to ask secondary teachers which you prefer?

[Booksaremylife]

for digital learning at your school Kerboodle from OUP or Boost ( Hodder?) or Collins Connect??
or are you using something else we should considering?

Yes, each department decides how best to spend their capitation. We choose to spend part of our on this. Science also use Kerboodle, Languages and History use other providers. Some departments use nothing at all. We only use it for GCSE though (year 9-11). We can’t afford to do it for year 7 and 8.

@Booksaremylife

This is really interesting, thanks! So none of these were useful During lockdown, homeschooling either?

Used GCSEPod during lockdown 1 because our SLT rushed it as a catch all for most subjects and our subject one was riddled with errors and also bits that were not even in the syllabus but for another exam boards’. They had just changed the name of the exam board on ours and charged us over £1,000 for the privilege.

I also used free resources as supplements to my resources (Isaac and Seneca) and they two had glaring errors that was embarrassing when I get lots of email from pupils. From about June onwards I ditched all of them completely for homework and just used my own/departments’ resources and had no issues after that.

Sons secondary are using kaboodle. I miss all homework being set on Google classroom. Made things much easier to check - dc has mild sen so doesnt write homework down or remember what he wrote

@Booksaremylife

Then why would schools pay for subs when there is free stuff so readily available? I always thought that perhaps having everything in one place was worth it?

Schools waste a lot of money!

As a parent I personally don't like online maths stuff as it makes it hard for those who need more working out than average. Maybe if my DDs had got on with it better I'd have a different opinion.

I rated Seneca for GCSE revision, a good way to break up book revision anyway. But due to circumstances DD didn't use it after covid hit in y10 so we didn't give it a fair test.

Kerboodle was so basic and useless as to be of no use, thankfully DC's school have abandoned. They now have Seneca, which seems ok, and GCSE pod(DD hasn't used this though, I think it's only some subjects).
They've just ditched mymaths too, though I wasn't aware of any issues with it, ds quite likes it.