When Deputy Head Teacher of Leith Academy Rachel Watson put ClickView into action during recent COVID 19 imposed isolations, she had City of Edinburgh’s Empowered Learning Project to thank.

Designed to provide equitable access to digital learning for all students, it was a no brainer for Edinburgh City to engage ClickView to be a part of this innovative project.

In pandemic times such as these with frequent interruptions, this engagement could not have come soon enough.

For Rachel, ClickView alleviated any concerns of equity in terms of student access to learning when they were faced with periods of isolation:

“Our students were still able to access all the content from their lessons.”

Tasked with delivering the Empowered Learning Project to Edinburgh schools, David McKee names ClickView as ‘a key component’ of the project’s aim: to provide equitable access to digital learning for all students.

“iPads are going to be the core hardware for that, but ClickView will be our video solution.”

Achieving equitable access signalled other positive benefits that came from teacher and student use of ClickView in classrooms across Edinburgh.

It was soon clear that the Empowered Learning Project and ClickView were empowering learning and teaching across the city. And it became quickly apparent that video as an educational tool has a lot to do with this.

The secret weapon behind the Empowered Learning Project

David describes a setting familiar to teachers everywhere when deploying video content in the classroom.

“As a teacher, you can stand and deliver a lesson to your children. It will be appropriate to some, too hard for others and too easy for others. But the joy of video content means that pupils can consume it once or many times; they can stop, they can rewind.”

ClickView’s video content format speaks to the digital natives that teachers must now engage with across all year levels.

Yasmine Naeem, a Principal Teacher at Edinburgh’s Cramond Primary School explains: “Video content within the classroom is essential with our children. They are digital natives, so they are used to having constant use of technology: smart TVs, game consoles, and devices such as iPads. We need to keep up with them to make sure that their needs are met.”

“You can create the content beforehand, pre-load the lesson with it and then be more focused on individual support for different children in whatever activity they’re taking part in. And obviously if a pupil misses that lesson, it’s there.”

David McKee
Quality Improvement Education Officer

For David, a platform that delivers video content was a purposeful decision in the Empowered Learning Project plan. He makes a similar observation as Yasmine:

“I think video is a crucial learning and teaching tool. We know that many children have barriers to learning around language, but the power of video can remove that barrier”.

Yasmine enthusiastically recounts the success of a recent poetry lesson she undertook using ClickView video with her primary aged students:

“The content was specific and targeted. It was a short video clip that we watched. We then used breakout rooms to discuss what the video content was and what the poetic device was that we were thinking about whether it was imagery, metaphors, or personification.

The poems that my children and my learners in my class came up with and wrote were absolutely fantastic! I’ve never seen such high use of imagery within writing. And I had parents commenting that they felt that the whole learning experience was just fantastic!”

David adds that ClickView’s success in delivering safe, high-quality content that students can access for self-paced learning plays a key role in the Empowered Learning Project .

Because teachers need to trust the quality and the safety of the material delivered in their classrooms, ClickView’s content is carefully curated without compromising quality.

“(Some) schools typically would use YouTube for hosting, but then of course when you publish in YouTube, you don’t know what else is going to be in the sidebar or what else is going to auto play after that finishes”.

“The nice thing with ClickView is you’re in that safe environment,” McKee adds.

Edinburgh school executives are pleased to know that it’s not just students who have their learning enriched by ClickView. The platform is also used in the Empowered Learning Project to support professional development for teachers across the city.

“We use ClickView as the hosting solution to allow staff access to professional learning in the form of videos and quizzes as they prepare for the deployment of the Empowered Learning Project in their school,” says David.

Teaching empowered by reduced workloads

It’s no secret that teachers at the coal face need access to quality material that is easy to navigate and flexible to deliver. Saving time is critical for teachers.

ClickView’s playlist, TV offerings and interactive features means that Edinburgh’s teachers have found great benefit in the flexibility afforded by access to safe ready-to-use, curriculum-aligned content and broadcast television together with creating their own content.

David believes that the broadcast TV offering on ClickView is hugely helpful.

“Teachers see content all the time on television that is useful for the curriculum. The TV aspect of ClickView gives teachers the opportunity to grab content, edit it and save for use with your class, or for other teachers and their classes.”

This sentiment is echoed by History teacher Jessana Gooch of Leith Academy:

“With ClickView, it’s a lot easier to get into the core of the topic. ClickView content tends to be more of what you’re looking for, so you don’t need to trawl through lots of different clips or long documentaries.”

ClickView’s playlist feature has reduced Leith Academy’s History and Modern Studies teacher Sian Sievwright’s workload.

Sian says: “The ClickView playlist feature means that once I create a playlist, I can share the same link year on year.”

“When you’re looking for that video content for your class you can curate, or you can make it yourself, you can create. I think that’s a really powerful thing”.

Teaching and learning is not a one size fits all

Sian’s comment speaks to the essence of empowered learning: giving students agency in their work.

It’s clear that not only has ClickView enabled an equitable approach to learning for all students at Leith Academy, but it has built a culture of independent self- paced learning.

‘If pupils want to go back to revisit something that they didn’t quite grasp in class, or they need to go over it again, they can do so at their own pace through the ClickView platform,’’ adds Deputy Head Teacher, Rachel Watson from Leith Academy.

“Allowing learners to have content at their fingertips means that the entirety of the learning doesn’t need to wait for an adult. The learning will happen as and when the child is ready.”

Furthermore, the ability to create clips and add interactives to meet different learning needs has made teaching more customised and more time saving, and learning far more accessible.

“Instead of taking that time out of your lesson to deliver to different ability groups, you can create the content beforehand, pre-load the lesson with it and then be more focused on individual support for different children in whatever activity they’re taking part in. And obviously if a pupil misses that lesson, it’s there,” explains David.

Training and support at the ready

The City of Edinburgh Council has found the experience with ClickView positive on all fronts. Even the access to analytics on the platform help David and his team provide further support to teachers in the area:

“(The analytics) have been really useful because it’s allowed us to target support at specific schools and organise bespoke training sessions for those particular schools”.

And that’s when the teacher magic happens.

“What we generally find is that when a school has the kind of training and the kind of support from ClickView, they really start to fly with it.”

That is what empowered teaching looks like.

Together with ClickView, the Empowered Learning Project continues to flourish across Edinburgh. Yasmine’s comment is a testament to its ongoing promise:

“Because the learners are completely engaged with video content I think schools will definitely see an impact on learner participation and engagement in the results from standardised assessments and formative assessment.”

Councillor Ian Perry, Education Convener for the City of Edinburgh Council shares a similar sentiment:

“ClickView is another step in our journey to bridge the educational equity gap, ensuring every student and teacher in Edinburgh has our commitment and support for an inclusive, innovative and transformational education which can be sustained inside and outside the school gates.”