Since 1982, The Norwegian School in London has provided Norwegian primary and lower secondary education for students between the ages of 6 and 16. Tucked into a charming residential area in Wimbledon, south of London, England, the independent school provides a safe and stimulating environment for children to learn in a Norwegian-style school with all of London as their classroom.
The school provides a challenging curriculum for students and focuses on each individual’s development. With a highly trained and dedicated teaching staff, the school encourages each student to achieve their personal best and develop their own skills and interests while also learning to work together and collaborate with others.
The Norwegian School found their previous learning management system (LMS) to be too cumbersome, so they sought an alternative that would better fit the flexibility and interoperability their small school required. One of the reasons they chose the Skooler Learning Management System was because of its tight integration and seamless workflows with Microsoft Office 365.
“Now everyone, both teachers and students, uses the same programs and has the same understanding of the programs. Being integrated into Skooler makes it easier for the youngest students to find the right program.”
Cathrine Liveng-Ness, ICT Teacher, The Norwegian School in London
The Norwegian School has been digital for a number of years. Each student has access to their own Mac computer and first through fourth graders use iPads. Students do a large portion of their work digitally, and Skooler makes it easy to collaborate and share using Teams, OneNote notebooks, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations.
Teachers can easily provide students with feedback and corrections right within the Office applications. Skooler also makes it easy for teachers to collaborate with each other and to share lesson plans, information, and tasks. This way everyone involved in teaching a particular student has a better overview of the student’s work.
How Skooler has made a difference
Enhancing creativity. Compared to writing in paper notebooks, students can explore and incorporate a much more diverse range of content because they can retrieve information, videos and images from websites. OneNote makes it easy to compile content from multimedia sources and co-writing is much easier when students can share digital vs. sending books back and forth.
Fostering collaboration. Using Skooler, students can easily work together on subjects – both in the classroom and from home. Sharing documents with teachers and other students makes it easier to give feedback on each other’s work.
Staying organized. All classes have their own team in Microsoft Teams and there is a joint team for all employees as well as for each teaching team. Everyone knows where all the documents are and has easier access to each other’s lesson plans and teaching programs.
Saving trees while lightening the load. With Skooler, The Norwegian School uses less paper and requires fewer books because so many of the materials are available digitally. This means students have fewer heavy books to carry home and it keeps classrooms tidy.
Keeping parents engaged. With Skooler’s Parents Portal and mobile app parents can stay in touch with the school and keep track of how their children are doing in school. Currently, 99% of their parents/guardians are active users of the Skooler app or Parent Portal. All information from the school to parents is sent via Skooler, and it is also used to provide feedback on tasks, notifications of student assignments and other pertinent information.
Maintaining security. While allowing for school work, collaboration and communication both inside and outside of school, Skooler ensures that all private LMS and other student information is protected and secure.
