Never before have modern-day schools faced the challenges they are about to experience as children slowly start returning to schools. Already schools and teachers have been put to the test, coming up with new ways of teaching and delivering their curriculum to children on the other side of an electronic device. Our foremost concern at 2Simple during the Covid-19 situation, has been the well-being of South Africa’s teachers and learners. We have been amazed and impressed by the resilience and open-mindedness of our teacher clients across the country who have taken on new concepts and implemented creative solutions, digital or otherwise, for their students. We are very proud to have been a part of the toolkit which so many schools have used during this time to assist with online learning.

Digital Literacy

If there is one thing we have experienced during lockdown, it’s that access to all things digital and remote can be a saving grace. It is imperative that schools continue to focus on upskilling not only themselves, but the students as well, as our lives and society become more digitally reliant in these times.

At its most basic, digital literacy refers to an ‘individual’s ability to find, evaluate and compose clear information through writing and other media on various digital platforms’. Children spanning the digital spectrum in South Africa and across the divide, need to continue to learn how to work with digital information in order to manage in our tech driven society.

While Purple Mash is an excellent resource to teach digital literacy and is a good place to start when developing that skill in our learners, it is also there to take us the rest of the journey and help us integrate those skills across the curriculum. To cement those digital literacy skills and make them an effective part of the learning culture, we need to cross reference them across all learning areas. Use those skills to empower the learners to do self-learning and research and enable the Flipped Classroom approach.

Creative Thinking

We strongly believe that tried and tested models and methods used prior to lockdown will need some significant overhaul.

Borrowing from the *Flipped Classroom method, we have been looking at ways in which Purple Mash can be further used to enhance home learning and even extend to homework, as time in class may differ to pre-lockdown and syllabi are cut short.

The concept of a Flipped Classroom involves learners being *taught new content at home, and then engaging in further practice, experimentation and extension in the classroom. By prepping the learner before they reach the classroom, they arrive equipped with the basic concept and the classroom then allows for extension and a more hands-on approach if needed.

There is evidence to support that this way of learning allows for a far bigger investment and interest from the learner and allows class time to be used in explaining core concepts and allowing learners to use that time to clarify points they don’t grasp.

Laying the Foundation

In order for the Flipped method to be effective, you need a structured and focussed tool to allow learning that is appropriate and provides the foundation that is relevant to the assessment criteria and goals the teacher is wanting to achieve. The Purple Mash platform allows for curriculum to be introduced to a student in the home environment via video, uploaded documents, or sound clips, with the student doing the driving within a familiar setting. Conversely, this element also allows for Homework assignments to consolidate what has been learned in the class. Used correctly, Purple Mash can serve as a full productivity suite allowing teachers and children to share work, create blogs and upload videos to name a few.

If you have any questions as to how you could further these ideas in your classroom using Purple Mash, we would love to chat to you. Send us a mail on info@purplemash.co.za or call us on
011 875 7300.

*https://www.teachstarter.com/us/blog/flipped-learning-in-primary-classrooms-us/