EC Meeting Papers January 2019

Before schools begin using the platform, we organise and run a half days training day to ensure the teachers are clear on how to use the platform and resources.

Issues and Challenges Challenge one: ‘Inputting student data’; the platform is coded in a specific way, so the data input needs to be done in a specific format, we found that the teachers would input the data incorrectly. This caused the platform to collapse and need to be reformatted. One school’s (Salvatorian College) IT system has had a problem of ‘quarantining’ (rejecting) the emails and this resulted in the students not being able to sign up to their student log in. Response: To tackle this problem and make it easier for teachers, Shout Out now asks all schools/teachers to send across the data for the students and they upload this correctly on to the platform. The E-guide has now been updated to specify that they will need to contact their IT department to authorise the course content, this is also reiterated during the initial meeting showcasing the platform and, in the sign-up and welfare emails. This showed us the lack of basic ICT skills held by the teachers. A possible issue the NUT/NEU might be interested in exploring. Challenge two: ‘Utilising the platform’ where teachers have had to deal with an increasing amount of workload and they have been unable to utilise or start teaching the political literacy platform. This is the case in ‘Wren School’ and ‘Sacred Heart’. Response: Shout Out have maintained consistent contact with the teachers offering support and “troubleshooting” to help with a smooth transition to start the course and use the platform.

Feedback As the school year has only started two months ago it is very early for a full feedback report, however, this is what we could ascertain:

Salvatorian College: Lucie Spicer- (Education Coordinator) attended the first ‘drop down session’ which was the ‘Politics of Star Wars’ at Salvatorian College. She met the students who were taking part in the political literacy course, they were a mix set of students who had all signed up voluntarily to take the course. The student ages ranged from year 7 to year 10. The students enjoyed the session immensely, and were able to discuss current affairs and showcase political knowledge they had learnt through the course so far.

The teacher expressed that the resources were good, but due to time constraints they had not yet explored the resources in depth. They had however, booked a trip to parliament to hopefully get the students interested and wanting to learn more. As well as this, they have expressed an interest in changing their Student Council to our Student Union model, once they get further into the course.