Third COBIS International Marketing Intern Amy Carter Visits Supporting Members
In April, I was lucky enough to have an opportunity to visit some of our COBIS Supporting Members for the day. At COBIS, we have a wide range of businesses who support us and British International Schools around the world. I spent three entirely different days with three distinctly different companies; Interactive Schools, GL Education and Rising Stars.
My first visit was to the innovative Head Office team at Interactive Schools. Upon my arrival to their animated office space in High Wycombe, I was greeted by Simon Noakes, a familiar face and voice at COBIS conferences and webinars. He gave me a tour of the exciting space they work in where Pacman and Starwars line the walls and a most impressive, full size Hans Solo coffee table sits in the meeting room.
Simon gave me a brief overview of the company and what they’re involved in; a key area that they specialise in is creating high quality, personalised websites for Independent and International Schools which reflect the respective school’s unique style. The other key area is branding and social media for schools.
Simon organised a timetable for me for the day whereby I was able to learn about and become involved in several areas of the company such as Social Media, Content Creation, Testing and Event Marketing. As well as this, I sat in on their “Design Tea Party”, where everybody contributed by sharing a website they had found with an inspiring design. I learnt a great deal about design from this meeting and throughout the course of the day (which you can easily overlook when you don’t come from a design background) as well as creating a game “Spot the bug” to bring some more fun to the joys of “Testing”! Many thanks to Simon and his team for taking me under their wing for the day, I came away brimming with ideas.
My second visit was to the dynamic team at GL Education in Chiswick where Andy Sleath, the International Marketing & Customer Engagement Manager, greeted me and introduced me to the team. Here, I gained an insight into what GL Education provide for schools; assessments, surveys and evaluations including the long-standing CAT (Cognitive Ability Tests) designed to measure students’ individual ability in order to help them excel. The team explained to me how International schools can benefit from using these different types of tests. We looked in detail at one particular case study which highlighted the importance of paying special attention to how EAL students’ ability can be affected by their language barrier. I was amazed at how easily this can sometimes be overlooked by teachers.
I also had an opportunity to chat with Danielle Morgan, Head of Communications at GL, about the fascinating work that she does for the company such as managing their events, social media and their recent involvement in the EAL world (and current media surrounding this.) To end my visit to GL Education, I sat in on a Webinar from GL International Manager, Claire Dunn, about Understanding Student Attitudes; it was interesting to see webinars hosted at GL after assisting with COBIS webinars at our HQ.
Many thanks to Andy Sleath and the whole team at GL Education for giving up your time to tell me about the varied work you do at your HQ. I came away from my second visit, again, inspired with ideas.
My final visit was to the Rising Stars office in central London. Olivia Tanner welcomed and introduced me to the whole team and I began my morning sitting in on their weekly meeting. This gave me an insight into the varied work of the Academic Publishing company as well as the detailed processes that are carried out before resources can go to print. After this, Olivia talked to me about all areas that Rising Stars are involved in, including online/downloadable resources, their involvement at various conferences and their provision of a range of assessments for learners and schools.
An exciting new resource that Rising Stars have just launched is MeeMo, a “whole class working memory programme” targeted at Primary students. Olivia showed me this colourfully designed resource, complete with box, and we had an impromptu memory challenge game so that she could demonstrate how it worked. It was an extremely fun resource (even for adults) which I would have found useful while working as a teacher in Spain, and I could see its potential for Primary aged International students.
After learning all about the work they do at Rising Stars and enjoying one of their published game resources, I was able to share a little more about the work of COBIS with Olivia and answer some of her questions. Through this discussion, we were able to share ideas and come up with further ways that COBIS and Rising Stars could collaborate. It was great to be able to share ideas with Olivia and I feel that the visit was mutually beneficial; I am very grateful to Olivia and her team for hosting me at their offices, it was an inspiring and insightful day.
