GCSEpod reviews

[Nat54]

Hi - I'm Assistant HT at a school and we're looking into signing up to GCSEpod. It will be a significant cost to the school if we subscribe and therefore I need to be sure that it will be useful to all staff and students (I'm responsible for resourcing). I've had a quick demo from the company to see what's available and it looks good so far, though there wasn't an opportunity to navigate around the platform myself so that I could really get a feel for it. Would be good to know what other teachers think about this resource and to see if anyone was willing to share their user details (just for one day and password details can be changed!) so that I could have a good look around it before I commit to purchasing. Hope I'm not too cheeky to ask but it would be so useful to view the platform resources on my own without a sales rep. pointing out only the positives!

I don’t think it’s a good idea to pass on log in information but I have used GCSEPod in two schools so can try to answer.
I like the platform and think it’s really good. I teach English and it covers the full AQA course. I think it does most subjects except for some vocational ones like Media Studies (I also teach this) so bear in mind for some subjects it will be useless.
The videos are generally quite short and informative and you can set them as an assignment with some prepared questions (made by GCSEPod) so it’s great for easing workload as the teachers just need to set it up and tell the kids to do it. I think teachers need to ‘confirm’ the scores at the end but that’s the only ‘marking’ involved as far as I remember.
In my experience this is best targeted at your low and mid ability students as a way to drive up their knowledge and confidence. The videos share some great ideas but if students are looking at a grade 7+ they need a different type of challenge but this is just my experience in English.
I’m not a DH but have heard the cost is expensive and from seeing my former and current schools roll this out I would suggest you put time into showing staff how this works and encourage them regularly to use it. Don’t nag but remind. My school is a lover of all things tech and have bought so many programs that staff and students can’t or don’t use. This is to the point where I’d forgotten all about GCSEPod until I saw this post!
Do this with the kids too. Create year group competitions for who is using it the most to revise (you can see this in hours as a teacher) and who has ‘progressed’ the most. Then, depending on the kids they’ll be using it without reminding from their teachers who can be forgetful about this sort of thing (like me!)

Hope that helps!

Sorry @Nat54 I did not enter enough times to actually make this read like separate paragraphs. I’m new to NM and it’s been a long week!

For maths, I don’t think GCSE pod is worth it. There’s much more that’s free on youtube (drfrost or corbett maths etc). Mathswatch is good (needs a subscription but is WELL worth it). Tbh if you can get your head around Microsoft forms you can pre populate feedback and set up multiple choice with answers as misconceptions (as well as the correct answer!!) so rather than feeding back to 32 students, you feedback to all incorrect answers and rinse and repeat.

Kids are smart. They’ll find the answers on the internet to anything that’s already up, including MathsWatxh!

I'm a big fan of it but I'm not sure how many of our staff use it a lot to be honest. It's definitely a bit marmite with the kids though.

Gcse pod is crap for maths.

Other subjects rave about it but it's dire for us sorry.

I like it for science
I tend to set watching 2/3 of the video's plus a quick quiz for my weaker students at GCSE as hw.