Kisharon Noé School
Innovating with Google Sites helps students with learning difficulties to showcase their talents
Kisharon Noé is a Special Needs School based in northwest London. The school caters for a wide range of educational needs for children aged 4 to 19, from moderate learning disabilities to more severe and profound disabilities.
Priding itself on creating a warm and caring atmosphere for every pupil and family, Kisharon School nurtures the talents of its students by creating personalised and cross-curricular learning journeys, so they can be fully equipped for life beyond school.
When we began working with Kisharon, they were looking to overcome a crucial challenge: creating a tool that could help their parents to better understand and track their child’s learning developments throughout their time at the school.
Kisharon had primarily used Office 365 and Teams, but the solution wasn’t coming close to fulfilling their needs. In addition, the school had in place an underutilised Google domain which they had not yet realised the potential of. However, Kisharon wanted to develop their use of Google to a point where they could dramatically improve and enhance how the school communicated with their parents.
Darrell and the team at Haptic have supported us to maximise on our access to technology, ensuring information such as progress data, personalised learning plans and learning journeys are communicated almost instantly with parents and carers. As a school with special needs, annual reviews and parents evenings aren’t enough to assure all parents that pupils are making the progress they should be, so using Google Sites to document all of this helps parents to feel more updated on how their child is doing, especially those who are non-verbal. It’s also a way for parents to have live access to lessons, sensory stories, therapy programmes and other resources to continue valuable learning at home. There were lots of features that we weren’t aware of, so having Haptic’s support was key. They worked hard with us to find solutions to problems, even when we were getting creative with our parent interaction ideas! Their training was also clear and concise, and Darrell was open to all of our questions and suggestions.
"Like how we work with all our customers, our approach with Kisharon was open-minded, focusing on understanding their core needs and helping them to determine a solution that best fit their goals.
Through consulting with the school, it became clear that Kisharon had encountered some obstacles when using Google Classroom in the past. When you’re working with pupils who have special needs, the way in which student interaction takes place can be much more complex and nuanced, and when trying to use Google Classroom as a student interaction tool for sharing and gathering content, the school found that this wasn’t quite fit for purpose in terms of its usability for Kisharon’s students.
So we took a fresh approach to Google Workspace, by making use of Google Sites to create a workflow tool that allowed students to easily showcase their work, and receive feedback from parents, via Google Forms.
This unique approach to using Google Sites required Haptic to develop a bespoke item-tagging system to make these sites easy to use and navigate. In addition, we also provided training to Kisharon’s staff on how to use these personalised Sites to help gather parent feedback.
If you’re looking for a supportive IT partner that listens to your core needs, contact our friendly team today and we’ll be happy to discuss how we can help with your next project.
