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SEK Education Group, SEK International Schools and University Camilo José Cela, encompasses an educational community that fosters the development of skills that guarantee relevant, global, international and meaningful learning. The goal of this learning is to attain the full, all-round realisation of each of our students’ potential to tackle the challenges set by the 21st century. Among these challenges are learning digital, critical thinking and computational skills to be able to succeed in a world that is no longer understood without being digital. SEK has chosen Microsoft as a technology partner for this process of digitization and educational innovation that is has been pioneering in Spain for years and that now,during the COVID-19 pandemic, is more important than ever.
SEK Education Group has developed the MySEK Educational Ecosystem, in collaboration with Microsoft and based on Office 365 Education, which boasts a single dashboard for students and teachers, from which they can access the available tools, such as Microsoft Teams, which improve collaboration between students, teachers and families. Thus, university students and professors will be able to safely access all kinds of teaching materials, communicate instantly, use chats, track and follow up with conversations, share files, surf the internet, make video calls, share and develop projects together, create groups of any type (students, classroom, course, department, teachers, faculty, management, etc.).
All teaching staff are added to a ‘Teacher Training’ group in Microsoft teams and during lockdown its use has increased by over 250%, from 2,000 active users at the beginning of the year to more than 7,000 today.
Also, to centralise all the SEK seminars, we have integrated a Microsoft Stream channel with internal webinars within the Teams Training Team. All the necessary video tutorials for the SEK educational community are included on the channel, some of which are generic and others that are tailor-made and on Stream video are organised into different channels, be they classes or simply instruction videos for students.
On the other hand, thanks to the roll out of Microsoft Power BI, all members of the SEK educational community have dashboards, with different views and permissions, which allow them to visualise their past academic progress, their strengths and areas for improvement.
“When we talk about adaptive learning, Microsoft’s Power BI can serve as the foundation for individualised monitoring of each of our students, and this gives us an enormous advantage and makes our work easier and improves our attention and the personalised education that has always been one of our hallmarks”, pointed out Joaquín Rodríguez, Director of Technology and Education at SEK Education Group.
A good example of how Microsoft technology is helping SEK Schools and University Camilo José Cela to better teach their classes during this time is that the main channel of communication between teachers during this period is Teams, as is the case for the different departments. The Teams groups that had already been created were acting as repositories of information and alternative communication channels for absences (study tours, exchanges, ERASMUS + mobilities, etc). When lockdown came, these Teams groups have become the daily means of communication for departmental activities and coordination for SEK Schools.
In addition, we have taken advantage of the existence of a teaching team group in this Microsoft collaboration tool to store documentation and thus provide it with greater functionality. Specifically, we have established training channels for teachers, where best practices are exchanged, webinars are given on online teaching strategies or on the pedagogical use of digital tools, among other things, taught by the teachers themselves with greater digital skills.
“The effort we have made in recent years to develop this unique and specific digital ecosystem in the educational field, MySEK, allows us to guarantee that in a situation of lockdown our students continue to enjoy a learning experience that is as rich and varied as possible”, affirmed Joaquín Rodríguez, SEK Director of Technology and Education.
