School Reporting Suite

Saving Teachers Time

Month: May 2016

Primary School Assessment In UK Remains Controversial

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Primary school assessment in the UK has become a hot political issue in recent months.

The accurate assessment, tracking and reporting of pupil performance is vital to ensuring that the right steps can be taken to shape a child’s learning and tailor learning experiences to match progress while keeping parents and management informed.

How to do this on a national level has been in the news frequently in recent weeks as the government has come under pressure on how it tracks the performance of primary school children.

First, there was controversy over the trial of national spelling tests where questions from practice papers were used in the official trial.

Key Stage 2 SATs

Now this week the government has come under fire due to parents taking their children out of school for a day in protest at key stage 2 SATs

The Daily Mail summarised the issue

“Families have pulled their children out of class as part of a nationwide demonstration against the exams for six and seven-year-olds, which they claim put schoolchildren ‘through hell’ and too stressed to eat or sleep.

Critics claim the children in Year 2 is causing mental health problems – while some parents say their children are being ‘set up to fail’ so the Tories can force through its academies plans.

Schools Minister Nick Gibb said today it was wrong for parents to force young children to strike because: ‘Even missing a day’s school can be damaging.’”

This issue that saw more than 2,000 six and seven-year-old pupils taken out of school highlights how emotive testing and performance tracking can be.

It is important that schools continue to invest in making the assessment, tracking and reporting of pupil progress as efficient and as user-friendly as possible in a complex education setting.

This is why at Aspiring Panda, we developed the School Reporting Suite (SRS), our reporting software, that makes tracking and reporting pupil progress simple to manage.

Find out more at http://schoolreportingsuite.com/

The Advantages Of Education In The Cloud

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Cloud computing is the technology that allows users to access data from anywhere using the internet. Enhanced connectivity and the increase in the number of UK smartphone users has had a significant impact on the way the country does business.

Although you may not realise it yet, the cloud is having a large impact upon the education sector. Technologies are now in place that allow the sharing of ideas, collaboration and communicating in a way that was not possible even 10 years ago.

From video calls to educational apps there are huge strides being made to offer different products and services within the education system due to the flexibility and versatility that cloud technology creates.

Sharing data has become simple and the uses of the technology are developing rapidly as the sector adapts to the opportunities increased connectivity and sharing creates.

At Aspiring Panda, the cloud is an important part of our School Reporting Suite.

Our core product is a reporting system that allows teachers to assess, track and report the progress of students in multiple languages and curriculums. Adding the ability to store and share information from the cloud gives users a wide range of options on how to use the system.

Parents and teachers can access and input data even when they are not at school and have that information available in real time. The ability to do this from anywhere in real time is a real advantage for time sensitive professionals that do not want a difficult to use system tying them down.

Our system can be accessed on multiple devices including smartphones and tablets giving our users flexibility and choice on how they use the suite.

We expect to see further developments in the education sector as the power of the connectivity and sharing that the cloud provides is realised by schools and teachers alike.