At Pobble, we love to celebrate our fellow teachers and the wonderful work that goes on in schools to inspire children. We simply have to love The Positive Teacher Company! Recently founded by a primary assistant head from Leeds, Rachel Turner, we strongly recommend visiting her gorgeous website and enjoy the lovely positive vibe — a happy place for teachers! Rachel is also an avid Pobble ambassador. This is her journey with Pobble so far.
"Pobble has fast become a ‘must’ for all primary schools. The quality of the platform and the joy of the children’s writing ‘search’ function makes it a wonderful resource for day to day teaching and learning. In my previous school, we used Pobble and were lucky enough to have tablets in my Year 6 classroom. This meant that the children had the many thousands of samples of children’s writing on the site ‘on tap’. Children loved the fact the writing on Pobble is real — not teacher-written — real! They searched through any genre, theme or topic that we were focusing on or that interested them. No longer did I write my own WAGOLLs or WABOLLs, the children loved leading the learning and finding their own, leaving feedback for their peers around the world (such empowerment!). Pobble’s structured commenting meant that the comments my children left were generally high quality, both positive and constructive, and my teacher section allowed me to view all of the comments my children had left. A real bonus is that the Pobble team moderate all comments so I didn’t have to! The search function is also wonderful for me as a busy teacher: I have speedy access to a wealth of teaching ideas, WAGOLLs, WABOLLs and guided/shared reading texts. Thank you Pobble for giving me at least some of my Sunday back!
In my opinion, though, the best feature of Pobble is the fact the children become published authors. When we first introduced Pobble to the children, their writing suddenly mattered so much more! They tried harder with their writing because other people were looking at it and we were bullish about celebrating it in school — it was that simple. We were careful to only publish very few pieces per week which made it so special for the chosen few. Children were hooked on our simple Pobble classroom display which shared the total number of views and comments that the school had received. We nominated 2 Pobble leaders in each class who would log in and update the display each day. In my class, we’d set targets for the end of the week: ‘can we get 100 more views by the end of Friday?’
I was proud to very recently accept a promotion in a new school. Without question, we will be implementing Pobble very soon. I can’t wait to introduce the new time-saving resources section to our busy team. I am yet to use it, but having all top quality resources together from so many great companies in one place is just a dream for busy teachers! The pupil activity cards look brilliant too — very useful for empowering pupils, guided reading and also for use in our new ICT suite!
I have a real affection for the whole ethos behind Pobble. It’s all about celebration, empowerment and making life easier for teachers. This is closely aligned with my own project, The Positive Teacher Company, which I set up recently to spread a little more sunshine within our fabulous profession. Please have a look, it’s a happy place for teachers to be proud."