by Sean Dodson, the Guardian
Half past five on Friday afternoon has to be the deadest time of the school week. The gates remain open, but the classrooms seem as still as a chapel. Not the best of times, you would think, for any teacher to drum up a bit excitement for a student survey. But for one school in Leatherhead, Surrey, a lesson in pupil engagement was just around the corner. Keith Halsey, a physics teacher and co-ordinator of the Howard of Effingham school new virtual learning environment (VLE), was tasked with surveying student pinions about language lessons. Rather than go down the traditional route – sending out loads of letters, most of which were ignored – he decided to instigate a discussion thread on Frog, the school’s new learning platform. He hit “send” at a stroke past 5.30pm, and assumed that was that. “Within quarter of an hour we had 30 replies back,” says Halsey, “by Monday morning there were 300, and by the following Wednesday we’d had 600!”
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