Jon Attwood, Deputy Head at The Rural Enterprise Academy in Staffordshire, explains the benefits of using Educake across multiple subjects and how it has helped increase student engagement while reducing teacher workload.
Student engagement
We use Educake across multiple subjects: English, maths, geography, science and PE. The biggest positive for us is the engagement. Overall, we’ve got more students engaging in schoolwork across all subjects, which is fostering that habit of working outside of school from year 7 right up to GCSE.
The feedback from students has been really positive. They don’t have to take paper worksheets home, and they’re able to access it on a variety of platforms. Every quiz has a shareable link, so it’s easy to communicate homework with parents and students.
Parents approve
Speaking of parents, they’ve told us that Educake is massively helpful. We’ve even had parents who are teachers themselves (at other schools) tell us that our approach to homework is better than their school’s. It’s accessible and makes it easy for parents to keep an eye on their child’s progress at home.
Reducing teacher workload
The ability to schedule tasks is a real game changer. As a teacher, once you have your class lists, you could theoretically set up a whole year’s worth homework within a few hours. In terms of reducing workload, that’s fantastic. Staff have said that it takes some of the load off them, and they can then use the data that comes back to them from completed quizzes to inform their practice (see next point).
Diagnosis, therapy, testing (DTT)
Another great strength is the amount of quiz analysis you get as a teacher. You can quickly glance at the results grid and pick up on the areas of weakness, and that can inform your planning for future lessons. We use that data to help address gaps in line with the diagnosis-therapy-testing assessment model that we follow as a school. It fits really well with that.
School Leadership
To another deputy head, I would say that Educake is a very easy thing to buy into to increase the level of engagement outside the classroom, especially at KS4. If they’re struggling with forming consistent homework habits, it’s something they should try. We’ve definitely seen an improvement.
Finally, to anyone thinking of using Educake in their school: it doesn’t actually take much to get going. It didn’t take me much time to educate the staff body on how to set up quizzes and analyse results. The Educake team really helped to get students enrolled and up and running quickly, which was a real pro!
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