Magic Studio

Allerton Grange, Leeds, is a thriving, all-ability, multi-cultural school with 1,690 students on roll. Most of the 258 students in the school’s highly successful sixth form have been with the school since Year 7; illustrating confidence in the school and in the quality of teaching and examination success that the school achieves. The school has a range of sixth form courses including popular options such as Information Technology and Law.

Shona Crichton is Head of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) at Allerton Grange School, an early adopter of the Magic Studio service.

Interactive Content for the Virtual Learning Environment
“We were looking to incorporate a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) into the school as we currently had no bank of resources and nothing interactive,” explains Shona, “unless you count the interactive white board and some PowerPoint, Word & Excel. From a student point of view this was neither interesting nor inspirational.”

Following an initial evaluation of the free Magic Studio service, Allerton Grange School purchased a full Magic Studio license, giving the school the ability to have more control over accessibility to resources, enabling students to have direct access and tighter integration with our chosen learning platform.

The ‘whole school’ approach for cross curriculum resources
“As well as increasing interactivity and creating a more engaging learning experience, we are on a drive to move our ICT forward and have adopted a ‘whole school’ approach; intersecting learning material across the curriculum,” adds Shona.

“We found that, when we brought everyone together, different departments use the same content. A single set of resources are viewed from different angles by different teachers. For example; Biology & Physical Education may share the same resource, as will History & Religious Education.” Shona is certain that Magic Studio is central to this whole school approach. “Once you have a resource bank like Magic Studio in place, others can easily see what you have created, pick it up and reuse it. Consequently all areas of the curriculum benefit. This is a much more interactive approach, saving time and effort.”

More engaging teacher led sessions
The Magic Studio resource bank has been extremely well received and is showing real benefits in a teacher led scenarios on the Interactive Whiteboard or data projector.

“It looks great on the interactive white board – much more compelling for the students. I can see it being used right through the Key Stages and across the curriculum. In our sixth form, for example, we use it to assess how the students are doing. It doesn’t replace everything, but it really helps,” explains Shona.

Student independence
For the students, using Magic Studio resources gives them greater independence, accessing resources at home and at school, using them for revision, intersected with basic Word documents and MP3 files. “And because the Magic Studio works hand in hand with our Learning Platform, it’s now really easy for students to simply open resources in a Browser – no training required,” comments Shona.

Students creating resources
One challenge Allerton Grange faced was in the creation of resources. “Our teachers are so busy that they found it difficult to find spare time to create new resources – even with money as an incentive. So we have implemented a Project Management set up, where the teacher acts as Project Sponsor and has a team of students creating resources as a project.

The teacher appoints a sixth form student as the Project Manager and a small team made up of Sixth Form and Year 10 & Year 11 students. They hone their project management and people skills fielding work and creating resources which are then checked for quality and accuracy by the teacher before being published to the resource bank.

“What has been a surprising and fantastic by-product of this approach is the competitive drive this has given to the various project groups as they see what their peer groups have created,” says Shona with a smile. “Now we have a bank of over 400 resources – all of them of increasing quality and detail.”

Easy to use
Shona is thrilled that the Magic Studio service has been so easy to use. “It really has been fantastic. The interface is very well designed, showing us from the first page that we are plugged into the schools area. We didn’t even need to conduct any training sessions to get ourselves started. We used the tour and video tutorial. The children have needed no training at all!”

Shona has some advice for other schools looking into what content and tools to use within their learning platforms. “If I could say anything to other teachers and ICT staff out there I would say ‘give Magic Studio a go – you will be amazed at how easy it is. A lot of other software products claim to be easy to use – but this really is. In fact, I think Magic Studio can do an awful lot more than it claims it can!’”

Local Authority wide use
Since buying a full license for the school, Allerton Grange are really looking forward to more schools in their Local Authority (LA) adopting the Magic Studio service so that they can export and share resources within the LA.

“We can easily see a time when there are so many published resources that we won’t have to create any new ones at all – freeing up much more time. In fact we would love for our LA to buy it for all the schools within the LA – and a national resource bank would be brilliant.”