A small, rural DEIS primary school uses Microsoft Teams to design and create blended learning tasks and assignments. Teachers create a Word document template for various writing tasks which are to be completed at home. Teachers scaffold learning activities during in-class time and then distribute the Word document template to all pupils via Microsoft Teams. Once they have completed the Word document, pupils submit the first draft of their writing. The teacher responds using the comments feature, giving effective feedback in order to focus pupils on the success criteria for the task as well as providing direction as to the next steps of the writing process.

A large, urban primary school is using Google Classroom as a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) to create and assign pupil work. Teachers use the voice-to-text feature on Google Docs to give summary feedback on pupils’ project work. (Note: the voice-to-text feature cannot be used in the comments section in Google Docs and so feedback will appear in the main document itself). Teachers and pupils engage in an iterative process of drafting and giving feedback on project work over the course of two weeks. Having received the final draft of the project via Google Classroom, teachers use the voice-to-text feature to give an overall summary of the pupils’ work, detailing the areas of excellence as well as feedback on areas for future improvement.