Supporting the future of ICT in Education
15/07/2008
The online self-review framework is Becta’s flagship tool for school improvement and is linked to a national standard for ICT. Its users are school leaders, teachers and people working to improve schools through effective use of ICT. The framework is free to use and can help; show what "good" use of ICT looks like, compare progress against other schools, identify strengths and produce action plans for improvement.
When Becta approached Technophobia it already had an online self-review tool however many aspects of its usability were sub-optimal. Becta’s goal was clear ‘to offer our users a vastly improved online experience’. Technophobia’s mission was to define the overall system architecture and build a user-centered site that provides the highest levels of usability, technological best practice and provides for future development.
To satisfy the criteria set out by this project Technophobia designed a bespoke solution using the Ruby on Rails web development framework. Ruby is a dynamic, reflective, general purpose object-oriented programming language and Rails is a framework specifically designed with web development in mind, instead of having web capability added to it as an afterthought. The result is a development framework minus the limitations imposed by frameworks that have web functionality shoe-horned into them; this in turn leads to speedy and efficient development.
The new highly-tailored online tool provides a self-review in the form of an interactive structured questionnaire covering each strand of the framework. Divided into relevant questions it is supported by an explanatory guide for each point covered by the review. The intuitive system allows the user to indicate, by means of a scale, how the school is performing in each particular area and record evidence, comments and action planned. The framework system then uses the data collected to benchmark the school against other schools and the ICT Mark accreditation standards. Based upon these results the system dynamically generates focused and appropriate recommendations and action plans. Version control allows the schools to save each review and generate on and offline reports to monitor and guide progress. The user-centric interface presents a clean and straightforward design that is efficient and concise. This powerful and innovative tool drives out many of the inefficiencies encountered when undertaking a review of this kind by removing much of the time consuming planning, collating, formatting and reporting, allowing users to concentrate time and effort in the important areas of review and implementing improvement.
Technophobia has provided Becta with a bespoke Content Management System (CMS) that enables update and expansion of site content, such as the incorporation of new strands or questions into framework review. The CMS also allows for the creation and management of other language versions of the site, the first of which being in Welsh. An intuitive user interface allows Becta to upload data from Edubase, a register of all educational establishments in England and Wales, maintained by the Department for Children Schools and Families. Technophobia has not only designed a CMS, we have created for Becta a framework creation system, a model that can be used to roll out other self-review programmes. Technophobia is also providing Becta secure hosting and data management.
The new self-review tool will not only empower schools to drive forward their ICT strategies with greater ease but the far reaching consequence of this powerful tool mean the real results will be seen in the increasing skill and competence of the next generation of ICT practitioners and users.
On the release of the new self-review tool Simon Harrison, Project Manager – Becta, kindly said ’the new tool adds further real value to the self-review framework. The user-centred design presents a new tool that is much more usable than its predecessor and will contribute enormously in supporting schools with their developing ICT strategies. A big thank you to all on your team who have made this project such a pleasure to work on.’
Latest news articles
- Moving on up 09/01/2012
- We moved into our new office today, and it is…
- Technophobia in the top half of The Drum Digital 100 20/12/2011
- Technophobia is delighted to have been ranked number 48 in…
- Candy Diemer hired to lead user experience team 07/12/2011
- Candy Diemer has been appointed as user experience…
- Private and Public Sector Collaboration - Collabojam 03/08/2011
- Technophobia is proud to have participated in this year’s…
- Welcome to Yorkshire 05/05/2011
- The Yorkshire tourism industry has just received…
- Technophobia acquired by Capita 15/04/2011
- We are delighted to announce that today Technophobia…