It’s Monday morning. You’ve just put down your first cup of coffee and it’s time to get everybody logged in to their digital learning environment. This can take up to an hour, if not longer, and means you’ll be pacing the classroom non-stop to make sure every student has the right learning materials in front of them…
And then there’s warding off distractions. You’re constantly scrambling to prevent unwanted online behaviour and make sure students don’t look up the answers during a test. At the end of the day and with a full week ahead of you, you’re exhausted! Because even as a teacher you’re only human, with one pair of hands and finite energy.
That’s why we created COOL.
COOL is a teacher’s virtual classroom management assistant that supports you throughout the day. Whether you’re planning and prepping, starting class, managing and distributing materials, monitoring progress and behaviour, testing or grading: COOL lends a helping hand. All while saving you teaching time.
Time-effective term and class preparation
Early mornings at the photocopier? Not anymore. With COOL, lesson preparation happens in the cloud. Pull up your lesson plan straight from your COOL dashboard, wherever you are. Check on the progress of student projects and assignments before class, preset a digital dictation in COOL Check, or send paper learning materials to the printer from any device.
What about the administrative hassle at the beginning of each term? COOL makes it easy for you. No need to spend time on creating student accounts, because COOL is always synced with your school’s SIS and Google Classroom. This means that you’re automatically assigned to your own groups when you first log in to COOL, and student information is always up-to-date.
On top of that, the COOL dashboard offers easy access to your favourite educational apps and materials, as well as (home)work and Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 apps. As a teacher, you can easily customise the dashboard for your groups or individual students, so that everyone is equipped with the apps they need in just a few simple clicks.
And what’s even better? Thanks to COOL, you and your students only need to log in once to access any of your apps. Super convenient!
Trouble helping your students log in?
With a tight schedule and well-planned lessons, it can be a pain to lose time getting students logged in and ready to learn. That’s why COOL offers easy additional login options such as a quick QR code scan and Picture login for your younger students.
Making the login process easier means your students can access learning materials and start the day autonomously. Instead of having to stop at each desk to support or troubleshoot issues, you can rely on your students to get ready on their own and begin your lesson right away.
If passwords ever get lost – and of course, they will – there’s no need to call your IT admin in for help. With COOL, teachers can reset their students’ passwords or create and print new QR codes in seconds.
Distribute learning materials the easy way
While sharing instructional materials on the IWB is easy enough, getting students to open the correct URL during class can be a hassle, especially if they have to manually type it in. COOL assists you with a simple trick: using the special Monitoring function, you can simply “push” an app or external link from your own device to your entire group or to individual students.
Another benefit of working on the cloud with COOL is access to fantastic tools for collaboration and project-based activities. Have students collaborate in Google Docs or Microsoft Word Online. Let them brainstorm in Google Jamboard or get the creative juices flowing with a storytelling assignment in Google Slides or Microsoft Sway.
Monitor learning and online behaviour
Everyone is logged in and working on the task you gave them. Or are they? Actively monitoring your students’ interaction with learning content is now much easier. To check on your students’ progress – or get them back on track if they visit off-topic websites – simply activate COOL Monitoring to see what’s happening on each screen.
Instead of walking around the room, COOL Monitoring helps you ensure that your students are engaged in your lesson in a non-distracting way. You can see real-time activity at a glance and focus on the students who need your attention the most. Manage behaviour and give feedback effectively: simply send a student a quick motivational message.
In addition, a built-in blocking and filtering function protects kids from seeing what they shouldn’t. This is particularly important in the aftermath of the pandemic: children may have gone through traumatic experiences and your students are still in a vulnerable place.
Hassle-free digital assessment
Setting up a digital test or exam in a secured online environment may sound like a task for a tech-savvy colleague from the IT department. Indeed, digital testing often involves a lot of technical preparation and complex logistics. Well, that was before COOL Check.
COOL Check is a secure digital testing environment designed specifically to meet the demands of teachers. Creating, supervising and grading both low-stakes (practice) tests and high-stakes exams with COOL is easy. Even for teachers who feel unsure about using tech.
While your students benefit from a clear and familiar testing environment, you benefit from simple tools to stay in control. With the Monitoring option, you can check your students’ live progress on a test without physically surveilling them. If you notice one of your students is stuck, just offer them some guidance via a direct message.
Another benefit of COOL Check is that you can specify in advance which resources students can use during a test, such as a calculator or a specific web page, and you can easily enable or disable spell check. Students won’t be able to open any other tabs or pages for the duration of the test.
Save precious teaching time
At COOL, we know that being a teacher involves working long hours. That’s why we vow to make life easier for you – and your working days a little shorter.
- Paperwork to be done after school hours? Let COOL do the job for you. Easily submit class records and forms to the school cloud.
- A single, easy login is all it takes for you and your students to access your educational apps, collaboration tools and key learning resources directly from your COOL dashboard.
- Distribute learning material in the blink of an eye: push content to your students from your own device and activate COOL Monitoring to keep everyone on task.
- Set up cheating-proof tests in a few clicks with COOL Check. Create them with Google or Microsoft Forms to auto-display the results once students have submitted their answers.
To sum up…
COOL is the virtual teaching assistant that supports you every day, every step of the way.
While you bring knowledge, skills, strategy and personality to make each day in the classroom meaningful, COOL takes care of the IT part of education and gives you the tools to use your teaching time to the fullest.
And COOL doesn’t just save you time. It frees your hands and gives you the opportunity to invest your energy in doing what you love: teaching, inspiring, and providing those crucial stepping stones for later on in life.
Want to see for yourself out how COOL can assist you? Take a personal COOL tour: