As the academic year begins with gusto, we’d like to say a big welcome back to all of our customers (100% renewal rate…..) and wave hello to our new customers. We look forward to working with you all throughout the 2020 / 21 academic year, despite the fact this is probably the strangest start we have known.
Doubtless, Coronavirus will cause headaches galore and challenge leadership up and down the country. It is inevitable the teaching profession will continue to be its under-appreciated, much-maligned self, so we’d like to take this opportunity to provide you with a quote by Epictetus: –
“Circumstances don’t make the man, they only reveal him to himself.” – Epictetus
New Features on Kloodle
We are delighted to announce a few new features designed to help our customers get even more out of Kloodle. As always, we are keen to listen to the people who use our software on a daily basis, and provide features that will help make life a little easier. This year, we have added the following: –
Skills Ratings / Self Assessment
Driven by a need to capture a “baseline assessmet” of learners’ skills, we have introduced a self-rating system that provides a learner the opportunity to rate themselves based on the skills they will be evidencing on Kloodle.
This is achieved using a star-rating system, marking yourself out of 7 stars based on how competent you feel you are at a particular skill. To negate the potential of someone marking themselves 7 stars for everything, there is a credit limit, meaning students have to stay within this limit with their ratings.
The result of this assessment is an initial skills wheel. Once a student begins to post on Kloodle, a second skills wheel is produced, demonstrating where a learner’s skills lie in relation to their self-assessment.
You can see a tutorial on how this works here – http://help.kloodle.com/en/articles/4411076-how-to-complete-an-initial-skills-assessment
The Kloodle App
We have released a new app, designed to make the following activities easier than ever: –
– Building a profile
– Capturing skills evidence through posting blogs, photos, videos and documents
– Capturing Work Experience hours and reflections
– Completing awards and challenges
The app can be downloaded now via the App Store and Google Play.
Gatsby Ratings
We work with schools and colleges who host a number of Gatsby-related activities, from employer talks, to work experience and everything in between. There has been a lot of interest in gathering learner feedback based on these activities. We have released 2 new mechanisms to gather this feedback: –
– Likes
– Comments
This enables learners to either like or dislike an event (a mechanism they are very familiar with), as well as the ability to provide a comment on the event or activity.
This then provides leadership or the organising teacher with a stream of feedback they can take into account when shaping other activities.
You can view a tutorial on how this works here – https://help.kloodle.com/en/articles/4255041-gathering-feedback-on-gatsby-activities
Learner Dashboard
The learner dashboard is now the first page learners will see when logging in. The page is designed to: –
– Place their current goal front and center in everything the learner does
– View their skills wheels quickly and easily
– See their number of WEx hours, as well as quick links to posting reflections and increasing hours
– See the awards and challenges assigned to them and what they have to complete
– View Gatsby activities they have been included in
Course Skills
We have also been told by our customers that they would like to be able to capture course specific / technical skills, as well as the “soft” transferable skills Kloodle is already so good at capturing. As a result of this, we have: –
– Created a new skills wheel based on a learner’s course specific skills
– Created the ability for class teachers and HoDs to specify the course specific skills a learner can tag
– Created a global course skills setting, designed to enable Directors of Curriculum to specify the academic skills learners should be developing throughout their course.
This provides the ability for schools and colleges to gather together examples of course-specific skills, and to capture the distance traveled based on the development of these skills.
Here’s a tutorial on how to achieve this on Kloodle: –
Posting on behalf of learners
Kloodle is a learner-driven platform, designed to get young people to reflect on the vital skills they are developing throughout their education. The process of reflection is crucial in helping young people develop self-awareness, as well as to appreciate the true impact of their education and the curriculum they are following.
However, in some settings, capturing achievements and reflections can be challenging for the learners themselves. As a result, we have created the ability for teachers to post content on their learners’ behalf. This has worked well in SEND settings, for example.
You can view a tutorial on how to achieve this here – https://help.kloodle.com/en/articles/4255127-posting-reflections-on-behalf-of-a-learner
We look forward to our customers using, critiquing and shaping these new features. Any feedback, as always, is gratefully received!
