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.