“I have a plan to improve how we use Earwig.”
“Great to hear what other settings are doing and take away ideas to develop ourselves.”
“Very interesting and very good to hear other ideas for reporting & analytics.”
“Great atmosphere of challenge and a relaxed approach.”
Just some of the feedback from the Local Earwig Ambassador’s Conference in Huntingdon. The next stop of the tour bus will be York on 9th May, which will take the output of the Analytics workshop from Huntingdon, and extend it further. Be there and be part of shaping how Earwig’s Analytics develop. By the way, we’re organising the local conference to follow York right now, which we expect to be in/around Birmingham in early November. Watch this space…
Huntingdon had a great group of experts from a wide variety of schools. Lots of contributions, discussion and mingling, which is so vital these days as many schools feel pretty isolated. There were also lots of questions, and lots of answers – not all from Earwig since a critical point of these conferences is for schools to ask others how they do stuff, and for other schools who’ve been there already to share. It works! This, and a liberal scattering of refreshment breaks, and a slightly longer lunch break were used to the max to network and to share.
We started the day exploring some of the key new features added relatively recently. Although almost all of these have been the subject of dashboard notifications, we appreciate that not everyone reads them, and it works well to have a chance to stop and think about them, and to discuss their application. The second session was a focus for sharing of ideas, and parental engagement was the main topic here. The group included schools who have already launched to parents as well as those who are thinking about it, so it allowed time for the latter to quiz the former, as well as the more experienced to consider other ideas for extending use of parent access to further improve a deeper parental engagement.
One of the key elements of the day was the Analytics workshop – the main bit where the delegates work for their supper! We structured the workshop so that groups could work together, get their ideas down on paper and present, followed by a ‘critical friends’ review by the group. It was a very productive session. The conference came to a consensus that it may be hard to define the detailed data that is valuable and worthwhile, but general themes became very clear.
We’ll be taking the output from this workshop on to York. We’ll rejig the agenda again, but only slightly this time as although the general format is good, continual improvement applies to everything! We look forward to a new set of faces, and tsunami of ideas in the workshop, and lots more caring and sharing of good practice.