Linda

Riverview School District in the USA

Riverview is a school district in the USA with three schools and about 1700 students, where they, for several years, have used Skooler as their LMS. Skooler, founded in Norway, is closely connected to Microsoft 365. When Skooler incorporated Loops in their company the Principal of Riverview, Christopher Collins, was asked if they wanted to try Loops in their organisation.

Mr Collins started by trying out Loops himself and was quickly very interested in building loops. One of the first loops that he built was to educate his pedagogues on how to use Skooler. He used the loop in a workshop with the teachers to let them try the system themselves. The teachers became interested and shortly thereafter several of them tried to transform their own teaching material into loops. For the most part they used the material that they had just posted on the school’s website, to instruct their students on how to work at home in the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.

The teacher immediately saw how the loops simplified their students’ everyday work, helped them keep track of what they were supposed to do and made it easier to keep up with the set study pace. It also gave them an opportunity to easily communicate with their teacher about each task. Loops was implemented in the entire school district and during the pandemic all the 238 teachers started teaching through Loops. Very soon, the teachers realised the extended possibilities that Loops provided. In several subjects they started building very creative loops where they, and their students, communicated a lot through film and where students’ learning benefited by the communication they had with each other.

About a year into the project, early spring 2021, Mr Collins asked us for numbers on how active Riverview was in Loops. We could then tell him that his pedagogues up until then had created 1934 loops and that they, every month, have between 500 and 600 started loops up and running in the school district. The loops have an average of 20 participants and the average time that the loops are active is 9 days.

Many loops have been used several times and among the favourites we find the following titles:

• Practice Loop
• Digital Reading Log
• Loops for students
• Grade 4, Unit Zero
• Fingerprints
• Mrs. Bauer’s Homeroom Loop
• I am experimenting
• Oregon Trail Week 3
• Fantasy Book Clubs – Bend 1
• Grade 3- 3.5 Expanding Multiplication

In Riverview they are very pleased with Loops and how the tool can be used in their education. They appreciate how well it functions with their other digital tools, not to mention the fact that Loops has helped them maintain high quality education throughout several lockdowns during the pandemic. Teachers tell us that the very students they were worried would have problems handling their studies during the pandemic, have managed well thanks to Loops. Seeing a clear structure for their work, learning in the fun layout of the loop, and being able to easily communicate with teachers and fellow students has made a difference for them.

“It has been fully embraced, we love it”.

Nytorpsskolan i Angered

Principal Elsemarie Hallqvist gives us her thoughts on the implementation of digital teaching resources and how they have used Loops at Nytorpsskolan so far. The interview was made in 2019. The film is in Swedish, but you can read everything that is said in the text below.

The challenges a school leader faces today are first and foremost present in the area of equivalence, making the school equivalent and working with our compensatory assignment, which is about all students actually having the same opportunities.

When we decided to use the teaching material Loops, it was because it wasn’t just “physical book gone digital”. In Loops we found a system that gave us the opportunity to do things that were not possible before. In Loops you can add texts, articles, films and images and turn it into whatever you, as a teacher, need.

When we use Loops, we give students the opportunity to participate more on their own terms. If, for example, you need to have a text read out loud to you, that is built into the system. When it comes to showing what you have learned, there are also different ways to do that, to make sure reading and writing isn’t always what is requested.

We use Loops in our collegial skill’s development and I think it is important, in a learning organisation, that if you want something to really stick, everyone in the organisation must use the tool. When we work with formative assessment and assessment for learning within peer learning, we use Loops as our tool.

For a digital learning material to really function well at a school, I think it is very important that the school leader is committed to the whole process, all the way from the choice of teaching material to actually seeing what happens in the classroom.

Teachers’ possibilities to interact with students have increased substantially since we started using Loops, because now you build the teaching material together with the students. I can also see that teachers benefit from their students’ knowledge. During one of my classroom visits, I heard a teacher asking students to construct quizzes on the subject in their mother tongue. The teacher then said that if you send the quizzes to me, I will add them in a loop for students with the same mother tongue who have just arrived in Sweden. This would not have been possible with another teaching material than Loops.

What also matters to our students, is that we use Loops in all subjects. They recognise the shape of the loop, with its hubs and nodes and they immediately know how to use the material. We also use Loops in other areas, for example in the student council.

Cecilia White at Knutby School in Uppsala Municipality

Cecilia stays with her students from Preschool class to 3rd grade. She started using Loops when a colleague came across a loop about equal value for all and tipped her off about it. She became curious and created a test account. Cecilia quickly learned how to build loops and how to use the system, with the aid of the Loops instruction material.

The first step was to remix a loop that was already in the library and to rebuild it to suit her own students. Cecilia chose to remove the group assignments in the loop and replace them with individual assignments because she taught primary school students and wanted to make the loops easier for them to work with. 

The next step was to start the loop with her students. She then quickly realised what worked really well in her group of students and what she should do differently. After that, she really wanted to start building her own loops from scratch. She has been inspired by loops built by other teachers that she has found in the library, but she has also looked for other sources of inspiration. For the loop that she has built about The Brothers Lionheart, for example, she has been inspired by a program on Swedish Radio.

Cecilia can see many advantages with Loops. Partly the graphic layout of the loops themselves and partly the fact that both teachers and students can decide themselves how they want to communicate, through text, sound or film. Her advice to other teachers is simply to dare to try Loops. Distribute a loop to your students to see what works in your group. Start small, it doesn’t have to be complicated to be good. 

As a teacher I get a good overview of what my students have accomplished and I can give them feedback, says Cecilia. My students’ work is gathered in Loops and that gives me good support in my assessment of their knowledge.

What do Cecilia’s students say about Loops?

“They love it and think it’s great. They think it’s fun and they are proud of the fact that they can navigate the system all by themselves. They have quickly learned how to use Loops, the layout has been very appealing for them, they know exactly where to enter and how to move forward.”