Evidence Me is an assessment and observation app which captures children’s learning journeys. It shows the impact of children’s learning by evidencing their experiences, monitoring their development, and creating reports to share their progress.

In this blog we have shared some key benefits of Evidence Me as well as some top tips from one of our current subscribers, Arunside School in Horsham.

Observations & reporting 

With Evidence Me, staff can easily take a photo, video or write a note and instantly upload their observation to the app whilst on the go, with or without Wi-Fi.

Evidence Me can also provide educators with all the assessment tools they need to make informed planning decisions. There are a wide variety of observation and progress reports that can be used to track and evidence learning.

Top tips from Arunside School on observations and reporting: 

1. The blur function is useful to create multiple observations from one group photo that can be sent home.
2. Observations inform progress and attainment which can be discussed at Parents' Evening. Guidance on using Evidence Me for parents evening can be found here.
3. To save time, we use the microphone on iPad keyboard to do ‘voice to text’ for adult’s comments and/or pupil voice.
4. We like the ‘duplicate’ function on observations (for adult-led activities) as it allows us to write a template observation that can then be adapted/personalised to each child accordingly.
5. We like the new function that automatically recognises a child mentioned in the observation text box and assigns them to the observation.

Support: 

Another top tip from Arunside school is to make the most out of the excellent support services available with Evidence Me.

For example, they shared that “whenever we have needed to contact the support team (e.g to get advice on updating the system so the new cohort appeared), the phone call or email has been answered quickly. They have always been knowledgeable and give helpful step-by-step instructions to sort the issue”.

Additionally, teachers at Arunside make use of the online Evidence Me Help Centre as they find it “very clear and easy to follow”. The Help Centre can assist with a variety of queries and provides information about latest updates.

As well as the above support, extra support can also be accessed through: 

• Live webinars with our CPD team
• Support videos on our Evidence Me Youtube Channel
• Our Evidence Me community group on Facebook

To find out more about any support services, please visit our help site.

Parent engagement: 

There are a number of ways that Evidence Me supports parent engagement and further enhances relationships between parents and the school.

Our Parent Share feature allows teachers to share observations with parents and for parents to create their own. All observations can be commented on, facilitating two-way communication.

Additionally, our Parent Contact Report can provide you with information on total parent shared observations, observation comments by parents, observations submitted by parents and the last time parents were active on Evidence Me.

Top tips from Arunside school on parent engagement: 

1. We share observations of adult-led activities and child-initiated learning every two weeks. This includes educational visitors/visits and extra-curricular activities (PE, Cooking, Forest School, Sport’s Day etc).
2. We regularly encourage parents to send ‘Parent Postcards’. This is a great home-school link and gives us the opportunity to talk to the children about out of school activities and learning. The children enjoy sharing their parent postcards in front of the class.
3. We use Evidence Me as a tool for parents to send pictures/videos of their homework/learning we have set.

If you don't currently have an Evidence Me subscription, you can sign up for a free trial on our website.