Microsoft Learning Accelerators aim to make education more accessible by providing students with vital tools to develop their learning, while teaching them essential skills in further education and later in their professional life. 

Visit the Cloud Design Box website for more information.

In our latest Microsoft 365 User Adoption podcast, the Cornerstone Academy Trust (TCAT) reveals how they’re embracing the new Microsoft Learning Accelerators to enhance teaching and learning. 

About The Cornerstone Academy Trust

TCAT is a multi academy trust comprising four primary schools in southwest England.  

Its motto – “Fortune Favours the Brave”, is unequivocally reflected in its forward-thinking approach to technology in education. The MAT is a Microsoft Training Academy and runs a DfE English Hub, Behaviour Hub, a Science Learning Partnership and is also part of the West Country Computer Science Hub.  

Cloud Design Box (CDB) has been working with TCAT since 2018 to develop a modern intranet in SharePoint and Teams, facilitating communication at the MAT-level and within the individual schools. 

By automating the management of various Class Teams and Staff Teams across the schools based on daily MIS data, the CDB team helped TCAT establish a strong digital foundation for teaching and learning. CDB has also provided comprehensive training and consultancy to TCAT through workshops and an online training portal, ensuring that colleagues stay updated on Microsoft’s digital tools for education. 

Jonathan Bishop, CEO of TCAT, joins podcast host and CDB Chief Operations Officer, Darren Hemming, to talk about the impact of the new Microsoft Learning Accelerators and how Reading and Search Coach are empowering students to become independent, avid learners.  

Enhancing reading skills with Reading Coach.

Reading Coach – available within Microsoft Teams and Immersive Reader – provides students with valuable opportunities to practice reading and improve their skills.  

Empowering independent learners with Search Coach.  

Search Coach helps students develop their research skills when searching the web. The tool can be added to any Class Team and works in a very similar way to a typical search engine.  

Equipping children to thrive in the modern world. 

“Both Reading Coach and Search Coach are supporting students to develop skills for the modern world. The tools help them learn how to present their ideas coherently, succinctly and speak with clarity, as well as be confident in what they’re trying to articulate,” Jonathan adds. 

In this episode we speak to teacher and housemaster Henry about using Microsoft 365 in an independent school. Blog post to follow on https://www.clouddesignbox.co.uk/

Ian Stuart from Avantis Education talks about the power of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality in teaching and learning.

Avantis has supported teachers with classroom technology for almost two decades and now boasts a diverse range of education products, including LearnPad, ClassCharge, ClassConnect and ClassVR.

In this podcast episode, Cloud Design Box’s Darren Hemming talks about ClassVR, Avantis World and creating immersive, 360° experiences for students.


Embedding Virtual Reality learning experiences inside Microsoft Teams and SharePoint.

Avantis World is a virtual reality theme park designed for education. Students and teachers enter the world using VR headsets or any modern browser.

“It’s designed to allow teachers to take their classes to places that would usually be impossible to go to or imagine. Some places in the theme park are galleries you can walk around, and others are fully immersive experiences,” Ian explains.

“For example, we have a digestive system experience where you can turn into a piece of pizza and travel right through the human body. Other examples include renewable energy and photosynthesis.”

Full blog post and video can be found here: https://www.clouddesignbox.co.uk/embedding-vr-and-ar-into-microsoft-teams-and-sharepoint-with-avantis-education/

Darren meets Ryan for Formative.

In this episode Darren Hemming speaks to Stefan from Lingfield College about the rollout and adoption of 1:1 devices. 
Find out more about Cloud Design Box at https://www.clouddesignbox.co.uk

The benefits of 1:1 devices in schools with Lingfield College

The Director of Digital Learning at Linfield College talks about the school’s plan to roll out per-student devices to every student and the challenges and benefits that come with digital transformation. 

Lingfield College is a co-educational independent school in Surrey for pupils aged two to eighteen. Stefan Hagen is the Director of Digital Learning and works with his team to help drive digital learning within the school, working with the school’s partner companies – including Cloud Design Box – to deliver quality technology to staff and students.  

The school has bold plans to introduce a per-student device policy – eventually rolling out touch-screen laptops to every student within the school.  

In this podcast episode, we discuss the challenges of moving to blended learning, as well as the many benefits that come with a 1:1 device policy in education.  

Stefan also outlines what the school has done so far to lay the foundations for this digital learning strategy and what the plan is to accomplish their goal of per-student devices.  

A vision for cloud-based learning. 

Lingfield College had begun looking at ways to “get digital moving”, as Stefan puts it before the pandemic.  

But, things didn’t move as quickly as they had hoped and as the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns hit in the UK, the school had to move quickly to deliver quality lessons via Microsoft Teams.  

“When we returned to the classroom after lockdown, I was keen to keep the momentum that we had built up going, encouraging staff members to use Teams and OneDrive,” Stefan explains. 

“However, I realised that many people were fed up with computer screens and that we had to move more slowly and carefully to get everyone on board.”  

It was around that time that Lingfield College began working with Cloud Design Box to create a long-term strategy that would enable the school to migrate to the cloud, which would lay the foundations for their 1:1 device policy.  

Moving to the cloud. 

“As they say, when you move house, you have a clear out before you move so you don’t take all your junk with you. And, it was the same as we moved from our old servers to the cloud,” Stefan explains. 

Cloud Design Box worked with Lingfield College to give staff the time and training they needed to move their resources over to the cloud.  

“We set up key milestones and eventually turned the old servers to ‘view-only’ to give staff who hadn’t been able to move resources over yet access without creating a confusing dual system.” 

1:1 devices for teachers and school staff.  

Moving to the cloud allowed Lingfield College to roll out 1:1 devices for every staff member, allowing teachers to build up their confidence with the new technology.  

“This approach made the most sense to us because teachers can get used to the technology as they’re using it for teaching so that when we are ready to roll out 1:1 devices for students, teachers can help resolve some tech issues if they do occur in the classroom.”  

Infrastructure challenges that come with 1:1 devices.  

As Stefan points out in the podcast, there’s more to think about when rolling out 1:1 devices than simply giving everyone a laptop or tablet.  

“Getting the infrastructure right is a challenge. For example, our flooring makes it difficult for us to put charging ports into our classrooms. So we’re now looking at char

An eye opening interview with Jonathan Bishop, the CEO & Executive Headteacher of Cornerstone Academy Trust.

• Best value doesn't mean cheapest.
  
  
• It's not about directly balancing reduced printing costs against buying Surface Pros - the aim is to improve T & L and build staff efficiency while spending effectively.
  
  
• He talked about needing fewer staff though, which I thought was controversial. Or at least freeing up staff time to do other things. I think different folks may hear that message differently though, depending on whether they are a CEO or a technician! Remember that Cornerstone outsource their technicians...
  
  
• More expensive devices work better and longer e.g. power requirements
  
  
• He prefers one-to-one devices to whiteboards - you don't have to turn your back!
  
  
• He took no prisoners in suggesting that some schools should have done more with ICT - it's not optional. Digital Divides don't just come from families with low incomes - you can have a school down the road who have not prioritised IT enough.
  
  
• He borrowed the money to buy the Surfaces (well, he leased them). £4K per pupil on average should allows £200 to be spent on a device annually.
  
  
• Teachers are saving time by marking assessments with the students on their surfaces, rather than taking them away to mark.

• MATs have millions (perhaps billions) of pounds sitting in their bank accounts for emergencies. He thinks some of that money should be spent on ICT projects.

In this episode, Darren speaks to Marjolein Hoeskstra about her journey with Microsoft, TweetMeets, MVPs, MSEduCentral and much more. Marjolein shares the best links for educators with over 1300 resources across 80 different topics. Created by teachers for teachers.

In this podcast episode, we caught up with Mark Fuller, IT Director for Bridge Academy Trust (BAT) – a multi academy trust based in Essex – about how they have extended Microsoft 365 with Cloud Box to improve communication and collaboration between their 12 schools.

Bridge Academy Trust is a large MAT made up of four secondary schools and eight primary schools. Providing education to students 3-19, the Trust needed a solution that would not only enable collaboration between its schools but also allow each individual school to embrace blended learning in its own unique way.

Following a merger, BAT found themselves managing ten different Microsoft 365 tenants across the trust – one for each of the schools and one for their central trust team:

“We quickly realised that this approach was unsustainable. Our staff had several different logins to access what they needed. It was complex and time-consuming, and didn’t promote any kind of collaboration or communication between our schools,” Mark explains.

“To make everything simpler and to encourage more collaboration between our schools, we made the decision to merge all schools into one BAT tenant with the help of Cloud Design Box and their partners.”

One of the key challenges when rolling out Microsoft 365 across BAT was that each school was at a very different stage in terms of blended learning.

“Some of our secondary schools were already using the full suite of tools in Microsoft for teaching and learning. Meanwhile, other schools were only using it for email and storing some files in OneDrive,” Mark explains.

“We also had a school using G Suite that we needed to migrate across and support them in using brand new blended learning tools.”

Mark describes his approach when it came to encouraging user adoption of Cloud Box in each school.

His first quick win is to set the school’s SharePoint intranet as the default homepage:

“This way, I’ve won half the battle because they’re already using it. The page contains links the staff will find useful – timetables, web applications, finance forms, HR forms, policies etc,” Mark tells us.

“When they open their computers, it’s the first thing they see – they haven’t got to start typing out the URL. It just makes navigation so much easier.”

As they roll out, Mark is working with each school to introduce them to SharePoint and Teams and support them with user adoption.

“I speak to staff and give them a brief demo of what SharePoint and Teams can do. I do live webinars and drop-in sessions using Microsoft Teams and record them so staff can watch later if they miss the live events,” he continues.

“I have also created a training site within SharePoint for staff to access. This not only has my own resources on there, but I have links to the courses created by Cloud Design Box and Microsoft. There’s no point in me re-creating what has already been done and they have saved me so much time.”

Mark points out that it’s important to recognise that each school, even if they are in the same trust, has very different needs and will use Microsoft 365 in different ways:

“It’s important we work with schools to create something that they will use, rather than telling them exactly how to use it. This has worked well, and we’ve had schools ask for all sorts of things, like a place to store all exam information and a site dedicated to assemblies,” Mark enthuses.

Lastly, Mark has made himself available to answer questions for any school that needs it:

“It can be a bit of information overload for some staff, so alongside the training and drop-in sessions, I have made myself available to answer questions from schools.”

In this episode, Darren speaks to Martin Edworthy, the e-learning coordinator at Sacred Heart Catholic High School about moving into a single tenant for the Bishop Bewick Catholic Education Trust.

In this podcast episode, we speak with Rachael Howarth, Vice Principal of Bradford Girls’ Grammar School about how they’re using Microsoft 365 to assess and engage students in a blended in-classroom and remote learning setting.

Rachael walks us through some key ways in which they’re using Microsoft Forms, Class Notebook, Polls and Insights to increase engagement, save teacher time, give feedback and keep an eye on students’ wellbeing.

“We’ve been using Class Notebook to engage with students who have been learning from home due to self-isolating. It’s been a blend of live teaching and uploading class resources for those students who share devices and need access to content on-demand,” Rachael tells us. 

“We’ve also been teaching in school and using tools in Teams to set assignments and rubrics, run polls to get a quick measure of where students are in terms of their learning.”  

n the video, Rachael demonstrates how the teachers use polls to help students further embed their learning and see which students have understood the lesson and who may need a recap.

“We have been using self-marking quizzes quite successfully – they give the students the answers as they move along,” she explains.

“Polls are like the classroom equivalent of holding up mini whiteboards and getting everyone to hold up their answer – you can get a broad sweep of who is understanding and who isn’t.”  

This type of interactivity is carried through to providing feedback to students. Teachers at Bradford Girls’ Grammar School are adding audio files to students work to give feedback on assignments. Not only is this engaging for students to actually hear their teacher explain something to them as if they were in the classroom, but it’s also saving teacher time as they don’t need to type or format any additional words.

“We’ve also been using audio files for learning objectives – just inserting a clip into a Class Notebook that explains exactly what we want the students to do – they can listen instead of writing out learning objectives and it does save time,” she adds. 

By using Microsoft 365 in and outside of the classroom, the school has been able to collect valuable data around students’ learning and engagement.  

“Some of our students do not have access to the live lessons because they share devices. So we need to look at other metrics to see if they’re participating in other ways: Are they having conversations, are they completing assignments, are they accessing Class Notebook?” Rachael explains.  

But, the Insights dashboard goes beyond checking up to see whether students are completing their homework: 

“It’s been really useful for pastoral support. At one point, we had a large number of users who were working in the middle of the night. So we immediately put out welfare messages to staff, parents and pupils. It gives us the opportunity to have that conversation with our community.”  

Bradford Girls’ Grammar School is embracing Microsoft for the future and not simply a remedy to the pandemic:  

“We’re learning rapidly – we’ve been on a steep learning curve but we’re implementing these interactive methods of assessment into our practice as we develop as remote teachers. Week on week, we’re getting a high-level engagement on Teams – anything between 190 and 700 daily active users – it shows how useful our students and staff are finding Teams.”