Classroom to Cloud: Don’t close, take your school online!

When I started Zzish, it was with a passion that comes from wanting to make a difference in education. My team and I genuinely believe that software can make a huge difference in helping teachers personalise their teaching in and out of the classroom, and in doing so radically improve student progress. We’ve spent years working to make this happen, but at this particular point in time, we are incredibly proud to be part of a like-minded community that has a real opportunity to make a significant impact in the midst of a global crisis.

According to the United Nations, school closures in 13 countries to contain the spread of Covid-19 are disrupting the education of over 290 million students globally, “a figure without precedent.” This figure is only set to increase.

Our message to schools is simple: don’t close, take your school online!

The EdTech community in the UK, and indeed around the world, has come together and said that any school affected by the COVID-19 can use our various software applications completely free. You can see a list of all the software companies offering this here:

• International Educator Shared resources for virtual learning in emergency school closure

It might seem a little radical to take a school completely online, but with a little bit of planning, it’s a lot easier than it might seem. There is absolutely no reason why classes should not convene at exactly the same time as they normally would, and that teachers simply deliver their lessons online over the Internet to students sitting at home.

Indeed schools and districts in the US are already starting to do this and whilst a little daunting at first it seems to be working out well. As parent, Nicole Tanner, says, when Northshore School District was forced to close for two weeks, the teachers there decided to take school online and have pioneered a model they are calling “Classroom to Cloud”. It seems to be working.

So how does a teacher deliver a lesson online? Essentially, they need three components:

1. Video/audio conferencing software
2. An LMS (Learning Management System) to assign tasks and receive work for marking
3. Formative assessment software for teachers to monitor student progress. This is so that teachers can understand which students need help with which part of the curriculum, and so give different students the appropriate personalised help they need, remotely.

Our Quizalize software is one of the leading solutions in the third category. It is particularly useful for schools as it can be used to measure students' understanding in any subject and any grade by capturing student mastery data on progress against each learning objective in a curriculum. Whilst many schools already have software that can do this for key subjects, such as Mathematics, they typically lack software to do this in many other subject areas. 

Here at Zzish, we’re incredibly happy to be able to support our first school in South Korea who are using our Quizalize software to keep the school open online! If you are a teacher or school that is being affected by COVID-19, then you can get Quizalize Premium for free too by letting us know here.

Video conferencing software

We are not the only ones offering our software for free to support schools during school closures. Google Hangouts and Microsoft Teams are both amazing and easy-to-use conferencing tools. Many companies use these tools on a daily basis and there is no reason teachers can’t do so too. The free version of Google Hangouts has a limit of 25 simultaneous users, not particularly helpful for schools with class sizes of 30 or above, but Google have announced that schools can use the Premium features of Google Hangouts completely free until July 1 and Microsoft Teams is free for schools too. 

You can now run some pretty large classes for free online with Google Hangouts — if you happen to have a class of 250 students, it’s no problem at all. And if you want to do one-way streaming, you can even teach up to 100,000 students simultaneously!

Of course, it’s important to note that not all students have good internet access and/or suitable devices at home, which may make video conferencing impractical for some students. However, all video conferencing software supports switching from video to audio + screen capture. Audio + screen capture requires much lower bandwidth, which means that even students on poor internet connections can follow along with a lesson taught via screen sharing a powerpoint presentation. Having said that, if a student is able to watch YouTube on their smartphone, then they will be able to watch a video stream on Hangouts using the Android or iOS mobile app or Teams Android or iOS app too.

Zoom is another popular video conferencing tool used by companies. It is generally considered a little more stable and reliable than Hangouts and Teams. They too are making their software free for schools. In fact, Zoom has seen a remarkable 40% increase in their share price since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak as investors see opportunity in the crisis.

Whilst there is no doubt that COVID-19 is an international crisis, the rapid adoption of EdTech by schools is perhaps one positive thing to come out of it. Schools across the world have generally been slow to take up using software in the classroom, but now there is an impetus that will hopefully help teachers come to grips with these tools and recognise how powerful they really can be at helping students learn faster.

Formative assessment software

There are thousands of amazing software applications to help teachers deliver teaching remotely, but classroom quiz game software, like Kahoot and Quizlet, is particularly valuable for understanding student progress in real-time.  

Our own Quizalize application falls into the category of classroom quiz games. It is generally preferred by teachers who value the unique features in Quizalize, such as differentiation and tracking of student mastery, that help them deliver more personalised teaching to students. Independent studies run by schools themselves have shown students achieving 8-10% better scores in end-of-year exams as a result of teachers using Quizalize. So perhaps the need to shift to using digital tools for remote teaching could actually result in a similar uplift in student learning across the globe?

Classroom quiz games are powerful tools for collecting student data to inform teaching. They all have “game views” that the teacher would normally show on the electronic whiteboard in a classroom session, but these game views can easily be screen shared using video conferencing software too. In fact, we have a teacher in India who broadcasts our game view to hundreds of students at a time using YouTube live streams, whilst the students take the quiz on laptops and mobile devices.

At Zzish, we actually don’t think of Quizalize as just another quiz game at all. At Zzish we think of Quizalize as a “virtual teaching assistant”, a software application that supports the teacher in real-time, whether in the classroom or in remote teaching. Our goal is to save teachers hours of time each week by helping them collect data on student progress in a fun and engaging way, and then giving them the superpowers to instantly and effectively personalise their teaching for each and every student.

Taking school leaders online too

It’s not just teachers that need support — school leaders do too. This is a particularly challenging time for these amazing people, who need help to first get their school online, but, once they are online, they also need digital tools to help them manage the school. Our Zzish Insights product for school leaders may be particularly useful here too. 

Zzish Insights aggregates the student data from every Quizalize quiz delivered by teachers across all grades and subjects within a school (or even a whole school network) on a daily basis. It’s a unique product that allows school leaders to track the academic progress of every class against every curriculum learning objective on a daily basis. It helps school leaders work out exactly where they need to support teachers with new training, new resources or other help. It’s a super powerful product and we like to think of it as a “virtual assistant for school leaders”.

School leaders can also use video conferences to have meetings with their staff, or even join into individual classes remotely, something they can't do with normal classrooms!

In short, for school leaders, teachers, students and parents who are committed to making it work, there is tremendous opportunity to radically improve the way teachers teach and the way students learn through remote teaching. I hope that schools do not simply choose to close down and instead see this as an opportunity to take teaching to an entirely new level. The proof that EdTech really can accelerate student learning is out there, and it’s now up to the amazing teachers and school leaders of this country to take that leap of faith and start delivering their lessons online. My team and I, and indeed the whole EdTech community, will do everything we can to support them.