Unity Team – Unity EdTech

The thing I’ve always loved most during the 15 years I’ve been teaching is the interaction with students; you know, the repartee, the buzz of being ‘out front’, the pleasure from watching students ‘get ‘it!. I have found lockdown a real challenge. All these are missing!

The first week or so was fine, what with all the planning of the work for students to do at home, the setting up of new systems to manage it like Google Classroom, the support provided to and by colleagues. The honeymoon though was well and truly over after the first week! I felt more isolated, more lonely. Every day blended into the other and felt like Groundhog Day!

So I stepped into the unknown to try and cope with the ‘groundhog day’ effect. I needed to ‘talk’ to my students! First I marked some student work by recording audio and sending them the link, then I learnt how to embed a webcam video on my Google Classroom page so I could actually tell my students what I wanted them to do. Feeling more confident, I then added a video to a PowerPoint that I wanted students to work through and tomorrow I’ll have run my first Google Meet with a class. It’s not the same but it feels more like teaching!

I still wish I was back in school though!

Working Together Far Apart – Maths

TTRockstars and it’s sister site Numbots are currently free to all schools due to Covid-19.

I wanted to share some tips on one way that we are using this in the Unity Schools Partnership to allow our students to work together during this time.

Firstly setting up TTRockstars is easy.

Go to https://ttrockstars.com/page/covid19support and sign up for a trial.

Once approved you can begin the process of uploading your students. I would recommend using the CSV form to do this and entering in your own usernames and passwords. This will make it easier to share the details with your students.

Once done you are ready for your students to start playing.

There are several bolt-ons available to you during this time, including sessions (being able to set specific tasks) and most importantly tournaments.

Battle of the bands allows you to set up tournaments between classes or year groups within your school.

Top of the rocks allows you to create tournaments with other schools.

Create a group for your trust or local schools and add the schools. Now you can set up a competition and your group are automatically invited. Each individual school can limit the classes that take part so you can have a challenge between year groups or across an entire school.

At the end of the tournament, we will present the winning schools with a TTRockstars cup, and the site automatically produces certificates for your top players and top classes for you to print off.

At Unity Schools Partnership we have 3 tournaments currently running. One for all of our primary schools, and one each for year 7 and 8 at our Secondary schools.

We have made the tournament last for 12 days and so far after 3 days over 1 million correct answers have been recorded between the 3 competitions. This is a fantastic response and clearly shows the impact that this has on our students. They love representing their respective schools and get to play against each other in the arena or against the rest of the world in festival.