This has been 3 years in the development as we do teach alongside this whole JustMaths thing … but we are now at the point where we’ll be reaching out to current subscribers to move you over so that you have access to some new functionality. New users will get this automatically as their user profiles will be set up automatically once this goes live … but more on the transition to come! … I am going to use this blog post as an “update” post for updates specifically related to the transition as its a biggie.
So … what’s it all about? This came about as the specialism of Seager and I is converting those grade 3’s to 4’s and 4’s to 5’s and then once that is in place the rest of the grades shift upwards too. Intervention we used to call it! … We know some students are really hard to reach when it comes to revision and homework which is why at the core of what we do is teaching the students the right topics at the point where they are ready for it. If we get the teaching right everything else falls into place … however we know that students need meaningful practice but when it comes to homework, the type of students we specialise in are absolute geniuses at coming up with excuses or reasons for non completion of homework and many moons ago the biggest irritation for us was the excuse that they just couldn’t do it. Giving them videos just results in the response “yeah that didn’t help” … and we’re left with no way of telling whether or not they’d actually watched what you’d set them to do .. so for a long time now we’ve wanted a way to monitor the videos watched by students when any work was set … and well it just spiralled from there.
Anyway I don’t want to oversell this as we originally called it an LMS (Learner Management System as we learnt the phrase means) but thats all a bit poncey so thats the last time I’ll call it that … its basically some new functionality that we have been developing for JustMaths Online which means each school sets up user names and passwords for teachers and students and can then set the students work to complete by watching videos, or answering questions (quizzes will be developed too!!) and also set them worksheets to complete. So no more excuses as teachers will be able to see how much of any actual video a student has watched … the videos are full blown “lesson” videos or could just be one of our “quick vids” that focus on a sub skill within a topic.
Theres more to it than just videos of course and its going to be populated with content over time … so this is very much a JustMaths community project that you’ll all be involved in as it develops.
More on it soon …
I can’t wait to say “so remind me how much of the video you watched? ”
