We are very excited to announce the launch of a new and improved version of the Verso teaching and learning platform.
The improvements and new features we have added will make it even easier for teachers to quickly and easily create collaborative and deep-thinking lessons using evidence from the classroom and high-impact teaching strategies.
Each improvement is based on feedback and interviews with teachers, administrators and pedagogical experts over the past two years. The improvements are designed to not only improve usability but align with the evidence-based pedagogical methods that underpin the Verso approach.
Watch a short video of the new features
| New Feature | |
| Streamlined teacher dashboard provides teachers better access to Verso professional development modules, enables sharing of activities with other teachers and provides them a snapshot of evidence and statistics from the classroom.Impact: Enhances the capacity of teachers to build collective efficacy by working with other teachers and also track their own skills development. This area will be further enhanced with the release of Verso accredited High-Impact Teaching Strategy (HITS) courses later in 2018. |  |
| 2) Improved class background and search functionalityImpact: A huge improvement and much asked for by teachers in middle and high schools with multiple classes to enable them to better search for and manage activities across multiple classes. |  |
| 3) All new My Professional Classes to enable teachers to access professional learning classes as a student and also invite colleagues to co-teach classes.Impact: Schools can now deliver professional development to multiple teachers simultaneously via the Verso platform. Teachers can now join classes as students, supporting in-school coaches and trainers. |  |
| 4) HITS supported activity creation for teachers with hints and help overlays to quickly build lessons based on evidence best practices and High-Impact Teaching Strategies.Impact: It is now easier than ever for teachers to create high-impact activities using Verso. They can simply upload existing lessons into Verso and using the activity creation template quickly adapt them to add in collaborative strategies, feedback tools and modelled responses to amplify student learning for every student. |
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| 5) Improved student engagement and feedback – Improved teacher and student likes functionality allows teachers and students to anonymously provide feedback to students about their ideas and identify better quality responses from the classroom.Impact: Teacher likes provides an important feedback, assessment and monitoring tools. Teachers can now acknowledge responses that have met the requirements of the task and track the progress of individual students. |  |
| 6) Improved grouping functionality of students responses now enables teachers to better group student responses by theme and display similar ideas as tickets.Impact: Teachers and students can more readily read and respond to other students ideas, enabling greater feedback and sharing of ideas. The improve grouping allows teachers to better build collaboration amongst students. |  |
| 7) All new activity engagement dashboard collects all the classroom data in a single location, enabling teachers to see a word-cloud of vocabulary usage, student participation and engagement data and evidence of student learning.Impact: For the first time ever, teachers can now receive feedback on student academic register and common used words via analysis of each student’s use of Tier 2 (enhanced academic) and Tier 3 (subject specific) vocabulary. This is critical to literacy development of learners and particularly ELL learners as vocabulary is essential to deep learning and is directly linked to improve literacy and test scores. |  |
| 8) Vocabulary word-cloud demonstrating use of target and contextual vocabulary by teachers and students, using word-clouds and suggested and recommended vocabulary prompts for teachers and students.Impact: This feature improves the level of vocabulary amongst students by providing real-time visibility to the teacher of the vocabulary level of their students and suggesting targeted words to include in responses. It is linked to the explicit teaching methods advocated by John Hattie. |  |
| 9) Expanded library functionality providing enhanced searching of Verso’s 100,000+ HITS supported activities, individual school libraries and the global content libraries of expert curated exemplar activities.Impact: This was a frequently requested feature that will make it easier for teachers to find and access high-quality activities that they can adapt and use in their classroom. |  |
| 10) All new My Progress tab provides teachers with classroom statistics, High-Impact Teaching Strategy suggestions and their recently completed activities to enter and review reflections.Impact: This feature directly links a teacher’s development to the evidence and feedback from the classroom. My Progress creates an evidence base for the teacher by encouraging them to reflect on their work and then makes suggestions on future areas of improvement. According to Hattie, teacher reflection is critical to the cycle of professional improvement. |  |
| 11) Individual student engagement tracking: Provides Teachers and administrators visibility on contributions of individual students across multiple classes or activities.Impact: Teachers can now view individual student activities to ensure they are tracking and supporting students who are not making quality contributions. Teachers can then intervene with personalising learning for that student and build collective efficacy across the teacher community. |  |
| 12) Improved My PD tab for teachers now distinguishes between High-Impact Strategies advocated by Hattie and other international experts to improve in-classroom teaching and the Verso Learning Courses which develop and recognise a teacher’s individual efforts to improve their professional capacity.Impact: Teachers can now better manage the different components of their professional development based on classroom strategies and collect evidence of their development through the activities they have delivered |  . |
For the moment you can continue to use the current version of Verso and can easily switch between versions if you wish, however we will be removing the current version soon. Until then please check out the new features by logging in to your account or setting up a new Verso account.
