The EfL Activity Channel & EfL Activity Kit

The EfL Activity Channel, together with the EfL Activity Kit, lets teachers, therapists and other authorised staff at your school create rich video-based activities containing written and visual instructions, links to your school’s favourite resources, other web links and downloadable and printable resources.

These activities can then be shared with learners and their families/carers via the  EfL Activity Channel within your school’s EfL Parent Portal.

• Activities can be shared with individual learners, groups/classes or the whole school community.
• Activities can be easily duplicated and adapted/personalised (if necessary) for individual learners or groups.

Each learner has their OWN personalised Activity Channel containing the activities that have been shared with them. These can be both general resources (for anyone in the school), as well as personalised activities that have been created specifically for that child – only that learner and their family/carers can access these activities.

Parents, families, carers and learners can access the activities that have been shared with them via the EfL Activity Channel once they are logged into the secure EfL Parent Portal. They can easily search for activities based on relevant themes, areas of your school’s curriculum and even specific learning goals for that learner.

They can also differentiate between general activities and those that might have been personalised and created specifically for their child.

* Crucially… the EfL Activity Channel is YOUR school’s private and secure online channel containing Activities that can be (if desired) easily and quickly personalised for EACH learner and their family/carers.

Teachers can create rich and powerful learning activities / resources in a few minutes!

Creating activities is quick and easy… whether it’s an activity for multiple learners or one that models learning for a specific learner.

Activities can consist of:

• Activity Description (which parents, carers and learners can search)
• Up to 3 videos or photos e.g. Modelling activities for parents, carer and the learner
• Written instructions and notes about the Activity
• Web-links (e.g. Links to websites that support or form part of the activity resource – e.g. YouTube, your school’s favourite online resources, etc…)
• PDF resources (e.g. worksheets, cutouts, etc..) that can be downloaded and printed by families, carers or the learner

Capture learning and collect evidence from outside school

Parents/carers can then collect photos, videos and notes of their child working through activities. These can be submitted to the school via the EfL Parent Portal and the school can annotate and link this vital evidence to the relevant learning outcomes for the learner and their overall learning journal/journey.

Enhance your teaching, learning and provision

• Enables you to easily and quickly create personalised activities, resources and support for learners
• Provide personalised and targeted support to learners and families/carers when learners are unable to be in school
• Helps to develop independent learning
• Provides learners with opportunities to apply, develop and generalise their learning in a range of contexts outside of school
• Enables you to capture, evaluate and keep track of learning and progress made outside of school
• Successful teaching and support strategies can be converted into shareable activities to share best practice
• Powerful CPD opportunities: Personalised CPD for teachers and LSA/TAs
• Therapists and Multi-agency teams can provide rich, video-based resources for learners and families that are personalised to the learner’s needs
• Empower learners and their families for lifelong learning: Preparation for Adulthood (PfA)
• Model support strategies for job coaches and other stakeholders that support learners outside of school

Launching shortly… THE EfL ACTIVITY LIBRARY

The EfL Activity Library allows schools to quickly and easily share Activities with each other. In addition to creating their own Activities and adapting existing ones from your school’s resource base, your teachers can browse the EfL Activity Library for useful Activities that have been developed by the EfL SEND Community of schools… hundreds of SEND schools, colleges and settings.

They can import activities and then adapt and if appropriate, personalise them before sharing with families/carers and learners at your school.

• Massive savings on workload time and effort
• Share best practice, while still allowing the necessary adaptation and personalisation of activities where appropriate.

The EfL Activity Library allows us all the opportunity to benefit from the shared expertise and experience that exists within the community of nearly 400 SEND schools, colleges and settings that are now using Evidence for Learning.

EfL Activity Channel in action!

This short video (right) made by Martin McKenna, Deputy Headteacher at Palmerston School, Liverpool, shows how their school has already started using the EfL Activity Channel & Activity Kit to support remote provision and learning during the coronavirus crisis.

It shows how easily an activity can be created (and personalised for specific learners if need be) and then shared with parents/carers and the learner. It also shows how parents/carers can access their own private Activity Channel and search for and use activities before collecting photos, videos and evidence of their learning outside of school to send back to school via the EfL Parent Portal.

Example: Literacy – Modelling best practice for parents to help with reading and comprehension

In this short video, a teacher at Palmerston School, Liverpool  discusses how they use Evidence for Learning to record and annotate short ‘training’ videos for parents that model good literacy skills, such as how to decode phonics and good questioning.

The approach provides a completely personalised set of resources to support the learner, and the Evidence for Learning system allows parents to record evidence of their son or daughter practicing their reading and comprehension at home and outside of school.