SAM Learning and Mobile Phones
In April, we surveyed our teachers about how their learners are getting on with SAM Learning on smartphones. Here’s a brief discussion of the responses:
1. About 40% of teachers knew that their pupils had logged in to SAM Learning on their phones… and slightly less than that didn’t know.
2. Around 90% of learners were happy to do their revision / homework on mobile.
We believe that providing the opportunity for your learners to do their work flexibly, to fit in with their other commitments. Other work we are doing shows that many pupils like to do SAM Learning on their phone on the way to school, or the way home (the orange line):
3. Teachers think that the best ways to launch their pupils’ mobile use of SAM Learning are:
a) Set them a homework to log in on their phone at home.
b) Ask parents to look at this with their children at home – e.g. via email or newsletter.
We have prepared templates for these communications to give you a head start here. Also, you can always get in touch with us, if you’d like some support.
4. Less than 40% of schools allow use of mobiles in the classroom.
We understand that phones in schools are a double-edged sword… that they can be a great resource (almost every child has their own little computer!) yet often involved in discipline issues (although almost never the cause!)
It’s encouraging to see that a third of schools allow use with ‘specific teacher permission’… which will be a real benefit in the run up to exams, when independent revision becomes the dominant practice.
5. We are interested in which aspects of SAM Learning teachers would like to access on their mobiles. Top of the list are:
a) Task setting
b) Learner Password resets
c) Viewing the Leaderboard
The current version of SAM Learning will load on a phone browser, but isn’t designed for it. As we work to update the Teacher Interface, we will use the information from this survey to prioritise.
(We are aware that many schools would not encourage this use, as it would involve having pupil data on teacher’s private devices… you should be reassured that there is insufficient data available to locate or contact pupils.)
Our thanks to all of the teachers who responded – we know how busy you are.
We are always interested in feedback and ideas for our development – please do get in touch to share!
David Brown
May 2022