RESEARCH CONFIRMS THAT YOUR CHILDREN’S GRADES IMPROVE BY AN AVERAGE OF 15%
WHEN PARENTS TALK TO THEM ABOUT WHAT THEY DO IN SCHOOL.
Parents
See an example of what an Earwig parent sees.
Click the button below and use ‘example@earwig.com‘ and ‘password‘ to log in.
What Earwig means for you
You may not know it but at every school, teachers take hundreds of photos and videos of the pupils. This is mainly to provide ‘teaching evidence’ for Ofsted, but also for general record keeping and for use by the school to monitor standards.
Earwig enables teachers turn these images into individual records and presents these as a timeline for every class, activity group, subject and child.
The interesting bit for parents is that the Earwig system also provides a secure login for every parent, so that they can see each new record as it is made.
This gives parents almost real-time access to see what their children are doing at school that day, which makes after-school chats between parents and children much more relevant and helps you to encourage and motivate your children.
How to use Earwig
Once your child’s school has acquired the Earwig software package, they can provide you with your own secure login and password.
When you access the Earwig website you will be able to see your child’s individual timeline.
You can check the records created today or scroll back three months.
You can read the teacher comments in each Earwig record and even add a note for the teacher yourself.
Capture those moments forever
You can also just look at the photos and videos in a gallery, just like on your phone or tablet. To ensure that you have these forever, you can buy digital downloads, for £2.00 each or pay £12 for unlimited downloads. You can then order individual prints or create your own photobook.
The school gets 25% of whatever you spend. So every purchase helps to improve facilities at the school.
Child Protection
Any facility dealing with images of children must be cognisant of its safeguarding responsibility to keep those images secure. Each Earwig school system is a separate secure environment and, while school staff can access and use Earwig records in a variety of ways, each parent can only see the records in which their child is tagged. For more on Earwig’s policies and technology in the regard, go to PRIVACY POLICY or DATA SECURITY.
‘As a parent, I have been on the receiving end of the ‘What did you do in school today?’ ‘Nothing’ conversation too many times. Now I can say ‘I liked your electricity from pineapples project. Let’s try it at home’ or something like that. I wish Earwig had been around years ago.’
Sally Brown
Educational Lecturer and Parent
School Governors
If you are a school governor you will be only too well aware of your responsibility to have ‘oversight’ of the activities at you school and to monitor progress towards agreed objectives.
Tramping round the school once a month is necessary, but of limited value. How much better if you could supplement this by calling up a, current, detailed, vivid timeline of documents, images and video clips and analyse this by activity, year, class, subject, team or almost any other criterion – and do this any time you like, day or night?
That is what Earwig offers to governors directly. Each governor gets their own ‘governor’ login, which enables them to access all the school Earwig records, filter these to bring up specific timelines and save these as PDFs if required. They can also see current assessment matrices and reports, including benchmarking against the relevant curriculum, for each class, subject or child if the school employs the relevant Earwig module.
Indirect advantages of Earwig for governors include less staff stress, permanent Ofsted readiness, happier, more engaged parents and better motivated children.
If your school doesn’t have Earwig, it’s time to talk to the Head!
'We live our lives mediated by technology, and often we take it for granted. Those genuine ‘wow’ moments when we see a technology revolutionizing how we work are not so common now, but seeing Earwig at the governing body meeting was one of those wow moments. Earwig Academic Timelines will have a major positive impact on my governing body and how it operates as we get beyond the data, past the acronyms and look into a window on the school.'
Dr Matthew Pearson
School Governor and education guru with 13,000+ twitter followers.