The role of reliable data in decision making has always been important, even more so during the challenges that schools are currently facing, with students, teachers and parents working hard to ensure continuity of learning whilst at home. With schools delivering remote learning, it has become increasingly difficult for school leaders to understand the level of engagement of the wider school community and the impact that this is having on the learning experience.
Here at Firefly we have been developing a new tool to give school leaders greater insight into the activity of their students and teachers. Although we are still working on the final version, in light of the impact of COVID-19 on schools we will be offering access to an early Beta version of our new Insights tool until the end of July, to help them respond to the particular challenges of remote learning. This new element within Firefly will provide greater visibility of whole school engagement. Schools will be able to track:
- How Firefly is being used on a day to day basis, as well as how this compares with the previous week.
- When teachers, students and parents are engaged, allowing them to see levels of activity at different times of day. This will allow school leaders to better understand their students' working patterns and know when best to communicate with parents.
- The engagement and activity of different groups, with the ability to filter by teacher, student or parent users.
Whilst the work on the Insights tool is not yet complete, we wanted to make sure that schools were able to take advantage of some of the early features immediately. This release will give schools a taster of the sorts of things we are working on, and we will be continuing to develop the full version, with its more extensive range of tools and features, with the aim of releasing it fully later this year.