We caught up with Barrowford Primary School's Assistant Headteacher Karl Cross to find out why they chose CENTURY and how they have been using it.
Why did you choose CENTURY?
We chose CENTURY because of the ability for us to manage teacher workload, our ability to still be able to follow the curriculum in sequence and deviate where we needed to, and the fact that the AI behind it is incredible. The more the children engage with it, the more they get out of it, the smarter the system gets and the better pitched the questions are.
We can track really closely exactly how children are doing in every area of the curriculum in English, maths and science, which was just amazing for us. The impact that it’s had on our children has been fantastic.
How do you use it?
One of the first things we do is get the children to complete a diagnostic on CENTURY, and the platform provides us with an analysis of their strengths and areas for development within that concept. That helps us to know where to pitch our next steps.
Once they’ve done that, we deliver our teaching input. What we’ve really enjoyed with CENTURY is that the videos are such good quality, we can often just play the video and then support with modelling around that because they break down the strategies that are required really, really well. We’ll then follow that up with a series of nuggets, which could be done either in class or as homework.
One of the things we do in the classroom is to get a group of children, or even the whole class, working on CENTURY, because the live feedback we get from that is amazing. Using our teacher iPads, we can tell how well they’re doing, who's doing what, how they’ve answered questions, where they’ve gone wrong and we can pick out misconceptions more easily. That’s allowing us to give better feedback more quickly to help the children make progress.
We also use the assignments function quite a bit. Following a sequence of teaching and learning, for example, we might decide to set the children a little challenge so they can independently apply their learning and we can receive that and give them feedback on it in CENTURY.
One of the things we particularly like about CENTURY in terms of assessing learning and progress, is that you can see things like how much time a child has spent on each question, which you couldn’t otherwise do.
For example, you might notice that student A and student B have both spent 8 minutes working on the same question, which they both answered incorrectly. However, because you can also see on CENTURY exactly what answer the child has given to every question, you might notice that Student A had clearly made a typo when entering their answer, but they do appear to understand how to work the answer out. On the other hand, Student B might not seem able to have interpreted the question correctly, and you can take them aside and give them a short tutorial on whatever the specific topic is. As the data is instant, you can do that right away, so having all of that data and feedback from CENTURY has been massive for us.
Learn more about how CENTURY can supercharge the teaching and learning at your primary school.
