Since the start of the year, Ms. Voët and Ms. Boquet, teachers at Andersen school in Villebon-sur-Yvette, have been using ONE with their year 5 classes. Ms. Voët explains how use of the VLE has blossomed this year, with the blog at centre stage.
First steps in ONE: activating accounts
To help pupils and parents get to grips with ONE, Ms. Voët set up a “VLE help” blog where she gives advice on how to use certain features (downloading a free tool to view the videos available in the filespace, advice on which browsers to use) and specifies the rules of publication in personal accounts (particularly the motto in the “My account” section).
The teachers took things one step at a time before launching ONE in class: fine-tuning ONE settings, choosing which apps to use and allocating permissions for published content (blog, filespace) to parents and pupils. Only once everything was ready were the accounts distributed; the goal was to give families access to ONE before the school camp in December. The teachers helped their pupils activate their accounts in class, while the parents did it themselves at home.
A blog for school camp
“We were waiting for the class trip to the snow to be able to really use the blog and give families our news”.
Ms. Voët used the app as a class newspaper during their school camp, by starting the blog “Trip to the Far North”.
The blog allowed both year 5 classes to communicate with parents about how the winter camp was going. Each day, the teachers published information about the stay and photos to illustrate the pupils’ activities.
“Parents were very pleased to be able to see the photos and hear our news.”
Ms. Voët had very positive feedback from parents, who were glad to be able to follow their children’s activities and access the photos posted online every day.
In the lead-up to the trip, the teachers uploaded all the documents required to prepare for camp to the filespace: the list of items to take, health & safety sheets and information about the stay. As such, using ONE greatly facilitated organisation of the winter camp and communication with the families involved.
Resources on ONE for revising and homework
In the everyday running of the class, ONE is also used to monitor homework and to access resources.
While the children are writing down their homework in their paper diaries, Ms. Voët enters a post on the “Homework” blog. Thanks to this blog, parents can see what homework is to be done on a daily basis, and the teacher can make sure that all pupils get the information, even when they are absent from school.
Ms. Boquet, who takes the year 5 pupils for history lessons, uploads videos from the lesite.tv platform to the ONE filespace. In this way she can easily provide pupils with materials to help them study and learn their lessons.
Songs, rhymes and a few documents pertaining to what is taught in class are also posted in the filespace. These resources are particularly useful to pupils when they are revising. Accessing the materials is quick and easy, whether for watching videos or for downloading lessons.
In short, these two teachers have found ONE very useful both for communicating with families during a one-off class trip, and over the long term for keeping up with homework and access to learning materials. Furthermore, ONE facilitates the teachers’ collaborative approach and the sharing of activities between the two classes.
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