Our Learning Cloud has been upgraded with several new features to enhance our students’ learning experience:

• Interactive whiteboard: enhanced to enable students to use a range of fonts, drawing tools and graphics that they can edit, drag and drop. The improved interactivity boosts engagement and can lead to a deeper understanding 
• Timer and stopwatch: this feature has multiple uses by helping students to focus, creating a sense of urgency for time sensitive tasks, promoting healthy competition, encouraging time management whilst helping to reduce anxiety as students know exactly what time is available to complete a task.  
• Reactions bar: this has moved to the main visual learning space, enabling students to select emojis and raise their hand more easily within the lesson. Using emojis provides a simple way for students to engage and express themselves during lessons, enhancing interaction and participation. Emojis can make the online experience more enjoyable for students, fostering a sense of community with other students.  
• Wake lock for mobile: Ensures that students accessing lessons on mobile devices won’t have their sessions interrupted by screen timeouts, maintaining a steady learning experience

We have also made an enhancement for our teachers so that they can see live data in the learning analytics dashboard. This feature means teachers can see in real time who is attending, participating and making progress which helps them to have immediate impact on students learning and progress.  

These new and enhanced features will be live after the half term break. We’re creating videos so that you, and your students can see the changes. As soon as these videos are available, we’ll send them to you but in the meantime, you may wish to share this overview with students so they know what to expect.