About School Ninja
School Ninja was created in 2020 by teacher and digital learning enthusiast, Bernard Street to empower both teachers and learners in their online learning. We strive to promote a positive, supportive culture around remote learning and create an engaging online learning community.
School Ninja is an online learning platform and learning management system (LMS) designed to create stronger links between in-class learning and learning from home. Schools and teachers can connect with parents and students online, measure student performance, set homework and online coursework and promoting positive learning outcomes.
Our goal is to bring educators and learners together in an online community focused around celebrating education. School Ninja is made up of 3 core features:
- Collaborating to create exciting online course content which challenges students and acknowledges their successes.
- Fostering a positive online learning community with extensive digital classrooms and online learning support, and
- Extending learning through additional online courses and achievements
1. Collaborating to create exciting online course content
School Ninja allows educators to create and deliver excellent online coursework for their students which complements the curriculum and classroom learning.
Teachers can collaborate both inside their school community, and with the larger teacher community, to develop advanced courses and self-marking assessments which can be shared across multiple schools, and measure student engagement and outcomes.
Courses can grow over time to develop well thought-out learning strategies which complement the curriculum and can be used year after year.
2. Fostering a positive online learning community
Our online learning community supports students and teachers. School Ninja gives students clear guidance of the expectations of the classroom and a single point of reference for all of their subjects, collating all homework tasks and To-do’s in one place.
Educators and schools create digital classrooms to engage with students and parents outside the classroom while students are given more clarity and freedom to learn at their own pace and with more direct support.
Parents can engage in their children’s learning journey by communicating with teachers, having access to complete the same online coursework as their children and seeing which To-do’s are coming up soon.
3. Extending learning
Students have the ability to progress and extend their learning by enrolling in further online courses. Students can be enrolled by their teachers, or enrol in additional courses that interest them.
Teachers can view courses completed, final grades and quiz attempts. They can offer guidance to extend students in areas they are most interested in, and give more support to students who are struggling with the coursework. Teachers can even share and sell their resources on the School Ninja Marketplace for other teachers to use.
A message from the founder
Hi everyone! Welcome to School Ninja. I hope that you have as much fun using School Ninja with your teaching and learning as I have had building it.
Having taught in education since 2013 I have always been passionate about online learning. I believe it is an incredibly powerful medium to allow teachers to support their students and understand their strengths and weaknesses as learners.
Yet, in my experiences, I have found most digital learning systems are either too complicated for teachers to setup and maintain, or too easy for students to ‘click’ their way through.
This often results in excessive amounts of work for the teachers and students having unrealistic expectations of their understanding because they ‘did the work’ but never realised that they didn’t actually learn the content.
I especially saw this with my own students. Some would spend hours working diligently through dozens of online lectures and courses and would absolutely sink to the floor when they just scraped through the last test.
While others would frantically click through as much content as possible the night before the parent teacher interviews just to make it look like they had put in the effort when their exercise books are blank.
For many students perception is as good as reality, and when it looks like the work is done, for them it is enough.
I have found online course software is oftentimes geared towards demonstrating that the student has been given the work, rather than focusing on what they understand. Or, perhaps even more importantly, what they don’t understand, and how can we work together to support them.
As a teacher I wanted a system which allowed me to not just give the students the work, but to allow my gifted students controlled freedom to extend their knowledge, and more effective roadblocks to signal which of my students were struggling the most.
And more importantly, a system which was easy to use and wouldn’t make me feel like I’m spending my life building the pages in the first place.
In 2020 I created School Ninja, an online learning system which is designed to empower teachers to maximise their teaching inside and outside the classroom, and allow students to build stronger connections with education and their own learning. While I designed the project to allow me to get the most out of my own teaching, I hope I can support other teachers in their own teaching journey.
If you have features and enhancements you would like to see on the platform, please reach out and let us know.
Bernard Street
School Ninja Creator, Teacher and Digital Learning Specialist.