A Day in the Life of Malcolm—a Teacher

Meet Malcolm, a teacher in a K-12 school.

He wants to help every student in his class reach their potential. His main priorities are:

• Ensuring that students progress through the course and achieve the desired outcomes
• Identifying gaps and providing growth opportunities for students
• Providing engaging learning opportunities
• Spending more time interacting with students and less time on admin tasks
• Connecting with parents
• Maximizing student equity and inclusion

Malcolm has a big task. Let’s look at his day and how he uses the Brightspace platform to help him achieve these goals.

First thing: Get a bird’s-eye view of the progress of the class

Malcolm opens the Brightspace learning platform on his mobile phone and takes a quick look at how his students are doing. He knows that early intervention to support his students can make a big difference in their success.

• He can easily see how students are progressing and can drill down into specific individuals by using the class progress dashboard. It’s easy for him to pinpoint who might benefit from a quick check-in to see how they’re doing.
• Malcolm also has virtual assistants that he can use to send reminders, open remediation or enrichment pathways, and provide personalized feedback to automatically help keep students on track with the right nudge at the right moment.
• He has an activity planned for later this week with three different groups. He uses the information on how the students are doing to tailor the activities to what each group needs the most.

Morning: Empower students to share their learning

Malcolm greets his class and starts off the day by having students share their latest projects. This is one of his favorite parts of teaching—interacting with students and sharing their enthusiasm as they share their work.

• Each student does a presentation about their project. Malcolm opens up Brightspace on his tablet and can use the Portfolio tool to document the presentation and write feedback in real time during the in-person presentations.
  • His comments and grades are integrated right into Brightspace, saving him from having to add them later.
• Students can document and share their projects and upload them right into their Portfolio in Brightspace.
  • They can take an image or upload their project, and record a reflection about their project. Each student appreciates how interactive and engaging this activity is. Malcolm can ensure that parents will see these awesome projects by sharing them in Brightspace for Parents.

Late-morning planning period: Quickly prep the next lesson

While students work on their next assignment, Malcolm has a few minutes of spare time. He wants to create some new content in his course to highlight current events. With Brightspace, building this new content is easy.

• Using a built-in template, the new content looks polished right from the start. It’s beautiful and mobile-friendly.
• Malcolm can seamlessly add the content he loves from a variety of sources.
  • He adds some content from existing sources, then integrates district-developed content, and follows it up with some videos from the web. He even drags and drops in some content that is on his desktop. He looks through the Learning Repository at content that was uploaded by other teachers. He adds in one of the top-rated items from one of his peers that he knows his class will love.
• He knows he has the tools to make content accessible to everyone.
  • He easily creates a quiz, using the intuitive quiz-builder, so that students can test their new knowledge.
• Malcolm loves how providing the content via Brightspace leaves more time for lively discussion. His students can review this content ahead of time, and they can dive right into a class discussion tomorrow.

Noon: Motivate learners with achievements—without interrupting lunch!

Malcolm knows how much his students love to earn badges and awards. He especially loves that these are set up to release automatically when a student completes a topic or masters a quiz.

Early afternoon: Increase engagement with a field trip!

The class heads out for a field trip. This is a key learning activity and he wants each student to be fully engaged.

• All students must complete an assignment by recording a video as they interview a classmate about what they learned during the field trip. The students love doing this, and even the shyest of students come out of their shells during the activity.
  • Malcolm loves that Brightspace works on any device, so students can record their experience on their mobile phone or borrow the classroom tablet. He doesn’t have to worry that some students will not be able to do the assignment because they don’t have the right technology.
  • A few students weren’t able to attend the field trip for personal reasons. Malcolm records a video to post on Brightspace so they don’t have to miss out. He creates a photo banner widget to showcase the photos from the students who were on the trip to further share the experience.

Late afternoon

Malcolm wants to finish up a few odds and ends before he leaves for the day. He used to feel that his workload was never-ending, but since his school started using Brightspace, he finds he can get through his tasks more quickly.

• Malcolm has a variety of assignments that he needs to review and grade.
  • Malcolm appreciates that he can quickly sort and prioritize all assignments in the centralized Quick Eval hub to work through the most important first.
  • Malcolm knows that timely and specific feedback will drive student success. He can easily add meaningful feedback using tools such as annotations, video-based comments, and rubrics. His rubrics are even aligned to the outcomes for the class for easy tracking later on.
  • He decides to leave video messages today so he can personalize the feedback. And knowing that they’re automatically closed-captioned means that they’ll work for everyone without any extra effort from Malcolm.
• Midterm assignments are due next week, and Malcolm adds a friendly reminder to the Activity Feed on the Brightspace course homepage. He knows that this will go to both students and parents.
• Malcolm used to spend a lot of time grading and on admin tasks after work hours. With all the time that Brightspace is saving him, he finishes earlier than usual and has time to relax and refresh for the next day.

Evening: Enjoy some professional development

Malcolm has been doing some professional development for himself, which is also on Brightspace. He logs on after dinner and works through the first section of his new course. He loves continuing to learn and even gets some ideas about how the course is set up in Brightspace, and he can add those to his online course for his class.

Bedtime: Enjoy peace of mind

• Students can access Brightspace whenever they want to. With a system uptime of 99.9%, Malcom knows that students will be able to access Brightspace anytime—without interrupting his downtime.
  • Students can upload assignments, review course content as they study, or plan ahead by looking at their schedules—all without Malcolm having to do anything. Some of his students are playing in a basketball game tonight, so he knows that they’re likely to upload their assignments later.
• Malcolm knows that his students’ data is secure and protected. Using a system with operational practices based on industry-leading security and privacy standards, he never has to worry that his students’ data is at risk.
  • D2L doesn’t just rely on Amazon Web Services. They have an impressive track record of security leadership. Data is encrypted both in transit and at rest. D2L is a leader in the industry with ISO27001- and ISO27018-certifications and is a member of the Cloud Security Alliance.
  • We understand that privacy is not just about keeping your data secure with our encryption while it’s in transit and at rest in our cloud. You own your data and you control it. D2L is a leader in building software with privacy by design as a core principle and supports compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, and other privacy standards.