How Teacherly is attempting to slash teacher workload

'Turning teachers into teams' is the slogan that pops up on Teacherly's homepage. I always get excited at the prospect of allowing teachers to collaborate more and work more effectively. When teachers work together and share ideas - great things happen! Teacherly aims to do this by providing an online platform where resources, planning and ideas are shared easily whilst linking teachers together through collaborative discussion.

What is it?

Teacherly is an educational technologies company based in UK with offices in Manchester, Derby and London. 

The aim of the company is simple, "to harness the power of technology to improve learning".

Sharing content, best practices and professional development resources is their main focus whilst aiming to provide an engaging teaching experience for both teachers and students. Think Nearpod meets Seesaw with a touch of Teachers TV and Skype thrown in for good measure.

Improve Planning?

Set up not too dissimilar to a PowerPoint presentation, Teacherly allows you to design lessons using its customisable presentation tools. They game changer is how the cloud based system integrates with assessment and collaboration tools.

Drag and drop planning approach allows you to add objectives directly taken from your school's curriculum and add references to the skills your school most values ensuring lesson have clear curriculum focuses. This also feeds into an individual student assessment system which provide real time data on their progress.

The cloud based system also allows videos and audio to be directly saved to slides meaning that links to external files are not lost when shared with students or colleagues.

​In fact, once lessons are created and planned, they can be shared with students in real time or shared remotely for students to work through independently in their own time. Flipped learning at its best!

Assessment Integrated?

Students get access to the planned learning journeys. When they access the lessons and progress through the challenges set, teachers receive real time formative assessment on students performance and understanding.

Students complete quizzes to show understanding whilst Teacherly also have interactive customisable challenges and worksheets that students can complete. These can also be reviewed by the teacher to support ongoing assessments and students can received valuable feedback to support target setting and next steps.

Collaboration and Coaching?

Teachers do not complete lesson preparations and planning alone. Teachers can add collaborators who join in the planning process. They can add their own resources, ideas and content to the plans to build a rich learning experience for all teachers and students involved.

The platform also supports messaging with audio and video integration. Think of it as a WhatsApp for teachers to allow discussion and collaboration.

Of course, teachers can also invite mentors and coaches to the team section so that insightful dialogue can occur between developing teachers and their supporting staff members. A great feature for NQTs and Student Teachers! Lessons can also be annotated and commented upon for added reminders and prompts.

What do teachers think?

With 2083 schools already onboard, now with over 70,000 teachers using the platform monthly Teacherly is certainly already making a difference.

'The feedback is positive and through customer conversations and working closely with teachers, heads of department, principals we have made further improvements.' says Founder and CEO Atif Mahmood.

Further improvements such as the introduction of the Teacher Digital Passport has now enabled teachers to gain better insights on their own performance and highlight areas for professional development. Performance Management and day to day teaching can appear to be separate. What Teacherly aims to do is combine them and make them one continuous process - the way it should be!

You can sign up, trial and demo Teacherly on their website. They also have a really helpful support page to answer any of the simple questions you may have about their service.