Wokingham

All pupils in the Wokingham borough’s schools could have their own online learning space thanks to new IT technology set to be adopted by the authority’s decision-making executive on Thursday May 31.

The Wokingham committee is expected to approve adoption of the UniServity learning platform, a set of online tools to help pupils and teachers share, store and manage their information and work. It would allow schools to access a vast range of services for their pupils and staff, including: a personal working space online for pupils and staff; individual logins for all pupils, staff and parents; shared files and workspace that could be accessed by specific users only; ability to host and manage schools’ websites; other communications tools and facilities such as calendars, surveys, instant messaging and discussion forums and the ability for all individual users to create webpages for a restricted audience or for general publication.

Specific examples of these uses could be: teachers storing lesson plans on a personal file and long-term plans on a shared file; infant pupils storing work they are particularly proud of on their personal space so that parents can see it; photographs of school plays and other activities on webpages with restricted access; pupils able to work on projects jointly with children from other countries; schools could be able to send messages directly to parents via the technology.

The system would be flexible and allow schools to select which of the services they want to adopt. It would also be up to individual schools to choose whether to adopt the UniServity system or a different system, but Department for Education and Skills advice is for all schools to adopt some sort of learning platform by 2008 and Wokingham Borough Council has selected UniServity as its most appropriate provider after a thorough procurement process.

Wokingham Borough council sees it as advantageous to use one learning platform across all its schools because this would allow pupils’ personal workspace to follow them if they change schools and would allow collaborative working between pupils of different schools both inside the borough and beyond – even internationally.

Wokingham Borough Council