Today, I want to talk about the Cases feature and the problems it solves for many different stakeholders at school. For example let’s take a typical scanerio we have when it comes to mentors.
Mentors whether it is at KS2, KS3 or KS4 play a vital role in supporting the students they closlely work with - What I have found from experiance and by speaking to mentors is similar across the board. Much of the work they do stays between them and the student. This is because it is often difficult or there are no systems in place to share the good work that is done with other people who have an interest in the students education. What also seems to be common is a lot of the time mentors end up building great relationships, discovering brilliant strategies that work however because of the lack of system or method of storing and sharing this valuable information means it is often hidden.
A typical scanerio in school:
Mr Brown is currently mentoring Thomas Jones in Year 10 and supporting him with all his subjects as he is below target in all of his subjects. One of the first things Mr Brown decides to do is get some feedback from all his teachers. He does this by sending an email to all the staff. Staff often get annoyed by this because this tends to clog up the inboxes of teachers who do not teach Thomas. Once Mr Brown gathers this information he puts it into this personal folder and begins his day making notes, comments and gathering worksheets, assignments from different subjects during his day working with Thomas. By the close of play he has many different notes, valuable information and has an idea of Thomas’s behaviour, effort and attitude across the subjects. Mr Brown during the day spends a few minutes to reflect with Thomas and give him praise in between lessons. At this stage many of the teachers that teach Thomas are not aware of the information Mr Brown has discovered. At some point Mr Brown types all the information up and puts it in his file and then takes more time to email all the relevant teachers with an update. This is incredibly time consuming and Mr Brown often finds it difficult to keep everything together and share valuable information he has discovered with Thomas’s tutor or subject teachers. Mr Brown decides to take the easier option and put all the information he has typed up in the Year 10 Mentoring folder on the shared area and email the link to all the members of staff.
Huge amount of time, effort and energy
In reflection I am sure Mr Brown is spending far more time searching for information, sharing information, analysing information and storing it, rather then spending time supporting and mentoring Thomas. At StudentRM our mission from the outset has been to provide solutions for these types of typical problems we have in school day everyday when it comes to sharing information and taking action
Cases for Mentors using StudentRM
The case for Cases and why they will free your time
Since we demonstrated Cases feature to Mr Brown, she has saved masses of time, effort and energy. This how Mr Brown works now:
- He searches for Thomas’s name by using the simple search
- Mr Brown then creates a case called “Mentoring Thomas Jones - KS4 Support”
- StudentRM will notify all the teachers that support Thomas and ask them for feedback. This feedback will automatically be put in a word document for Mr Brown saving him a huge amount of time.
- When Mr Brown wants to leave a note, file or comment about Thomas, he simply searches his name and put his feedback on Thomas’s page - keeping all his interactions in once place and shared automatically with everyone that has acces. Mr Brown can also create notes, leave comments and keep them private if he wishes.
- Mr Brown will continue to leave his thoughts on the case and once he has finished his mentoring he can close the case - If anyone searches for Thomas in the near future will be able to see a history of all the work Mr Brown has done with Thomas without having to search through emails and shared areas.
The debate regarding the benefits of teaching Latin to school children has raged for decades. Some argue even since the fall of the Roman Empire. Yet a recent survey by Cambridge University shows that the teaching of the mother of all modern western European languages has actually risen dramatically since 1999. What’s really surprising however is that the rise is not taking place in private schools but in state schools.