8. Subjects Available Subject Hours Maths improve activities 112 Statistics 49 English improve activities 38 English Literature 59 Science 155 Science for the 21 st Century 75 Applied Science 41 ICT 32 Applied ICT 24 DiDA 19 French 19 German 12 Italian 5 Subject Hours Spanish 7 Welsh 1 Applied Leisure & Tourism 10 Business Studies 5 Citizenship 23 Design & Technology 17 Drama 4 Geography 20 History 81 Media Studies 5 Music 4 Physical Education 22 Religious Studies 13
So why Use SAM Learning? Well it is used by more than half of all English state Secondary Schools clocking up over 4 million task hours in 2007-2008 – with over 50% of the usage being completed at home. Over 750,000 students will use SAM Learning this year – you can be one of them!
Here is a brief description of what SAM Learning Secondary is. For students, SAM Learning Secondary appears as a web based service accessible from any internet enabled device at anytime. All students have their own logins and all activities they complete are saved against them so that they and the school can see their progress. Students can tackle a choice of revision, using drag and drop and test practice which essentially means that students do and mark their own work. In exam practice, every single mark is identified by the examiners who wrote the question so we see time and time again that students benefit from improving their technique, their confidence and as a result their results.
Here is a brief description of what SAM Learning Secondary is not. SAM Learning Secondary is not revolutionary – it is not a service to replace lessons or teachers or to change teaching practice. It is based on very simple ideas of revision and exam practice by enforcing exam techniques and an understanding of what the examiner is looking for. The materials in SAM Learning Secondary are continually updated to match the curriculum, and students can drop in to the work and complete any exercise or topic. It is not a course with a start and an end.
Student Homepage Before we look at all of the features on SAM Learning lets have a tour of the homepage. Across the top you have your navigation bar – this is showing the student’s name, total task hours to date and then the Welcome, My Homework and Password buttons. When you go into materials you get the path of where you are so you can navigate in and out. Down the left hand side you have your navigation buttons. These stay with the student wherever they are on the website allowing them to go anywhere quickly. On the main screen there will be messages from SAM Learning – in this instance it is information on the 10 Task Hour Challenge to help at revision time. There is also a summary of your most urgent Homework to complete. We will cover the homework area further on.
GCSE Subjects Available All the SAM Learning courses are written by practicing teachers and examiners and are updated annually to comply with curriculum requirements. The courses are structured around the National Curriculum Attainment Targets and Programs of Study at KS2, KS3 and GCSE. Where possible, the topic headings within each subject are taken directly from the breakdown of National Curriculum Attainment Targets. This table shows the GCSE courses and the task hours available for each one as of January 2009. SAM Learning Secondary is a constantly evolving service, with materials being added to it and updated continually to match the latest exam specifications. The yellow “key” icon stands for our Key Content materials. The new Key Content menu is available for the subjects next to which this icon appears. The Key Content menu picks out the main subtopics that students really struggle with in exams when trying to achieve a C Grade, and provides revision materials specifically designed to secure that C Grade. I’ll tell you a bit more about our Key Content materials later on in this presentation! (see slide 6)
Maths Revision Exercise This is an example of a revision exercise for GCSE Maths. All of the revision exercises follow the same format and the student completes the exercise live on the internet and gets immediate feedback. On the top right hand side you can see the score and the number of screens of work in the exercise. With the scoring, the student gets a mark if the answer is correct the first time. If the student answers incorrectly the answer drops back down with a line through it and the learner can carry on until they get the right answer – they only get a score if the answer is correct the first time though.
Topic Test/Exam Question This is an example of a topic question in Biology. To replicate exam conditions a student can answer the exam question on paper. He/She can also answer by typing the answers onscreen. In the top right hand corner you can see a clock. This counts down to give the student an idea of how long to spend on the question. Are there any non Biology teachers in the audience? Have a go at answering the question! When the student has answered the questions they click on the Mark Your Work button. In addition, teachers can print out an exam practice question and make photocopies for each student to answer for homework or as an end-of-topic test.
Progress Report Here is an example of a Student Progress Report – this is a summary screen and you can see here that Amy has completed 4.83 hours of Science work and has achieved an overall mark percentage of 45% out of 100%. Clicking on the underscored word Science takes you to the full information for Science.
Science Progress Report After clicking on the Science link in the last screen we can see a summary of the science results. (This is not all the data, just a snapshot of a small part of it). It is clear where the student has completed exercises and where more help and intervention are needed. Remember! All exercises can be repeated, but the system only saves the lastest score you got!
I mentioned on the last slide that we have independent evidence that SAM Learning works. The full reports are available on request, but here are some summary graphs. These are the GCSE results, you can see a reasonable progression in the stats. It is clear why we have 10 task hours as a target - it is because you can see that there is a definite jump at that point.
It is very simple to login to SAM Learning. Everyone goes to www.samlearning.com and uses the green login area in the top left hand corner (highlighted in red on the slide above) You need the schools Centre ID which is the first part of the school postcode and school initials. You then have to enter the User ID and Password – for students this is their date of birth and initials.
It is easy to log onto SAM Learning. The first piece of information the student is asked for is the Centre ID, which is the first part of the school postcode and school initials. They then have to provide their User ID and Password – for students, this is their date of birth and initials - so for a student born on the 30th November 1996 called John Evans, their User ID and Password would be 301196JE.
Any questions contact your SAM Learning Co-ordinator in your school
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