-to-date news of events at school. They could also be given access to galleries showing pictures of events, trips and your school can easily show off its successes with photos of children’s work, ‘stars of the week’ and award ceremonies.

Parent accounts can quickly be linked to their child's account or children’s accounts so that they can see what their child or children have been up to on the platform and children can show off work they are proud of. For advice on creating and linking parent accounts, please visit the Creating_Accounts help page for advice.

Hints:

• When starting to involve parents in the Learning Platform, it may be useful to get a small group of parents onboard first of all. These ‘experts’ will eventually become the people the rest of the parents can ask for simple Learning Platform help.

• Letting parents use their own Yahoo or Gmail address and a password of their choice as a sign in may make it easier for them to remember their login details.

For advice on how to set this up, please visit this link

• Also, you could visit the exemplar parent explanation page to view an example of how you could structure your own page.