PHIL SPOKES
Founder and Business Director
We are excited here at Spokes Education to introduce UnfoldEd–a new and innovative series of interactive classroom lessons, starting with PSHE topics. In this post, I share some of how this story started and unfolded.
As a school governor and the husband of a dedicated teacher with 20 years of experience, I witness the challenges schools and educators face every day. While we’re deeply committed to supporting schools through our volunteering, we’ve always believed that, with the skills and expertise within our team, we have the capacity to make an even greater impact.
Over the past five years, we’ve explored various ideas for our own product, but nothing truly clicked until we developed our current iteration of UnfoldEd. While many resources exist for schools, our team saw an opportunity to leverage our combined skills to create something unique—offering enhanced interactivity, usability, and flexibility. We decided to start with PSHE subject lessons (as we believe they are some of the most important things to learn about) and worked with an external expert to put together a framework and unit overviews. From there we had a foundation on which to work.
Make it time-saving and customisable
We started our design process with a focus on helping teachers save time. Although a lack of time is perhaps the most serious issue that teachers face, our team also wanted to find a solution that did not limit their freedom to personalise lessons for their own classrooms. We recognised teacher’s frustrations with using lessons that cannot be adapted for their unique context.
Our solution was to offer a unique curriculum that enables anyone to just “turn up and teach”, confident in the knowledge that a team of experienced educators have packed each lesson with engaging activities and effective assessments. At the same time, teachers can benefit from various features that make it easy to customise learning experiences with options to select alternate activities, or even create their own with the ability to seamlessly incorporate other resources.
Make it engaging and easy to use
The next stage of the process was to design interactive lessons that teachers could present to their class through either a large screen/interactive whiteboard or a laptop/portable device. Our team collaborated on creating a fun and friendly look and feel to engage children. At the same time, we also understood the importance of designing from the perspective of the teacher. We know that teachers have to make countless decisions in the classroom, so we used the principles and best practices of User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) design to ensure that our lessons would be easy for everyone to use.
We also added some innovative features to help teachers deal with the unexpected situations that happen in the classroom. These features include a smart menu where teachers can access a bank of calming or energising activities at any point during the lesson. Another option is to effortlessly switch to a whiteboard without navigating away from the lesson–a simple idea that helps to avoid technical frustrations and ensure seamless lessons.
Make it quality and affordable
As we continued development, our final challenge was to identify how we could make UnfoldEd affordable for all. It is no secret that money is another significant issue for most schools. As part of our commitment to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, we want to use our shared knowledge to provide quality education to everyone.
We therefore made the decision to try and make all lessons completely FREE. As a small organisation, unfortunately we aren’t in a position to completely fund it ourselves, but we will try our best to make it work through a combination of corporate sponsorship and by committing a percentage of all our future profits to its development.
If you are interested in supporting UnfoldEd, we’d love to hear from you.
We want to share our knowledge to provide quality education to everyone… completely free.