It’s the start of a new school year and time to reflect. Looking back over the last year at Zeeko, we are so proud of the success of the Magical Leaders programme. In early 2021 we recognised the need for a programme that teaches 21st century skills to young people in a fun and engaging way. The 21st century skills framework was developed to help young people deal with an everchanging and uncertain world. If there were two words to sum up the last year and a half, changeable and uncertain would certainly be top contenders! 2021 has been an odd year for many of us. I am sure I am not alone in saying I thought things would be back to normal by now! Students, in particular, have had it tough. Many of the social and developmental skills that are often learned by being in the classroom, such as communication and collaboration have been put on the back burner. With the support of Enterprise Ireland and teachers all over the country, we developed and launched the Magical Leaders programme.
The Magical Leaders programme uses peer led learning, fun activities and interactive gaming elements to teach 21st century skills. We are delighted to say that the Magical Leaders programme was introduced to 118 schools across the country with over 4200 students taking part.
Check out this video all about the programme in 2021!
We want to take this opportunity to thank all the teachers that took part in the programme with us this year. Your insights and feedback have been invaluable to helping us understand the impact of the programme and make improvements and updates. Based on your feedback, here is what we have improved so far.
What we have changed
More practical teacher training
We realised that while the teacher briefing session with our educational consultant, John Rees gave a great overview of the programme and the objective of the lessons, it lacked in practical, step by step guidance on how to run the programme in the classroom. We have updated the content of the teacher briefing session to make it more practical and created an online version that you can access anytime.
Quick start guide
As an add on to the above point, we also created a quick start guide for teacher so that you can easily reference how to run the Magical Leaders programme in your classroom. The teacher’s manual describes the theory and pedagogical approach, the quick start guide will get you up and running!
More fun stuff for the class
We want Magical Leaders to be a fun and engaging experience for your class. So we have added some fun stuff to the resource pack such as stickers, keyrings and Magical Leaders Certificates.
Android App
One of the biggest improvements we made this year is the introduction of the android app. We heard from a lot of you that you were unable to access the online world as you use tablets in the classroom. And so Magical Leaders is now available to download on any android device! The iOS app is coming very soon!
Coming Soon
We are still working on making the Magical Leaders programme even better! Here are some of the exciting updates that will be coming soon.
The Magical Leaders Hub
We are building an educational portal to host all the Magical Leaders resources in one, easy to access place. The hub will also allow individual students to log in and explore the Magical Leaders world in class and at home.
More gameplay elements
We heard some feedback from students that the online world should contain more content and more games and so we will be designing and developing more to explore over the coming months. This will include hidden content to discover, games and more!
iOS Magical Leaders app
The iOS app is currently in production and will be launched later this year.
Resource updates
We are working on updating the activity books to provide more white space for students to fill out the activities.
We have come a long way with the Magical Leaders programme and we want to take it even further. Do you want to join us? Teach 21st century skills to your students in a fun and engaging way by joining the Magical Leaders programme. Register your interest here.
