27 Jan Closing the gap for pupils at North Ormesby Primary Academy
Opening doors to a richer English Curriculum by using Kaligo
“Kaligo helps pupils focus on handwriting skills earlier so that they can access the other areas of writing. Kaligo saves hours of time in lessons, and the personalised feedback is simply something we couldn’t do as teachers.”
Benefits
○ Immediate feedback
○ Instant assessment of handwriting ability
○ Reduces the workload for teachers
○ In-depth view of handwriting for each child
○ The bigger picture of class handwriting progress
Key information :
○ Ofsted ‘Outstanding’ School
○ High levels of pupil premium
○ Using Kaligo with 260 students
○ 25% EAL students
About North Ormesby Primary
North Ormesby Primary Academy is an ‘outstanding’ school with around 260 pupils aged 3-11. The school is based in Middlesbrough in the North East of England.
The school teachers and leadership team work hard to ensure that every child, regardless of their background, has the same opportunities to unlock their full potential and be the best they can be.
With high levels of pupils receiving pupil premium funding, a quarter of pupils speak English as an additional language (EAL).
Mrs Stacey Campbell, Y4 Teacher and Phase 2 lead, talks about the school. And how they are using Kaligo.
“The school has a high mobility rate. Kaligo helps us to establish where pupils are with their handwriting and deliver the many levels of personalised learning we need within the class.”
“Getting handwriting on track is so important. Once pupils are writing well, it eases cognitive overload so they can focus on other things, sentences, punctuation, clauses etc. – one thing less to worry about.”
Teacher challenge
“As a teacher, I can’t get around 30 children and show them what’s going wrong. But, using Kaligo, they can replay the video on the spot, watch the feedback and try again.”
Closing the gap
“Post lockdown, we have been using Kaligo to address slow writing stamina and misconceptions in letter formation and joins picked up during lockdown .”
“We incorporate our spelling lists from our Spag lessons into Kaligo so we can learn spelling and practice handwriting with purpose each week.”
Impact
“Using Kaligo three times a week for 20 minutes, we saw great improvement.”
“Kaligo helps to build writing stamina as for 60 minutes across three sessions during the week we give 100% focus to handwriting.”
“Using Kaligo pupils went from printing letters to joined-up writing in a few weeks.”
“Kaligo also boosted independent handwriting, and we could see an improvement on paper, and as a teacher, Kaligo helps me to pinpoint which children require the most support.”
The Kaligo approach
The Kaligo app uses the latest AI technology to monitor a child’s handwriting as they use a stylus to trace letter outlines on a tablet.
Looking at how a child writes letters can provide teachers with an overview of any neurolinguistic processes behind a child’s own writing method. By seeing how they control the stylus on a tablet and how long they take to form different strokes or letters, teachers can easily see where a pupil is struggling and where they are thriving.
Every child gets immediate, personal feedback with their handwriting during class; this just isn’t possible without using technology.Using this information, teachers can see in a few minutes whether the pupil needs any extra support or whether there are any areas they need to spend more time on.
Kaligo uses machine learning (AI) which provides pupils with real-time, automated, and corrective feedback.Based on six years of research at the Laboratory IRISA/INSA, Kaligo has collected and analysed 15,000 handwriting strokes. Each handwriting stroke is analysed based upon shape, direction, and order and identifies any difficulties children as young as age three may have with forming letters, numbers or even if they have an issue with pencil control.
Make sure to take a look at our other success stories.