Move To Digital Planners For 2023-24
The college has now had individual student devices across all Year Groups for two years and, as a result, the way pupils use their device for organisation and productivity has developed significantly. In order to continue this development, as well as further developing the 21st century skills of the pupils, we will no longer be providing the paper-based pupil planner as standard next academic year. Instead, we will be developing our learning management suite to incorporate the functions of the planner in a digital format.
This will include the following:
- Pupil Timetables will be automatically added to their calendar in Outlook and Teams. These will automatically update on any changes to the timetable.
- All teachers will set all homework tasks as assignments on Teams, allowing pupils to see all homework tasks and deadlines in one place.
- Teachers will set assignments to automatically be added to pupil calendars, so pupils can see deadlines in their electronic calendar.
- Homework timetables, which show each class/year what homework should be done each evening, will be created as electronic calendars pupils can subscribe to, so then can also see this in their electronic calendars.
- Key reference materials will be made available on the pupil SharePoint portal.
Pupils will of course be trained on how to access and use their electronic calendar effectively and efficiently, how to ensure they can see all upcoming homework assignments and how to access key reference materials easily. Their calendar will be available through Outlook and Teams through any device, allowing them to access this information both on their laptop and also on a mobile phone.
Our new Year 7 pupils will not be using a device in school for the first half-term, and so we will of course provide them with a printed timetable and slimmed-down version of the paper planner for the first half-term, before they begin using devices after October half-term.
We will also ensure a small number of generic paper diaries are available in September, for use by any pupils who are struggling to adapt to this change and would benefit from this.
We feel this is a positive step, both in terms of developing our pupils’ digital organisation skills and from a sustainability perspective, with a significant decrease in the amount of paper used by not providing paper planners. We will ensure we put the systems and training in place to make this a successful change.
