Amjad: When I’m reviewing EdTech, I distinguish between the tools that change learning and the tools that support conditions for learning. classroom.cloud for me sat in the area for me of supporting learning rather than changing learning itself, though it has tools to help you with the changing the learning aspects.

And that’s really what it came down. It got promoted to us as a classroom management tool, which I think it’s very, very strong in. And it’s got the highest – I run a rubric where I kind of evaluate, evaluate on different aspects: pedagogy, safeguarding, usability and implementation – it scored very highly on safeguarding and classroom management in this. So in terms of does it do what it says, yes it does.

Chrish:  Some countries have different regulations but regardless when it comes to safeguarding children, it’s the same. So there is nothing that’s lesser or more, like we would do our maximum to ensure the children’s safety. So in that context, yes, the application does what it says.

And the only challenge would be when it comes to supporting multiple platforms in the same network. That’s where the challenge is going be with certain products. Because you’ll be trying to cater the whole school, different OSs, different environments, different ecosystems in the same way. And here and there you lose the features. Again, that’s a given for any product.

But it’s an amazing product.

Aarifa: I’d like to agree with both Amjad and Chrish.

One thing that I do appreciate with classroom.cloud is that, from a teachers perspective, it’s a real time saver and time management tool because obviously the time in class is, it’s not always the best.

And with kids you’re able to see exactly what’s happening. It does, like what they’re saying, it does what it says it’s meant to be doing. The safeguarding is amazing and the IT tools for technicians as well. It’s super helpful, super fast and super productive.

Jérôme: I’ve used the product in a couple of schools actually and what made it stick out is the fact that it’s really easy to implement and to install in the school.

We used some other tools before that. And [with classroom.cloud] the technician was much happier, I would say, by the fact that this was very easy to set up.

And obviously after that, it’s very easy but it would turn to teachers obviously needing to know how it works. But I mean, it’s very straightforward. And that’s what also is very useful. It’s a fact that it’s quite a nice and easy app to master with.

It’s got little bits and bobs to understand but I mean otherwise it’s very straightforward. Very easy to implement in a classroom to check what the pupils are doing, for the classroom management but also, with the safeguarding side of things too.

And as Chrish mentioned before, safeguarding is, is very, very strong. And I really appreciated all the stats you can pull out from it. It was very impressive.

Jérôme: In this case, I was very impressed because the fact they have the trigger words. So I think it’s important, you know, when [students] do some searches on the Internet and things like that, you will have some trigger words. And if you have some words which are, you know, which would be a bit dodgy, they will pick it up and they will record it. So after you can have a look at it.

And the funny thing is that the first time they’ll actually use that, the word ‘sword’ and ‘weapons’ came up straight away. And there was a headmaster doing a Latin lesson on the Romans and talking about the different weapons they had.

So you’re thinking, okay, they probably know what they’re doing. So it just popped up straight to where you had something appearing. But obviously in that case it was really safe. That was okay. There was no issues whatsoever. I think is really important.

And the fact also that, one of the features  I really like is that they also can have an image taken when they go on certain things,  if it’s got a high level.

So you can prove to the parents or to the DSL in your school. ‘Look, that happened’.

Well, they obviously have access to it, but it’s a piece of evidence also that they access that website. You have the address, but you also have a picture of the content and that’s really to us an excellent feature.

Amjad

I think it was a recording just to go on from Jérôme. I think it was a recording.

Jérôme

Recording, yeah, recording like 4 or 5 seconds or something…

Amjad

In terms of abuse, it’s important to be monitoring and looking out for particularly imaging, to go to designated safeguarding lead. I thought that was very important as well. And how the reports can be forwarded. The leadership can actually see at a certain given time and ask for these reports to be submitted in as well – so they can keep a closer eye on everything that’s happening.  I mean those features were especially important.

Phillipa (host)

I think that’s great, that connection between senior leadership, safeguarding and the reports from IT, because quite often depending on, on how digitalised the school is, there can be a gap, There can be a huge gap between a digital system and the integration of that digital system an the safeguarding procedures, or potentially the reporting mechanisms.

So it seems a lot easier, it’s a lot quicker, more effective, I would assume in practice.

Jérôme

Absolutely, I think it seems to be quite fast. But also the fact that technically, I think, I don’t know if you, it’s probably the case abroad also, that the pupils they sign an AUP at the beginning of the year to be using properly the internet in their schools and to use the computers properly. So that’s also a way to check that they’re doing the right job and doing the right thing. So I think that that’s really important to have features like this.

There was also another very, very impressive factor. You can analyse messages through Teams. Obviously, if you’re on Teams also you can see what you enter, and the prompts also you’re typing in. So there’s lots of things that you can actually pick up.

Yeah, that’s very powerful, very impressive.

Phillipa

That’s really brilliant. You mentioned statistics, so is there a dashboard?

Amjad

Yes, there is a progress, well, I think it was where the leadership can actually take a look and see what’s happening, what’s coming up.

There was Word cloud where the most common terms that are being used come up and they can they can look at those words and see where they’re being used and if they’re being used appropriately. There’s a lot of information there that can be passed on very, very quickly. And obviously that’s very important for leadership to actually lead and manage the school and to find these issues and stamp them out early.

Chrish

Definitely, other platforms would just send messages to admins or to whoever’s in the system. But in this case depending on the severity or the or the way we configure it, it will go to the right person.

So I lead the digital safeguarding in the school, alongside with the other things, but that doesn’t mean I’m going  allowed to see certain things, right? So certain things we can configure so that it has to go to DSL. Nobody would else would know.

It protects child’s privacy, a child might be going through something in life, we don’t know what’s happening in their houses. So it could be different things. But the good thing is it’s flagging it to the right person. If you configure it right, it can be a very powerful tool.

Also the regulatory alignments, I mentioned KCSIE before and DfE. Because even though I’m in the UAE, we pretty much follow the same guidelines, like Keeping Children Safe in Education and DFE filtering is very clear how to do that. And then this just falls into the right down to the alley, and works well for the schools.

Again, now one more thing I need to bring up…it has started picking up these Gen Z words and ask me the Gen Z words are, I did not know, what are these words?

I mean, certain words are words for us. Like it’s just an English word, but that’s not for them. So when it’s repeating, happening again, again, and I realise like it’s keep getting flagged. “Why it’s getting flagged? It’s a normal English word.” And yeah, I had to actually do some research on those words to understand… I have to use Gemini to understand what are these words because unusually certain words were coming up that didn’t look like the wrong words for me but they were.

Amjad

You can always come home and try them on your children. They generally run for cover and think, ‘what are you talking about?’

Chrish

And another beautiful thing is the geolocation management. You can do the, the restrictions based on the geolocation when the children are in the school, certain restrictions may apply when they’re told some something else may apply.

Which is great because I don’t think we should be controlling them too hard after work hours because sometimes that’s only do as they are free to and parents won’t agree with us. So this gives the flexibility of how we want to operate.

So overall a great tool.

Amjad

On the implementation. It’s a good point that I got here in that often, the success of the platform depends less on the technology itself and more how it’s implemented across the school.

So I mean, there is that kind of need to understand how we use it, how we take all that information that’s being provided to us and how it impacts the running of the school, how it protects such and how it makes sure they’re safe and secure in their learning.

Jérôme

For example, in terms of the edu, you could, if there’s a good survey or poll, you can start at the beginning of the lesson so you can check on understanding.

It doesn’t need to be done at the beginning of the lesson, obviously it’s up to you. If everybody’s on a device you can run a quick survey, a quick question to check for understanding or something like that. Which I think is very useful.

I think you can also send an individual message too, which I like also to, to the pupils in your class. That’s super useful because if they’re off task or doing something and you can see that one of your pupils is struggling, some of the pupils are not as vocal at putting head up straight away, so you can say, “can help you with anything?”

The other pupils in the class don’t need to see that you’re giving help to that pupil in particular. But you can just send a little message and say, “If I was you, I will do this.” We can point them in the right direction.

There’s a kind of educational things that you can use in that context, which I think is very, very useful.

Two things that are pretty useful.

I quite like the random select also, which is good. You have your pupils, and sometimes again, pupilsdon’t really want to chat or something like that.

Obviously, you have the wheel of names you could be using. You could pop it onto your whiteboard. But within [classroom.cloud] you also have the random select so f you’re asking a question, you can just pop on that and you can have the name of pupil you’re going to be asking a question to or something like that. So that’s a kind of a nice little feature you can have in there.

And you don’t have to be going into another app to be doing it. So it’s quite useful.