Sky Class takes our safeguarding responsibilities extremely seriously.
By agreeing to our terms of use, you are letting us know that you share these values and are willing for us to discretely share data with any law-enforcement or safeguarding agency who should request it.
Our current range of activities do not allow teachers or students to privately communicate with one another through the app, or upload photographs. As our features expand to include creative, open-ended activities like Sky Class storytelling, our safeguarding and moderation tools will step up to meet the challenges involved. We will keep you up to date with these developments.
You can play an open-access version of Divide and Conquer and Spellcaster without making an account, so you may ask, what are the benefits of signing up?
Teachers are on the front-line during this pandemic and the amount of resources teachers pay for our of their own pocket is often underestimated.
Our ambition is to offer Sky Class as an affordable (and where possible, free) service for teachers for the duration of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Saying that, our servers do cost us money to run and this will increase as more schools sign up.
We are currently in a period of early access- which allows any teacher to sign up for a free account. After this, we will consult on the best way to fund the project sustainably going forwards.
While other online learning sites may focus on measuring attainment, at Sky Class we prefer to focus on rewarding progress. We think this is the best way to give you evidence that the children are learning.
A progress gem will be awarded when a Student improves on their score at an activity by a single point (whether that means one correct times table or a single spelling). The score itself is given less prominence by the activities, and should be seen as a personal target.
Therefore, a student who starts with a high score sets the bar high and needs to work very hard to earn new progress gems, whereas a student who initially struggles with an activity is encouraged to make steady, achievable victories. Progress gems are not out of anyone's reach!
Sky Class can be accessed on all modern web browsers. We recommend keeping your browser updated to improve your experience.
Our aim is to support all screen sizes from desktops and laptops through to tablets. During the early access stage, you may encounter some bugs on tablets (there are many different screen sizes to consider); if you find these, please report them to us so we can fix them. We recommend you use landscape orientation where possible.
While most of the website will be accessible on smartphones, unfortunately we won't be able to fully support the activities on these devices. This is in order to focus our priorities on providing a wider range of activities and features.
After signing in as a class, you have a choice whether to play the activity as a class, or switch user to one of the student profiles.
Playing as a class gives you access to that week's spellings or the class's times tables, however, you won't currently be able to save high scores or receive progress gems. This may become possible in the future.
When students are taking turns to play on the same machine, or on an interactive whiteboard and you want to get all the features of logging in, we recommend for now to switch player after each turn. This process can be speeded up if you chose not to set individual student keys- or if you keep them very short.