Message from the Head of Secondary: New Frontiers

Almost everyone in our school community knows of Language Perfect. It is an online learning platform which our Modern Foreign Languages department uses all year round to support student learning in French, German and Spanish, and which hosts a worldwide languages competition which our school is remarkably good at! Every year at competition time, our students can be seen glued to computers hammering out millions of bytes worth of language learning, and every year our school appears near or at the top of the leaderboard. Our relationship with the Language Perfect platform is a long-standing and very successful one.  

Language Perfect though is evolving. Since its arrival in the online learning marketplace, Language Perfect has changed, developed – got better – and of course it has had to, because as technology has developed, more and more learning platforms have become available. Some, like Language Perfect, have become a part of our every-day vocabulary. Which family with a Primary student doesn’t say ‘SeeSaw’ at least a couple of times a day?! And I can assure you that there isn’t an IB student in the school that hasn’t worried about their Managebac uploads…

Online learning is here to stay, but that does not mean that every online learning platform is a good one. Teachers play a crucial role in sampling online learning platforms as they appear and trialing them in different ways. They reach judgements about them based on whether or not they will compliment the teaching methods in our classrooms and whether or not they will make a significant difference to the learning of our students. Only the learning platforms that have been through a rigorous testing ground reach our students laptops and iPads.