Welcome to Day Ten of the 2021 Appvent Calendar!
I’ve been bowled over by the quality and diversity of the entries on the calendar so far this year. So many fantastic tools and ideas for their use have been shared.
If there’s one area that we all know our young people have been impacted upon the last 18 months or more, it’s been around student wellbeing. With that in mind, it gives me great pleasure to share today’s entry on the calendar as a solution that aims to support just that – read more…
Social and emotional learning has always been important, but like many aspects of education in the last 18 months and more, it has definitely grown under the spotlight of COVID and school closures during lockdowns.
As recently shared by Dame Rachel De Souza following her ‘Big Ask’ survey, responded to by more than half a million children in the UK, whilst there are lots of positives to be found in the report, “The Big Ask: The Big Answers”, young people recognise the impact that the pandemic has had on them.
“Among 9-17 year-olds, just over half (52%) said that having good mental health was one of their most important future aspirations.”
Nevermore than we’ve seen recently do young people need support around their wellbeing, which is where today’s entry can help to make a difference.
Enter ‘Persona Life Skills’.
What is Persona Life Skills?
Persona Life Skills is a web-based app that helps young people develop their social and emotional wellbeing and personal awareness to help them both in school and to help prepare them for their future, particularly thinking about engagement in society and their employability.
It uses personality insights to support social-emotional learning and is aimed at secondary students aged 13-19, whilst being designed to help students navigate their life journey.
How does it work?
The platform contains a variety of learning modules called ‘Islands’ which form what they call the ‘Archipelago’ which, as students complete the various sections, helps them both learn and recognise their own and other people’s personalities.
By working through the detailed activities linked to a wide variety of scenarios, so the software builds up a picture of the student as a person. It generates some of the keywords demonstrated in the screenshot above which help the student understand more about themselves as a person. Through the activities, a heatmap is also created which helps students learn more about their personality traits.
Through every step of a student’s use of the software, they learn more about how personality can influence thinking, communication and behaviour, and use this knowledge to help them develop 22 social-emotional skills.
What else?
The software has a plethora of fantastic learning opportunities for all kinds of life challenges such as:
– healthy relationships,
– preparing for exams,
– interacting with teachers,
– public speaking,
– preventing conflict
– empathy
– being a good friend
– life transition activities such as preparing for your first job interview,
…and so much more!
Persona Life Skills is a fully-featured e-learning package for Secondary schools, which comes with lots of helpful resources for teachers.
As a solution that will gather lots of data about your students, it also comes with a clear privacy policy that is available for both the school, teachers and students themselves.
As you might expect has a dashboard for the admin, to explore which not only facilitates learning about student progress in terms of completing activities but helps to give an overview of the broad range of skill sets that Persona Life Skills both teaches and checks from learners such as:
- Communicating
- Open-mindedness
- Problem-solving
- Resilience
- Self-control
To sum up
All in all, if you’re looking for a well-rounded tool to support the development of SEL and life skills in your school, you should definitely have a look at Persona Life Skills. The breadth of content is large and covers the curriculum in a way that will ensure consistency of delivery, access and equality in an engaging and relevant way for young people.
Learn more about Persona Life Skills by visiting https://www.persona-life.com/
