A learning platform without great content is as useful as a TV without programmes!
Interactive learning platform resources from Birchfield Interactive
[UKPRwire, Wed Sep 03 2008] For a truly interactive online experience, visitors to The Scottish Learning Festival 2008 need look no further than Birchfield Interactive (stand C16), one of the first educational publishers in the UK to launch SCORM*-compliant resources for learning platforms. During the past 10 years, Birchfield has supplied educational software to over 150 Scottish secondary schools, and its latest VLE content packs and games are fully compatible with Glow and other leading learning platforms. Spanning 15 secondary subjects (S1 – S4), Birchfield’s content and games, once uploaded to a learning platform, can be accessed by teachers and pupils 24 hours a day, 7 days a week from home or school.
Every teacher knows that it can be a challenge to convince students to log onto a learning platform from home, so it’s vital that the technology is populated with something more appealing than PowerPoint presentations and Word documents previously available from the likes of a school intranet. Written by teachers and available as single subjects or a whole school solution, Birchfield’s resources are tagged to learning objectives and each subject-specific content pack contains 3-D animation, videos, narrated text, drag and drop exercises, multiple choice questions plus two great interactive games.
Few teachers have the time, even if they possess the necessary multimedia skills, to produce SCORM-compliant curriculum content equal to the resources available from the likes of Birchfield. This issue technically shouldn't even arise, as teachers are paid to teach, openly debate and stimulate, rather than waste valuable hours trying to produce their own multimedia resources. Birchfield’s resources will also help teachers with assessment by giving pupils immediate feedback during activities and allowing staff to track individual progress, including the time spent on a course and activity results.
A learning platform is much more than an electronic notice board or filing cabinet. It's a means of personalising education, of allocating specific resources to specific students and automatically tracking their progress, as well as enabling staff throughout a school to benefit from a common set of resources. Thankfully, Birchfield’s SCORM-compliant content can meet all of these elements.
Edinburgh City Council is currently evaluating Birchfield’s complete VLE solution in its secondary schools. Andrew Watt, Senior Development Officer at Edinburgh City Council, comments: “We are very impressed with the professional quality of Birchfield’s resources and delighted at how easy they have been to install on our learning platform. Using SCORM-compliant content has meant that our schools have been quickly up and running with the learning resources, avoiding any technical issues.”
Jon Case, CEO of Birchfield Interactive, comments: “A learning platform is a great collaborative tool, but without educational content it cannot provide a well-rounded platform for learning, which is what schools need. By populating learning platforms with compatible educational content, Scottish schools are not only meeting specific learning objectives and making the most out of their ICT provision, but also making learning fun!”
Visitors to Birchfield’s stand (C16) during the event can take advantage of a free game sample, which contains comprehensive question banks for three S3-4 topics; Micro-organisms & Biotechnology; Work of Ice and Responding to Shakespeare.
Further information about Birchfield Interactive can be obtained by contacting Anthony Evans, Head of Marketing; tel: 0800 915 6616, e-mail: aevans@birchfield.co.uk or visit the web site at: www.birchfield.co.uk.
* SCORM stands for Sharable Content Object Reference Model. It is an XML-based framework designed to facilitate moving course content and related information (such as student records) between learning platforms, and to disaggregate course content into modular objects for reuse in other courses.
