Changing the way teachers plan lessons

Atif Mahmood, Lumici Slate founder and CEO: “As a teacher, I saw first hand how using technology in the classroom can boost learning but also how difficult planning and applying it well can be for some teachers. I had a vision to make this easier. Lumici is an educational technologies company based in UK with offices in Manchester, Derby and London. The aim of the company is simple: to harness the power of technology to improve learning."

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As teachers, we spend our careers refining and honing our teaching skills. It makes sense, therefore, that any technology we use in school should enhance these skills or free us to use these skills better. As a teacher, I saw how this could happen, but also how commonplace badly designed software that didn’t have a positive impact was, as well as how many teachers struggled to plan and apply any technology well.

I wanted to use technology that would not only make my own life, and the lives of my colleagues, easier, but enhance our teaching and engage our students. I was weighed down with the burden of lesson planning and aware of lack of engagement many teachers and students had with our VLE, which should have been making things easier.

From these experiences, and recommendations from a 2016 workload white paper, I developed Lumici Slate with the key aim of changing the way that teachers plan and deliver lessons. To achieve this, the most important factor was to make Lumici easy to use.

Lumici Slate is online lesson planning software that saves teachers time every day, makes collaborative planning possible and engages students. Sharing the burden of planning is straightforward, and teachers can plan face-to-face or virtually. Helpful when timetabling group planning is impossible or where groups of schools work together across trusts and associations. Once developed, plans and resources are all held centrally and teachers can choose to deliver lessons online or traditionally.

Content and images can be dragged into lessons from files and webpages, and the resource comes with a bank of high-quality resources. Lumici collects learner progress data to influence lesson design and show teachers what a perfect lesson looks through pre-built lesson templates that they can immediately adapt and use. It also supports quality assurance, across individual schools and groups of schools.

Lumici is already being used across schools and colleges, and the feedback suggests we are meeting our aims. We work closely with our customers to ensure that Lumici continues to meet the needs of today’s teachers and learners, and doesn’t become another shelved product in school.

“Enabling teachers, across a multi-academy trust, to build lessons together, significantly reduces the time taken to develop new schemes of work.” Ben Dunne, principal at Penketh High School.

“Lumici Slate gives us complete transparency of the programme’s learning material, what’s working and what isn’t and helps disseminate best practice.” Rakesh Patel, head of Maths and ICT.

“Unlike a VLE, Lumici Slate can be instantly adopted by staff as it’s so easy to use and needs no training.” Peter Kilkoyne, ILT manager at Worcestershire College

Visit www.lumici.co.uk or contact me on AtifMahmood@lumici.co.uk / 01332 725274 to find out more.