The Pobble platform has opened up a whole world of possibilities for schools to improve writing, both in school and when teaching remotely. Pupils find inspiration in other children’s texts, they learn to formulate good feedback, and they find great pride in seeing their own work published alongside that of thousands of others. Teachers can find and build inspiring lessons, engage their pupils with tools to write, edit, and publish their work, then easily moderate writing judgements online.
Pobble works. It works for individual teachers and their classes, but it’s most effective when it's used to implement a whole-school focus on writing. Ready to improve writing in your school? Join one of our short daily webinars to find out more about using Pobble in your school.
The most successful schools are doing these 6 things to maximise the impact of Pobble and improve writing across all year groups. Collectively, they bring enthusiasm for writing and raises writing standards!
When it comes to teaching writing, many factors contribute to it being arguably the most difficult subject to teach. If you’re tired, run down and not supported with great resources then you can’t teach effectively. At every point of designing and creating Pobble’s teacher and pupil tools, we’ve remained committed to supporting teachers. We’re certain Pobble can lighten teacher workload by reducing the time it takes to plan high-quality writing lessons freeing up valuable time and energy for pupil support. In fact, research undertaken through the UCL Educate programme in 2019 showed that Pobble reduces teacher lesson planning time by 39%. It was also found to improve pupils’ speed, confidence and enjoyment of writing, leading to improved writing attainment.
Pobble’s lesson tool includes hundreds of ready-made, high-quality lessons covering key writing curriculum objectives. The lesson builder allows teachers to edit Pobble content or create their own lessons with unique slide types. There’s also the ability to find and use content from well-respected resource partners and add real children’s work as exemplars in a lesson, all before presenting, printing or sharing in school or at home.
As teachers, we know that the key to creating good writing is to make it exciting. What could be more exciting than showcasing your pupils work to a huge audience?! It’s usually only the teacher, classmates and occasionally, the headteacher and parents that get to see a piece of writing, but when we feel like we have a purpose we try harder. Authors write because they want people to read it, and children are just the same. Children put more effort into their writing if they know other people are going to look at it - it’s that simple.
Pobble provides you with a platform to turn your pupils into published authors and an authentic audience of pupils, teachers and parents around the world. Even better, pupils can receive constructive, positive feedback! Now that's a reason to write!
Schools tell us that children understand that only their best work can be published and ask for ways to make their writing better. They strive to make their work a ‘Pobble piece’ This keeps them engaged and motivated, which in turn improves the quality of their writing dramatically. Being a published author (or Pobblished as our schools like to call it) fills children with confidence and makes them want to write more. Find out more about publishing writing.
Schools that get the best results from teaching writing celebrate it in style! Once your pupils finish a piece of writing, shout about it… In fact, scream, yell, wave your arms – go mad about it! Show them you care and are proud of them. Sadly, for some children, they may not get enough of this in their lives and it doesn’t matter how ‘too cool for school’ they might think they are, as humans, we all love positive praise!
Each week, teachers select up to 5 pieces of writing per class (limiting this makes it even more special) and this is celebrated to the max! To say writing has a high profile in these schools is an understatement. The children’s achievements are celebrated with stickers, certificates and lanyards, shared in assembly, in newsletters, on displays, on social media and of course published on Pobble to give them the accolade of being a ‘published author’. Ensuring that each and every child throughout the school year has a moment of feeling special and gains honour and recognition for their work makes writing matter.
Pobble enables entire schools to take writing out of the books and beyond the classroom wall, track their writing journey and showcase writing from across classes and year groups with their own school space. The school community and others around the world can then see and interact with the children’s work. Children absolutely love to see how many views and comments they receive on their writing from parents, teachers, peers and their wider global audience. When a child's work is published on Pobble, parents are notified and can leave a comment. Parent input is so important for the child. In schools that use Pobble attainment improves, children are more excited about writing and parents feel more involved.
Feedback is fundamental to increasing children’s writing confidence. Genuine, constructive and positive feedback on their work makes them want to write more and better! Knowing their steps to success and then building in an opportunity to assess their own writing will help them to improve and produce their best work. With Pobble's success criteria slides, pupils can self assess their writing before sending it to peers and their teacher for feedback.
Peer assessment is a crucial part of a child’s learning journey and children can be brilliant motivators for one another. Pobble provides a unique opportunity for them to engage in peer feedback with their classmates, and with peers in other schools around the world!
Pobble’s commenting tool makes leaving feedback on their writing easy. Pupils can receive comments on their writing from friends, family, and teachers both in their school community and from others around the world. Using pupil logins, children are encouraged to give effective feedback too. Peer assessment is becoming such an important part of outstanding schools’ toolkits that we have even created a function to help guide each pupil through making a great comment. Find out more about effective feedback on Pobble.
It’s more essential than ever that children are empowered to take responsibility for their own learning in school and at home. Giving pupils licence to independently log on to platforms and connect with students within the surrounding vicinity really motivates and empowers them to learn independently.
Pobble pupil logins allow your class to access and interact with lessons independently, ideal for learning remotely or in school. They can type their work directly into Pobble or upload photos of handwritten work, then send it straight to their teacher, as well as improve and publish their own work and access writing focused self and peer assessment tools. Work submitted goes to the teacher's online mark book where staff can review, provide feedback and then easily upload to an evidence bank.
Lessons can be accessed anywhere and Pobble’s 'Discover' area for pupils, enables children to explore and select writing tasks based on their own interests. Whether being 'Grammar Detectives' or researching a history topic, it’s always helpful to allow children to ‘magpie’ ideas from WAGOLLs (What A Good One Looks Like) to inspire their writing. Children love learning from their peers and seeing real examples of what good writing looks like, but good WAGOLLs aren’t easy to come by. Teachers often end up writing their own or use one from a textbook. On Pobble, you’ll find thousands of ‘real-life’ examples of children’s writing in the world’s largest bank of children’s handwritten work, searchable by age, genre or topic. Children can search from hundreds of thousands of writing examples, filtered by age, genre or topic from their own school or across the world! They are ideal for exemplification, finding ideas and inspiration. Find out more about empowering independent learning.
Assessment of writing is intrinsically hard because it’s ambiguous. It’s not sufficient to resort to a checklist of criteria and ensure the boxes are ticked. Not everything is black and white, right or wrong. Effective Moderation has a direct positive impact on a child’s learning. Ultimately, this ensures that future teaching and learning decisions are relevant, reliable and in the pupil's best interest. Pobble allows teachers to moderate writing remotely. With your pupils' work available in one place, monitoring their progress is simple. You can easily create moderation files to share and demonstrate their progress and add supporting evidence like a writing checklist. Even better, you can moderate these writing collections online with teachers anywhere in the world! To aid consistency of judgments, teachers can quickly and simply send and receive children’s writing collections, connecting with teachers in their own and other schools. Find out more about Pobble moderation.
If you’re not already a Pobble school and striving to improve the teaching of writing whilst maintaining sustained support for teachers, we can help!
