Complements school work
Children and young people asked the Commissioner to make education a priority issue for her office. The office’s new report ‘“This is our lives, it matters a lot”: Putting children’s rights at the heart of education’ makes recommendations to improve the education system for all children.
One recommendation is that the Scottish Government should invest in e-learning models to give children a wider choice of subjects, and to improve access for those who would benefit from it.
As young people across Scotland have started sitting their Nat 5s, Highers, and Advanced Highers, what strategies have they used for revision? Last year, Robert, 16, used online learning platform e-Sgoil’s Study Support classes when he was working towards his National 4 and 5 qualifications in S4. Study Support, which includes live webinars with teachers held in the evening, complements the work students do in school. In this blog, Robert explains what the Study Support classes involved and how he benefited from them…
“I felt like I was getting prepared for exams”
I found out about e-Sgoil when I was at high school. Their Study Support sessions start in October every year but I didn’t get told about it until January. I started using it in February 2024, just before exam time. Most of the other people in my classes used it too.
The classes are on MS Teams after school in the evenings. To access them, you register through e-Sgoil’s website with your Glow account and select your subjects. The subjects were from National 4 to Higher.
I used it for the subjects I was doing at school – English, Modern Studies, and Biology – and I also used it for the theory side of my Practical Cookery course, which I only did through e-Sgoil. It was available at my school but I preferred doing the theory online because it was really helpful. They were able to give more information for the exam, and more practical assessments for the theory so I felt like I was getting prepared for the exams.
I would have either one, two, or three meetings a week, one hour per night. I found the classes helped me to get ready for exams, they are different from school lessons. The teachers would talk you through the lesson, give you questions, give you time, and you can ask or answer questions in the chat box on Teams. You didn’t have your mic or camera on. In person, in a big class, some people don’t want to speak, maybe they don’t feel confident or comfortable raising their hand and talking. When you’re online, you’re just typing so that’s lot easier to do. For each lesson, there is a PowerPoint in the Teams files which you can look at in your own time.
There were a lot of people on the classes – in my Practical Cookery online class, there could be a lot of students. But it just seemed to work!
I found using e-Sgoil was definitely worthwhile. There’s a lot of detail given compared to school classes, and it’s done at a slower pace so that makes it much easier. It’s also a very flexible way of learning and I liked studying in the evenings.
The lessons are really detailed. The teachers were happy to answer any questions through email and were very supportive. In a high school, sometimes teachers just don’t have the time to respond to an email immediately. But online, they can get back to you quickly.
One area where I think both school and e-Sgoil could improve is getting students started a lot earlier with Study Support, it really needs to be in the first term so we have longer to get ready for exams.
They could show students how to use Study Support, explain to them how it works, show them what they can learn and get from it. Then everyone would get the most out of it.
I have had to show a lot of people how to get on e-Sgoil to use it. I think some students need more support getting logged on. Students can be given iPads or laptops or Chromebooks at school but not everyone knows how to work them. And if they can’t use it, they can’t learn from it. Teachers need to be helped to know how to help us.
I’ve done all my exams now and I’m in college, which I really enjoy. I had the support of e-Sgoil and the support of school which definitely gave me more confidence going into the exams.