Thank you to Dave Harrison, Year 5 teacher and IT coach, for sharing North London Collegiate School's experiences of Natterhub. We're very proud to be part of the curriculum at such a wonderful school, and look forward to working with Dave and his team on their suggestions for development.

Please tell us your thoughts on the teacher-led and Natterled lessons.

As the Edtech specialist teacher at North London Collegiate School, I focus on the Edtech for our school and my colleague looks after the computing curriculum as it’s become such a vast and specialist subject.  This generation of children have entered a strange world full of technology and we have a duty of care to offer guidance to our pupils as well as raise awareness on how to be safe online.  It’s important and a priority for schools to ensure that online safety is taught sufficiently.  

I made it my quest and mission to find resources and found Natterhub as a platform that could offer a solution to my concerns, but be a progressive scheme of work with quality resources, up-to-date information as well as engaging for the children to learn-where they could apply this knowledge and scenarios learnt in the classroom in the real world.  

We’ve recently launched issuing our 1:1 iPad scheme for pupils and some parents (understandably) were concerned that we needed to ensure the children knew how to use the ipad correctly, that it’s not an ‘ipad’ lesson but actually becomes embedded into our teaching and a way of communication with others - Natterhub has helped us in this mission.

In your opinion, how easy/difficult is the platform to use?

The Natterhub platform is very easy to use because it has been designed for children. They’ve found it easy to use and navigate  to complete activities, such as creating their avatars and participating and commenting during the lessons.  

We’ve been very impressed with the speediness of your replies about the minor snags we've faced and that you’ve taken onboard suggestions we’ve made.  We find companies like this are much more appealing to us, as they are looking to constantly improve their platform with the feedback offered.  Our suggestions have been implemented!

How does the assessment system (The Badges of Honour) aid your teaching and learning?

We find the information extremely useful that we can see at a glance what badges the children have completed.  The badge power awarded after the lessons have been extremely popular with our children - they enjoy seeing the badges they’ve collected.   It’s a great visual for them too and keeps them engaged and motivated during the lessons knowing they will be awarded this badge power and possibly additional badge power for completing a quiz after the lesson too.

How did Natterhub support you and your pupils during the lockdown?

During Lockdown we moved straight onto remote learning and used Microsoft Teams.  I discovered Natterhub in my quest and mission to find e-safety resources ensuring we found the right quality, content and pitch for our school.  We signed up and our children loved it.  They found the platform easy to use and the layout was familiar to them when we migrated to using the platform in the classroom. 

The children loved that Natterhub was for them - they loved the feel and appearance of the platform and the children knew it was ‘for us’.

What do your colleagues say about Natterhub?

The staff in school have enjoyed teaching the lessons in class. The teaching resources and planning as well as the slides for the lessons are detailed, in particular, the teacher notes provided during the lessons are very useful to help guide the lessons.  It’s helped support our roll out in school to provide our pupils with individual ipads ensuring that we have the tools to teach them safely how to navigate the internet as well the correct social etiquette when using social platforms.

We’ve been using the lessons predominantly in KS2 and teaching both Natterled and Natterhub lessons.  We enjoy the range of activities and flexibility the platform allows us in the classroom to teach e-safety lessons, from the interactive slides, polls and quizzes.

What do your pupils say about Natterhub?

We’ve had very positive responses from our pupils at North London Collegiate, they have loved the platform: 

‘it’s for children’ 

‘it’s for us!’

They’ve loved and enjoyed the polls, quizzes as well as the fireworks and confetti when they earn badge power after completing the lesson or quiz.  Our children have really loved creating their own avatars!

Our approach of ‘experiential learning’ is different from other online safety provision. What, in your experience, is the impact of this approach?

During my time sourcing resources for online safety, it’s been very difficult finding information and resources which is up-to-date, that hasn’t then become archived when you revisit the material and is still engaging for children.  Natterhub has solved this issue as you provide lessons that offer real-life experiences for the children; with lesson content and how you present the content, for example: commenting on the feed, identifying the fake news in your quizzes and teaching valuable skills to identify and practice how to interact on a social media platform.  

You’re giving the children and us (the teachers) the tools to support our pupils to  navigate what is a strange world.  It’s been helpful with our parents too and we’re looking forward to implementing the parent hub as we do our whole school launch in September.

How is Natterhub is impacting your pupils' understanding of digital literacy?

Our pupils are very resilient and have been able to adapt to the Natterhub platform (from moving from remote to class-based lessons) and enjoy using Natterhub to comment on the lesson as well as communicate with each other.

Our pupils are  learning to confidently use their devices but be respectful when navigating, participating and commenting in the classroom and it is becoming integral to their learning.