3-ways we meet school curriculum tagging needs

With so many teachers using Blippit Boards now, we thought it would be worth sharing our approach to the powerfully simple principle that drives the platform, from evidence capture to seeing it resurface in searches, filters, charts and reports.

We believe in being as transparent as possible regarding why things are like they are, so, in this post, we will summarise what we do and why when it comes to tags.

There are 3 main ways that we meet the tagging needs of all schools.

1. To meet national/statutory level tagging category requirements e.g. we review, create & deploy new categories (or tags into existing national categories) that also apply to all Welsh/English schools. This is all included as standard with Blippit Boards.
2. To meet school or cluster level bespoke tagging category requirements e.g. applies to a school or cluster such as a collaborative or localised special subject category. Deployed to and seen only by the target school(s) costs are a one-off and nominal covering the creation and bespoke deployment of the tag categories.
3. To meet ‘ad hoc’ individual-level tagging requirements only needed by some teachers in some schools for some of the time, we provide the ‘custom tag’ feature as standard. Custom tags can be reported on in the dashboard and are used to locate/filter boards but aren’t used to create charts because a chart of custom tags from across the school would have little value or meaning. We help manage the core tag collections’ consistency, quality, and relevance for everybody, which is why custom tags aren’t added to these areas. We would like to work out a method to allow users to effectively curate their own individual tags to avoid retyping/remembering them. We’re much less confident of a solution to enable every teacher to create custom tags and push these out to all staff in the school. Some of the reasons for this are below for transparency.

The rationale behind our approach
We know that some teachers want to make more tags to meet their needs. But, we need to balance the desire for total tag collection editability against the reliability and quality of experience teachers get. E.g. if all teachers in a school could add to the English subject category and inevitably unnoticed type errors crept in, some teachers may still use the misspelt tags. Other teachers may notice and create a correctly spelt version of a tag and start using that along with others. However, searching, filtering, charting and reporting would soon degrade with data seeming to be incomplete or inaccurate because of the variances in tags created manually by different teachers. If just this one scenario occurred in every subject then the whole experience would go downhill quickly.  At some point, there would need to be cull/management of user-created tags i.e. they’re deleted from tag categories. Blippit would need to have rules of who could delete/edit a tag e.g. admins, users or just the tag creator and also cater for what happened to boards already tagged with a deleted/edited tag.  The scope for human variance is so great that it’s not yet a responsibility we can pass to schools until we can mitigate the risks and commit to resolving associated school Support requests.

So that’s where we are with our approach to tagging and we hope you can see why we do things like we do. The bespoke category service can cater for any tagging requirements so get in touch if your school would like to take advantage of it!