Case Study: British Council Pre-school

About British Council Pre-school 

British Council Preschool is a preschool in Singapore that provides a broad curriculum, integrating the best preschool teaching practices from the United Kingdom and Singapore. The preschool aims to develop children who are all-rounded, and excel both academically and socially. British Council Preschool provides an excellent environment to encourage learning, and allowing each child to fulfill his/her highest potential. British Council Preschool has been using Qoqolo since the centre first opened in April 2014. They primarily use the Class Space and Portfolio functions of Qoqolo.

Solutions

Based on feedback from the principal, and a teacher, we have gathered insights as to how a pre-school that does not use a system like Qoqolo functions. Both mentioned that using Qoqolo makes teaching and running a pre-school easier.

Parents like regular feedback

From their past experiences, both found that parents like constant updates and feedback about their child’s progress in school. With Qoqolo, they are able to utilize Class Spaces to post quick and regular updates about what the students are doing in class, or about outings and event celebrations. Furthermore, the pre-school makes use of Announcements to notify parents of important information. Downloadable forms are also easily attached to the announcements to ensure that parents are able to view and download them when necessary.

Qoqolo has allowed the pre-school to build stronger relationships and more effective communication with parents, giving them up-to-date information about the day-to-day activities in the pre-school and their child’s progress.

Paperless and Cost-effective

From the teacher's past experience working in another pre-school, she said that in preparation for the Parent Teacher Conferences (PTC), teachers would have to print out every student’s portfolio, and this uses a lot of paper. When a student’s portfolio is printed wrongly, the teachers would have to reprint the portfolio, using up yet more paper. With Qoqolo’s Portfolio however, all these issues of having to use large amounts of paper for each PTC are avoided as the Portfolio introduces a paperless way of giving out students’ portfolios to parents. 

Right now, with the use of Qoqolo, the teachers are able to generate PDF versions of the portfolios, which will be given to the parents during PTC. This saves a lot of paper, as well as time spent on filing the printed portfolios for each student. 

The creation of foliettes after each activity is completed also helps teachers to keep track of the foliettes for the creation of the student’s portfolio at the end of the term. Previously, the teacher had been storing each activity’s pictures and captions in PowerPoint slides, and she would then have to compile the activities into a portfolio format. With the creation of foliettes in Qoqolo, she no longer has to do double entry when creating the portfolios, and she can easily generate a portfolio report from the existing foliettes in the system. 

In all, Qoqolo has helped to make various administrative tasks and dissemination of information to parents much easier for British Council Pre-school’s principal and teachers.