David Liebeschuetz, Head of Science at Davenant Foundation School, reflects on 10 years of online learning, including what’s changed and what they’ve found works best.
It’s hugely timesaving for teachers, because setting homework is so comparatively easy and stressfree when using Educake. It also produces consistency in homework setting across the department, which is just as important.
It would be interesting to try to guess what we would spend on photocopying if we didn’t have Educake. To resource homework without it would require either textbooks at home or worksheets that students would bring home, all of which is problematic and potentially quite expensive compared to Educake.
How has online homework changed?
I think the fundamental change in the last 10 years is the availability of AI and what it will do to kill the traditional model of homework. Typically, you teach students something, and then you give them some practice work to do outside of the lesson. That could be a worksheet, a series of questions, or an essay, for example.
AI is destroying that model, because even if you set students a very open-ended question about something you’ve taught them, they can simply put that prompt into Chat GPT, and it will churn out an answer. And then students will hand in that answer with very little understanding of what it means.
For the teacher, the only way they can know whether the student has handed in a genuine
piece of work is to test them on it. For homework to survive, it must be much better integrated into classwork. And Educake goes a good long way towards that. I don’t believe that kids are feeding Educake questions into AI and trying to find the answer. I feel that the format of Educake is pretty AI proof.
And that’s another good reason to keep up the subscription. Overall, the way to keep homework useful now that AI is here is to make it explicitly about retrieval practice, which is what Educake does.
The Revision Wizard and the Study and Quiz Yourself sections are there for students to work independently. We teach them that those sections are there and that the homework their teacher sets them is only one part of Educake.
I write to parents about Educake and the potential for students to use it for independent study and revision. Educake has made videos just for parents about revision, so I forward those to them. I really think of parents as an ally to get the kids to use it as a revision resource.
Value for money
It helps to improve learning outcomes through retrieval practice, because you can use it to test what students have learned recently and get them to remember what they’ve learned a while ago. I often use Educake as an end-of-topic test.
That way, I can plan to reteach the bits they’ve done badly on, because they’ve either not understood or forgotten.
Thoughts on Educake 10 years on
Educake is still our #1 homework resource for KS3 and KS4. It’s really our only homework
resource. Back then I called it “learning consolidation”. I’d probably call it “retrieval practice” now.
It’s not just the number one homework resource to us as teachers – it’s since become the number one revision resource for our students.
Retrieval practice
What we do is we look at individual tests and the ability you have to rank the questions
students have answered in order of how well they’ve done on them. That’s really useful, since you can see their misconceptions, so then you know what to reteach.
